He hated fascist Barbed Wire,he loved Kolkata and Sundar Bans and he is no more!
Günter Grass, the Nobel Prize-winning German novelist!
I always pointed out that without raising voice to protect the nature and natural resources,you may not stand with the suffering and toiling masses.Grass exactly did it and addressed the social realism in Bengal as much as true that the Bengali intelligentsia never dared to.
For me Grass is more a Bengali writer than any Bengali writer.
Palash Biswas
He hated fascist Barbed Wire,he loved Kolkata and Sundar Bans and he is no more!
Günter Grass, the Nobel Prize-winning German novelist!
I would never forget Gross with the goddess Kali tongue!Not only the world lost the most daredevil writer with concentration camp nostalgia,not only Germany lost an Icon enviable,Kolkata and and the most neglected Mangroves lost a very specific lover.The depressed class Have NOT demography of Slum Kolkata and 24 parganas lost their spokesman global.
Celebrating the Original warrior for the depressed classes in Asia and beyond,Babasaheb Dr.Ambedkar,the most misinterpreted,most misunderstood,most misused personality of Indian History,we the depressed class people in Bengal must mourn for the Man who spoke and wrote for the Mangroves.
Yes,it is very very important to know Grass in reference to Mangroves which could sustain entire Indian Subcontinent and remained most endangered thanks to making in PPP Model development and continuous destruction of the nature and nature associated people to sell of the Golden Bird,the aborigin India.
I always pointed out that without raising voice to protect the nature and natural resources,you may not stand with the suffering and toiling masses.Grass exactly did it and addressed the social realism in Bengal as much as true that the Bengali intelligentsia never dared to.
For me Grass is more a Bengali writer than any Bengali writer.
Gunter Grass And Kolkata: A Four Decade of Love-Hate Tale
NDTV - 12 hours ago
Kolkata: From a dark depiction of the "omnipresent stench", the people dwelling in concrete ...
Gunter Grass held up a mirror to Kolkata
Times of India - 10 hours ago
Gunter Grass and Kolkata - a four decade of love-hate tale - Yahoo News India
Yahoo India News - 13 hours ago
The Telegraph - Calcutta
Gunter Grass, the German author and social critic who gave voice to the generation that came of age during the horrors of the Nazi era, died on Monday morning ...
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Gunter Grass held up a mirror to Kolkata - The Times of India
timesofindia.indiatimes.com › City
10 hours ago - KOLKATA: Kolkata occupied a special place in Gunter Grass' heart, his consciousness and in his works. It was a bitter-sweet relationship that ...
Gunter Grass` Love-hate Relationship With Calcutta ...
articles.chicagotribune.com/.../8902030281_1_gunter-grass-grass-book-...
May 21, 1989 - Show Your TongueBy Gunter GrassTranslated by John E. WoodsHarcourt Brace Jovanovich, 314 pages, $29.95Calcutta is one of those names ...
CALCUTTA IS THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS - NYTimes ...
www.nytimes.com/1989/05/.../calcutta-is-the-measure-of-all-things.html
May 21, 1989 - In the fall and winter of 1987-88, Gunter Grass and his wife, Ute, settled in Calcutta for the Bengali-language staging of his 1966 play, ''The ...
Show Your Tongue by Günter Grass — Reviews, Discussion ...
www.goodreads.com/book/show/436030.Show_Your_Tongue
Rating: 3.3 - 20 votes
Robert said: Gunter Grass, Show Your Tongue (1989, Harcourt Brace ... A record of the author's stay in Calcutta from August 1987 to January 1988. A stunning ...
Günter Grass - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Günter_Grass
Günter Grass (German: [ˈɡʏntɐ ˈɡʀas]; 16 October 1927 – 13 April 2015) was .... In the 1980s, he became active in the peace movement and visited Calcutta ...
Gunter Grass and Kolkata - a four decade of love-hate tale ...
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12 hours ago - Kolkata, April 13 From a dark depiction of the omnipresent stench, the people dwelling in concrete pipes and damning criticism of the city's ...
Blades Of Grass | Soutik Biswas - Outlook
www.outlookindia.com/article/Blades-Of-Grass/208222
Calcutta is intensely close to Gunter Grass. It brings out the layers of complexity which constitute the Nobel laureate's sensibilities.
Gunter Grass and Kolkata – a four decade of love-hate tale ...
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10 hours ago - The versatile German Nobel Laureate, who effortlessly […]The postGunter Grass and Kolkata – a four decade of love-hate tale appeared first ...
Gunter Grass, Nobel Laureate and Germany's voice of memory, dies at 87
In 1987, Grass and his wife came to Calcutta for the staging of one of his plays, The Plebeians Rehearse The Uprising. He made fast friends among the city's writers
April 14, 2015 Last Updated at 00:04 IST
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When I heard that Günter Grass had died at 87, peacefully in the town of Lübeck, I thought of what he had been at 17 and 18. He was still a boy, despite what he'd seen in World War II, weighing only 110 pounds in his Waffen SS uniform after the 850-calorie diet in a US Army-run camp he reached after his surrender.
The boy, sensitive, already a storyteller by nature, was slow to understand the word "capitulation" meant "final, incontrovertible". The conquering US soldiers' ability to chew gum was impressive; so were their silent rubber soles, in contrast to his army's jackboots. The Third Reich was over, but even when the American education officer showed them the pictures of Bergen-Belsen, the corpses, the ovens, he couldn't believe it. He wrote in Peeling The Onion, the 2007 memoir that came out eight years after he won the Nobel Prize for Literature:
"You mean Germans did that?" We kept asking.
"Germans could never have done that."
"Germans don't do that."
But they did, they had, and for the rest of his life, he would be burdened. "One word evokes the other: Schulden, Schuld," he wrote. "Debts, guilt".
Grass at 19, 20, away from home in Dusseldorf; he filled out, put muscle back on when he found work as a sculptor. His job was to chisel tombstones, and change the names. The inscriptions - "such as: 'Death is the Gate To Life'" - were recyclable. In his twenties he tried to write his first novel, The Kashubians, but didn't get very far. He managed to kill off all his characters by the end of the first few chapters, so, there were no more chapters to write.
But he had been writing all his life anyway, sketching, making notes. His hands were restless, they never stopped. At the Bittweg tram stop, waiting to go home, he would see a line of stonecutting establishments, including the firm of Moog; he put it in The Tin Drum, his most famous novel, as C Schmoog, sandstone and basalt specialists. When they were not working on tombstones, he and his fellow apprentices restored the arms and wings of park statues that had been maimed in the bombing.
In the 1950s, Grass travelled to Paris. He was close to 30 years old and was smoking Parisiennes, deep in conversation with friends and family, when a three-year-old boy came into the room. The boy had a toy drum, a tin toy, that he struck with wooden sticks; he refused to leave or to stop, and circled the table, drumming determinedly. Then the child left, but his image stayed with Grass: "It would be a long time before the bolt slid open, the flood of images was released and with the images, words I had been saving since childhood."
He wrote poems and plays (Mister, Mister; The Flood), and then The Tin Drum came out in 1959.The New York Times reviewer recognised its genius, calling it remarkable, and calling Grass "probably the most authentic literary talent to appear in Germany in 25 years". But, Orville Prescott added in his 1963 review, "It is very German and in many episodes, very repulsive… It is gross, grotesque, gruesome and horrible throughout." Grass wrote many other striking and memorable works - From The Diary of a Snail, The Flounder, The Rat, My Century, Crabwalks - but it was The Tin Drum that readers remembered most and that made the most powerful impact.
In 1987, Grass and his wife came to Calcutta for the staging of one of his plays, The Plebeians Rehearse The Uprising. He made fast friends there among the city's writers, notably Sunil Gangopadhyay. He caught up with some of them, including painter Shuvaprasanna, when he went back for a visit in 2005. The city made a striking impression on him. For a while, Grass said, he could not write at all - he set down drawings until the words came back. His account of his time in Calcutta and Bangladesh was called Show Your Tongue, in a reference to Ma Kali:
"Kali Puja announced, I saw Calcutta descend on us. Three thousand slums, usually rapt in themselves, crouched low by walls or sewer water, now all ran out, rampant, beneath the new moon, the night and the goddess on their side. Saw, in the holes of uncountable mouths, the lacquered tongue of black Kali flutter red. Heard her smack her lips: I, numberless, from all the gutters and drowned cellars. I, set free, sickle-sharp I. I show my tongue, I cross banks, I abolish borders. I make an end."
Grass's reputation was severely tarnished, mostly outside Germany, in the 2000s when the revelations about his Nazi past came to light; Grass said in an interview that he should have written his memoir sooner. The shame had silenced him but in 2007, he spoke eloquently enough in Sweden at the Nobel banquet: "I come from a land of book-burning." Writers, he said, were such a threat to churches, the politburo and the mass media because they saw truth in the plural, they were unable to leave the past in peace, they cast doubt on the victors of history by giving the losers a voice.
These were all flaws Grass had himself, in ample measure. But he also had wisdom. In The Rat, he anticipated some of the most pressing arguments of our own decade with chilling prescience: "Towards the end of human history, the human race had developed a soothing, appeasing language, which spared people's feelings by never calling anything by its name, which sounded rational even when it represented nonsense as wisdom. Marvellous how their politicians succeeded in making words supple and bending them to their purpose. They said that the more terror, the greater is the security."
Looking Back at Günter Grass's Life and Work
By JOHN WILLIAMS APRIL 13, 2015 2:20 PM
Günter Grass, the Nobel Prize-winning German novelist, died on Monday at 87. Mr. Grass's career was long, but his literary reputation is still anchored most firmly by his first novel, "The Tin Drum." Mixed reviews in The Times haven't aged as well as the book.
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In 1963, in The New York Times Book Review, Frederic Morton called it "a formidable, if formidably uneven novel" that "brings off what no German has managed or even dared to attempt," which was to show the Nazis were not "imposing their exotic evil on the good little people" but "were the good little people themselves."
In The Times, Orville Prescott called ita "remarkable book," "certain to be highly praised and discussed." But he wrote: "Whether it will attract American readers is doubtful." Praising Mr. Grass as "exuberantly inventive and imaginative," Mr. Prescott also blanched at some of the book's contents. "It is gross, grotesque, gruesome and horrible throughout," he wrote. "Even those who think themselves inured to the indecencies of modern fiction will find much of 'The Tin Drum' excessively nasty. It is blasphemous also, deliberately and offensively blasphemous." He concluded: "How much more effective 'The Tin Drum' would have been if written with a modicum of restraint, selectivity and taste!"
Reviewing "Dog Years" two years later, Mr. Prescott called it a "labored, tiresome, pitilessly dull novel," and again made mention of "offensive indecencies." In the Book Review, Stephen Spender shared some of Mr. Prescott's qualms. " 'Dog Years' is far too long," he wrote. "In places it is turgid. But it contains scenes more powerful than those by any other contemporary novelist."
In the last years of Mr. Grass's life, much of the discussion about him concerned his revelation that he had served in the Waffen-SSas a teenager, which he wrote about in his 2007 memoir, "Peeling the Onion." John Irving, a longtime outspoken admirer of Mr. Grass and his work, wrote a lengthy essay about that book, and about his relationship with Mr. Grass, in the Book Review. "It was Günter Grass who demonstrated that it was possible to be a livingwriter who wrote with Dickens's full range of emotion and relentless outpouring of language. Grass wrote with fury, love, derision, slapstick, pathos — all with an unforgiving conscience," Mr. Irving wrote. When he turned to assessing the new memoir, Mr. Irving wrote: "No one I know who's actually read 'Peeling the Onion' wants Grass to give back his Nobel. The memoir is as good as the very best of Grass's novels."
More reviews of Mr. Grass's work in The Times:
"Dog Years" (Book Review)
"Cat and Mouse" (Book Review)
"Local Anaesthetic" (Book Review)
"Local Anaesthetic" (Books of The Times)
"The Rat" (Books of The Times)
"The Rat" (Book Review)
"Two States — One Nation?" (Book Review)
"Two States — One Nation?" (Books of The Times)
"The Call of the Toad" (Books of The Times)
"My Century" (Book Review)
"My Century" (Books of The Times)
"Too Far Afield" (Book Review)
"Crabwalk" (Book Review)
"Crabwalk" (Books of The Times)
"The Box" (Book Review)
Other Articles:
An excerpt from "Peeling the Onion"
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/13/looking-back-at-gnter-grasss-life-and-work/?_r=0
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