The Tin Drum

Günter Grass (1927–2015) was a German novelist, poet, playwright, and artist best known for his first novel The Tin Drum (1959), the opening work of his Danzig Trilogy that explores the rise of Nazism and World War II's impact through magic realism. Born in Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland) to Polish-German parents, he was drafted into the Waffen-SS as a teenager, later becoming a vocal left-wing critic of Germany's Nazi past and supporter of the Social Democratic Party. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999 for his frolicsome black fables portraying the forgotten face of history.