Günter Grass quotes

Günter Grass was a German novelist, poet, and playwright, widely recognized for his contributions to post-war literature. His most famous work, "The Tin Drum," is regarded as a masterpiece of magical realism and a key text in modern German literature. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for illuminating forgotten facets of history with imaginative power. Here are 35 of his quotes:

Even if surrounded with explanations, Auschwitz can never be grasped.

Günter Grass

The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.

Günter Grass

I shall speak of ... how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another ... Of the revulsion that follows one insight and precedes the next ... Of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis and progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.

Günter Grass

I have found that words that are loaded with pathos and create a seductive euphoria are apt to promote nonsense.

Günter Grass

I belonged to the generation that grew up under National Socialism, and was blinded and led astray - and allowed itself to be led astray.

Günter Grass

If work and leisure are soon to be subordinated to this one utopian principle - absolute busyness - then utopia and melancholy will come to coincide: an age without conflict will dawn, perpetually busy - and without consciousness.

Günter Grass

We of the long tails! We of the presentient whiskers! We of the perpetually growing teeth! We, the serried footnotes to man, his proliferating commentary. We, indestructible!

Günter Grass

Information networks straddle the world. Nothing remains concealed. But the sheer volume of information dissolves the information. We are unable to take it all in.

Günter Grass

We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.

Günter Grass

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Günter Grass

Believing: it means believing in our own lies. And I can say that I am grateful that I got this lesson very early.

Günter Grass

Melancholy has ceased to be an individual phenomenon, an exception. It has become the class privilege of the wage earner, a mass state of mind that finds its cause wherever life is governed by production quotas.

Günter Grass

Lies that do not hurt, which are different from lies that protect oneself or hurt another person. That is not my business. But the truth is mostly very boring, and you can help it along with lies. There is no harm in that.

Günter Grass

I did not volunteer for the Waffen SS, but was, as were thousands of my year group, conscripted. I did not then know as a 17-year-old that it was a criminal unit. I thought it was an elite unit.

Günter Grass

I have often supported Israel, I have often visited the country and want the country to exist and at last find peace with its neighbours.

Günter Grass

What I do is sometimes - at least in Germany - met with wounding campaigns. I always face the question: should I grow myself a thick skin and ignore it, or should I let myself be wounded? I've decided to be wounded, since, if I grew a thick skin, there are other things I wouldn't feel any more.

Günter Grass

People change with time. There are things that happened to a person in his childhood and years later they seem to him alien and strange. I am trying to decipher that child. Sometimes he is a stranger to me. When you think about when you were 14, don't you feel a certain alienation?

Günter Grass

I had an uncle who was a postal official at the Polish post office in Gdansk. He was one of the defenders of the Polish postal service and, after it capitulated, was shot by the Germans under the provisions of martial law. Suddenly he was no longer a member of the family, and we were no longer allowed to play with his children.

Günter Grass

Often I had to imagine the things I needed. I learned very early to read amidst noise. And so I started writing and drawing at an early age.

Günter Grass

Everybody knows how fallible memory can sometimes be. You remember certain fragments precisely, but as soon as you try to join the fragments together, for a story, there is a certain - not falsification, but a shifting.

Günter Grass

In general, I agree with Jacob Grimm and feel that we ought to permit changes and uncontrolled growth in language. Even though that also allows potentially threatening new words to develop, language needs the chance to constantly renew itself.

Günter Grass

I was assigned to the Waffen-SS but was never involved in any crime. Besides, I always felt the need to write about my experiences in a larger context one day. This has only developed recently, now that I have overcome my inner aversion to writing an autobiography in the first place, specifically one having to do with my younger years.

Günter Grass