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“... In the early Sixties,’ said Grass – he was talking to an audience of Greek intellectuals in Athens, during the dictatorship of the Colonels – ‘I started doing day-to-day political work. The presumptuous élitist notion that writers are the conscience of the nation and should rise above the practical realities of politics has always gone against my grain ...”

“... Günter Grass stands so prominently in the line of fire of Germany’s still polarised and politicised cultural life, and has been sniped at so often since The Rat (1986) – A Wide Field (1995) was literally ripped up for the benefit of the press by that other Grand Old Man of German letters, the critic and TV personality Marcel Reich-Ranicki – that it comes almost as a surprise to find a barely noticed survivor: Grass the poet ...”

“... who has weighed in now, with expressions of regret that the subject was too long neglected, but Günter Grass, whose novella on the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff has become a bestseller in Germany. At first blush this is a surprise. Grass, after all, is the child from Danzig who has always understood why his ...”

“... A new novel by Günter Grass invites comparisons of a national kind. If a British writer of fiction wished to engage with the big stories of the day – the kind of thing Brian Walden does at Sunday noon – how would he go about it? Could Murdoch, Burgess, Spark, Lessing, Drabble take on such issues as the politics of fertility; the rights and wrongs of membership of Nato; the nuclear energy programme; whether in the absence of Brandt, and given the too urgent candidature of Strauss, Schmidt ought to be voted for; the division of Germany? Decorum, or the sense of a diminished literary tradition, would probably inhibit the representative British novelist ...”

“... war service in the Waffen SS. The two boys in the hole make a good story. But how true is it? Grass certainly shared a hole with a Bavarian Joseph; they gnawed together on a handful of caraway seeds which Grass had bartered for two cigarettes, and argued about dogma, faith and doubt. The future pope was definitely in ...”

“... formal and compositional problems. These problems are likely to be different for a writer like Günter Grass, who faces the same world at one remove, reporting on the way the dead buried their dead. This is our first premise. The other is that, quite irrespective of that era, the German novel at its most characteristic has not been renowned for its ...”

“... The freckled drawing on the cover of Günter Grass’s latest novel shows a hand just emerging from a rubble of old stones and holding a quill. The quill is lightly and sensitively poised, the hand could be meaning to draw or to write as Grass himself both writes and draws ...”

“... produce wonderfully energetic textures. The sheet is enlivened, as a field is when the wind bends grass all in one direction. In another kind of drawing the line seems to be shaped by the thing seen, to reach around surfaces rather than outline or decorate them, to be as heavy or light as the thing represented.Dürer was a draftsman of the first ...”

“... what they saw as typical anti-semitic motifs in the depiction of Ehrl-König, and authors such as Günter Grass explained why the novel was nevertheless not anti-semitic. Some speculated that Walser might have employed stock anti-semitic motifs without being aware he was doing so, while others scanned his work for evidence that would point to systemic ...”

“... is a practical dissection of the heart and veinous system. On German reunification she takes the Günter Grass line: ‘Moral malnutrition had produced this calamity,’ says Benedikt. ‘The German reunion was a hunger oedema.’ Clever aphorisms abound, and Dische’s insights can take one aback by their unexpected sensitivity: as he watches Benedikt ...”

“... Times Guardian were Hannah Arendt, Christa Wolf, Max Frisch, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Günter Grass. When, in 1978, Jürgen Habermas asked Johnson for an essay for a book he was editing, provisionally titled Observations on ‘The Spiritual Situation of the Age’, Johnson wrote about what he could see through his first-floor window: the ...”

“... life and death … and immortal in the splendour of its sins’. Following Mann’s assessment, Günter Grass used Simplicissimus as the model for The Tin Drum. Even the cover drawing Grass did of the dwarf-like Oskar Matzerath beating his outsize toy recalls Grimmelshausen’s frontispiece. Today, thanks to ...”

“... Aus grosser Zeit (Days of Greatness) in 1978 and Hundstage (Dog Days – not to be confused with Günter Grass’s Hundejahre, Dog Years) ten years later. There was also a collection of interviews, Did You Ever See Hitler?, one of the three ‘inquiry’ volumes accompanying his autobiographical novel sequence, Deutsche Chronik, though to buy it now ...”

“... Norman wasn’t well enough to do the event but he liked the idea of it, a joint event with Gunter Grass, which I chaired. Grass had just published a memoir called Peeling the Onion, an ill-judged little book in which he speaks of his youthful membership of the SS. The night before the event, ...”

“... parties and compiled a list of “radical” quotations from people like Heinrich Böll and Gunter Grass, whom they accused of encouraging the violence by standing out against authority.’ Ms Moorehead concludes that the ‘conditions of poverty, oppression and alienation that caused the terrorists to kidnap, assassinate and bomb have not improved; indeed ...”