Grass' first and most famous novel, "The Tin Drum," came out in 1959 and ranks with Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" as a modern, international classic and as a mini-encyclopedia of a country's state of mind. He often angered his fellow citizens by reminding them of their shared Nazi past. But through language of renewed freedom and lyricism and stories that were surreal yet recognizable, he also assumed the even greater challenge of imagining what they might become. Combining naturalistic detail with fantastical images, Grass captured the German reaction to the rise of Nazism, the horrors of the war and the guilt that lingered after Adolf Hitler's fall. The book follows the life of Oskar Matzerath, the boy in Danzig who is caught up in the political whirlwind of the Nazi rise
Starting in the mid-1950s, Grass was a member of Group 47, a gathering of German writers and critics that also included Heinrich Böll and Uwe Johnson and had the mission of ridding the German language of the stilted, overwrought style of the Nazi era. Grass worked on "The Tin Drum" with the help of a stipend from the publishing house Luchterhand.
"The annual meetings of Group 47 provided a context for us from which German literature could re-emerge," Grass, who cited the German writer Alfred Doeblin and such Americans as Faulkner and Herman Melville as influences, told The Paris Review.
Despite initial shock in Germany over such a candid take on the then-recent Nazi reign, "The Tin Drum" became a worldwide success.
- This is relevant becuase Grass was a firm believer in speaking openly agaisnt the Nazi regimev much like the book Number The Stars. His story holds a lot of symbolism that can be taken as his view of Nazi Germany and his way to rebel against it.
http://news.yahoo.com/photos/guenter-grass-german-nobel-literature-laureate-dies-at-87-slideshow/guenter-grass-german-nobel-literature-laureate-dies-at-87-photo-1428946137158.html
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