Tony Paterson in Berlin
Gnter Grass, regarded by some as the enfant terrible, by others as one of the few giants of post-war German literature, heard that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature on the radio at his home in Lbeck last week just as he was on his way to the dentist.
“I am both happy and proud,” the 71- year-old novelist said. “I ask myself what the last German prize-winner, Heinrich Bll, might have said, and I have the feeling that he would have agreed with the nomination,” he added.
The author could have been excused his less than self-effacing response to the news that he had received the world’s highest literary accolade. For decades he has been tipped as a candidate.
Grass’s contemporaries were among the first to congratulate him. “If only for his novel The Tin Drum, Grass has for a long time deserved the prize,” writer Martin Walser said.
The Tin Drum was the landmark novel that Nobel judges singled out for particular praise. In the epic tale of a boy who refuses to grow up, Grass had “drawn the forgotten face of history in the form of a lively black fable. The Tin Drum will remain one of the 20th century’s lasting literary works.”
The novel, published in 1959, shot Grass to fame. It has since sold more than four million copies. Until its publication, he was an obscure poet.
Grass has evolved into both a grand seigneur of the German literary scene and an outspoken champion of human rights. Over the past decade he has fallen foul of Germany’s conservative establishment for criticising its treatment of the country’s Turkish immigrant minority and for questioning German unification.
Always regarded as a writer of the left, he wrote a withering critique of the communist system in his novel The Plebs Try Rebellion. The East German regime did not forgive him until 1987.
Grass assisted the former Social Democrat chancellor Willy Brandt in his 1960s campaigns. But he turned his back on the party in 1992 after it voted with Helmut Kohl’s conservative government in favour of tightening Germany’s asylum laws.
His early years in Danzig were crucial. Driven from the city in 1945 before an advancing Red Army, Grass is a refugee German, and still sees himself as such. “I have never struck roots anywhere,” he said recently.
Grass said of his new work, My Century, “It is not a novel of the century. That would be an expectation that cannot be fulfilled. It is my attempt to settle accounts.”