Günter Grass Books In Order

Publication Order of Die Danziger Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Plays

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Gunter Grass
Gunter Grass was born in the Free City of Danzig on October 16 1927, to Helene Grass, a Roman Catholic of Kashubian-Polish origin and Wilhelm Grass, a Lutheran Protestant of German origin.

Gunter was raised a Catholic and he served as an altar boy when he was a kid. His parents ran a grocery store with an attached apartment in Danzig-Langfuhr. He had a younger sister, named Waltraud, who was born in 1930.

He went to the Danzig gymnasium Conradinum. At the age of 16, he became an Air Force “helper”. Shortly thereafter, he was conscripted into the National Labor Service. Shortly after turning 17, in November of 1944, he volunteered for submarine service with Nazi Germany’s Kiregsmarine so that he could escape the confinement he felt as a teen in his parents’ house, which he considered stuffy Catholic lower-middle class.

Gunter was refused by the Navy and he was instead called up for the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg late in 1944. It wasn’t until 2006 that he revealed that he was drafted into the Waffen-SS at that time. His unit functioned as a regular Panzer Division and he served with them from February 1945 until he got wounded on April 20 1945. He got captured in Marienbad and was sent to a POW camp in Bad Aibling, Bavaria.

He worked in a mine and was trained in stonemasonry from 1946 to 1947. He studied graphics and sculpture. He was a co-founder of Group 47, organized by Hans Werner Richter. Gunter worked as a writer, sculptor, graphic designer, traveling frequently. In 1953, he moved to West Berlin and studied at the Berlin University of the Arts. From 1960, he lived in Berlin as well as Schleswig-Holstein on a part time basis. He publicly objected to the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961.

In 1989, during the German unification process, he argued for the separation of the two states because he thought that a unified Germany would resume its previous aggression. In 1995, he moved to the northern German city of Lubeck.

In 1999, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was noted by The Swedish Academy as a writer whose frolicsome black fables depict the forgotten face of history.

In 1965, he received the Georg Buchner Prize, and then in 1993, he was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 1995, received the Hermen Kesten Prize. In 1992 he got the Hidalgo Prize, awarded by the National Association of Spain, in recognition of his defense of the Romani People. Then in 2012, he received the European of the Year from the European Movement Denmark which honored his political debates in European affairs.

He married a Swiss dancer, named Anna Schwarz, which ended in divorce in 1978. They had four kids: Franz, Raoul, Laura, and Bruno. They separating in 1972, and he started a relationship with Veronika Schroter and had a child with her, named Helene. He also had a child with a woman named Ingrid Kruger, named Nele. Then in 1979, he married Ute Grunert, an organist, to whom he was married to when he died. He had two stepsons from his second marriage, Hans and Malte. At the time of his death, he had 18 grandkids.

Gunter was a fan of Bundesliga Clb SC Freiburg.

Gunter was an avid pipe smoker for much of his adult life, and died of a lung infection on April 13, 2015 at the age of 87 in a Lubeck hospital.

“Cat and Mouse” is the second novel in the “Danzig” series and was released in 1961. To compensate for his unusually large Adam’s apple, which is a source of both distress and discomfort, Joachim Mahlke (fourteen years old) turns himself into an ace diver and athlete. Before long he is known to his nation and peers as “The Great Mahlke”. However to his enemies he’s always a target. He’s doomed and different in a country that’s scarred by the war.

This was published two years after Gunter’s applauded and controversial masterpiece “The Tin Drum”. Once again, Gunter Grass turns his attention on Danzig. With a subtle blend of power and humor, this ostensibly relates the rise of Mahlke from clown to hero. However Mahlke’s outlandish antics hide the darkness at the core of a nation ripped apart by Nazi violence, the war, and all the subsequent aftermath.

“Local Anaesthetic” is a stand alone novel and was released in 1970. Starusch, a forty year old teacher of history and German, undergoes a protracted dental treatment in this office where television is used to distract the patients.

Under local anesthesia, the patient projects onto the screen his present and past with the fluidity and visual quality of the movies. A satirical portrait of social confusions.

“The Flounder” is a stand alone novel and was released in 1978. It all starts during the Stone Age, when a talking fish gets caught by a fisherman right at the spot where millennia later Grass’ home town, Danzig, is going to arise.

Like the fish, the fisherman is immortal, and down through the ages they move together. While Grass blends his ingredients into this powerful brew, he shows himself to be at the peak of his linguistic inventiveness.

“Crabwalk” is a stand alone novel and was released in 2003. This is an engrossing account of the Wilhelm Gustloff’s sinking. A German cruise ship turned refugee carrier, it got attacked by a Soviet submarine in January of 1945. Some 9,000 people went down in the Baltic Sea, which made it the deadliest maritime disaster of all time.

Paul Pokriefke, born to an unwed mom on a lifeboat the night of this attack, is a middle aged journalist attempting to piece together these tragic events. As his mom sees her entire existence in terms of this calamitous moment, Paul wishes that their life could’ve been less touched by the past. For his teen son, who dabbles in the dark, far right corners of the Internet, the Gustloff embodies the denial of Germany’s wartime suffering.