Six Decades grants us a privileged look behind the normally closed door of Nobel Laureate Günter Grass’ studio. For well over half a century Grass worked unceasingly as a writer, sculptor and graphic artist. While capturing the pulse of each decade of his long life in his novels, Grass also produced theatre pieces, poems, short stories, essays, etchings, lithographs, drawings and sculptures. He was furthermore politically active in his native Germany, set up several foundations, and was passionately dedicated to issues he saw of artistic, social and humanitarian importance. Combining Grass’ writings with over 800 reproductions of his visual art, documents and photographs, Six Decades allows us to follow his working processes from book to book, from year to year. He shares with us moments of private happiness and crises through texts and images, many of which were not originally intended for publication, including preparatory sketches, draft manuscripts, book cover designs and work plans.
Günter Grass Book order







- 2023
- 2016
Suddenly, in spite of the trials of old age, and with the end in sight, everything seems possible again: love letters, soliloquies, scenes of jealousy, swan songs, social satire, and moments of happiness. Only an ageing artist who had once more cheated death could get to work with such wisdom, defiance and wit. A wealth of touching stories is condensed into artful miniatures. In a striking interplay of poetry, lyric prose and drawings, Grass creates his final, major work of art. A moving farewell gift, a sensual, melancholy summation of a life fully lived.
- 2012
From Germany to Germany
- 264 pages
- 10 hours of reading
Germany's Nobel Prize winner chronicles the most important year in recent Germany history--the reunification of the country in 1990
- 2011
In this delightful sequel to Peeling the Onion, G�nter Grass writes in the voices of his eight children as they record memories of their childhoods, of growing up, of their father, who was always at work on a new book, always at the margins of their lives. Memories contradictory, critical, loving, accusatory - they piece together an intimate picture of this most public of men. To say nothing of Marie, Grass's assistant, a family friend of many years, perhaps even a lover, whose snapshots taken with an old-fashioned Agfa box camera provide the author with ideas for his work. But her images offer much more. They reveals a truth beyond the ordinary details of life, depict the future, tell what might have been, grant the wishes in visual form of those photographed. The children speculate on the nature of this magic: was the enchanted camera a source of inspiration for their father? Did it represent the power of art itself? Was it the eye of God? 'With his magical story of Marie's all-seeing camera, he transforms the facts of his headlong but loving life into something far more potent than reportage' Sunday Herald 'A short, often charming book...richly comic' The Times 'Beautifully-written sequel to Peeling the Onion' Daily Telegraph
- 2009
- 2008
Peeling the Onion
- 432 pages
- 16 hours of reading
Peeling the Onion is a searingly honest account of Grass' modest upbringing in Danzig, his time as a boy soldier fighting the Russians, and the writing of his masterpiece, The Tin Drum, in Paris. It is a remarkable autobiography and, without question, one of Gunter Grass' finest works. By the Nobel Prize- winning author of The Tin Drum.
- 2004
The Günter Grass Reader
- 320 pages
- 12 hours of reading
Selected from the vast range of his work, the writings included in this anthology trace Günter Grass's development as a writer, and with it the history of a nation coming to terms with its past.Excerpts from Grass's major novels-from The Tin Drum to Crabwalk-are included, as are numerous short fictions, essays, and poems, many of which have never appeared before in English. Grass's gifts as an observer of and participant in the social and political landscape are justly celebrated, as are his inimitable sense of humor, his consistent defense of the disadvantaged, and his mastery of the forms of expression he has employed over the years.For readers in search of an introduction to his work or for those familiar primarily with his novels, this diverse collection offers a fresh and stimulating introduction to one of the world's greatest living writers.
- 2002
Crabwalk
- 234 pages
- 9 hours of reading
From Books Cover: Gunter Grass has been wrestling with Germany's past for decades now. In this new novel Grass examines a subject that has long been taboo - the suffering of Germans during World War II. It is the story of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a former cruise ship turned refugee carrier, by a Soviet submarine in January 1945. Some 9,000 people, most of them women and children fleeing from the advancing Red Army went down in the Baltic Sea, making it the deadliest maritime disaster of all time. Grass's narrator is one of the few survivors, a middle-aged journalist who live in Berlin. Born to an unwed mother on a lifeboat the night of the attack, Paul Pokriefke tries to piece together the tragic events. While his mother Tulla sees her whole existence in terms of that calamitous moment, Paul wishes their life could have been more normal, less touched by the past. For his teenage son Konrad, who dabbles in the dark, far-right corner of the internet, the Gustloff embodies the denial of Germany's wartime agony.
- 2001
My broken love
- 303 pages
- 11 hours of reading
Collection of material on Gèunter Grass' sojourn in Calcutta and other visits to India and Bangladesh; also includes essays, lectures, references on India.
- 1999
My century
- 288 pages
- 11 hours of reading
A collection of stories--one for every year of this century--offers an interlocking history of murder, war, wondrous technological achievement, persecution, athletic prowess, scientific advancement, and megalomania.