GRASS, GÜNTER

Grass, Günter: translation

(1927- )

Playwright. Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1999 and is best known for his novels, but he wrote plays in the 1950s and 1960s. His short plays includedHochwasser(High Water, premiered in Frankfurt am Main, 1957);Onkel, Onkel(English title:Mister, Mister,Cologne, 1958) in;Noch zehn Minuten bis Buffalo(Ten Minutes to Buffalo, Bochum, 1959); and his full length, three-actDie bösen Köche(The Wicked Cooks, 1961), which premiered in the Workshop of the Schiller Theater inBerlin, as didDavor(English title:Max, a Play) in 1969.

By far his most frequently performed play, however, wasDie Plebejer proben den Aufstand(The Plebians Rehearse the Uprising, 1966), premiered likewise at the Schiller Theater Workshop.It examined the role ofBertolt Brechtin the 1953 workers' uprising against the Communist regime of the German Democratic Republic. The play depicted Brecht (called "The Boss") staging a scene from his adaptation ofWilliamShakespeare'sCoriolanuson the afternoon of 17 June, the day Russian troops killed scores of German workers in the streets of East Berlin and in the process destroyed the East German regime's credibility beyond repair. Demonstrators disrupt the rehearsal and ask Brecht to write a public declaration of his support of their uprising. Brecht declines to do so (in fact, Brecht wrote a letter of public support for the East German regimeagainstthe workers) and tells the demonstrators that he believes their revolt is pointless. He then dismisses the demonstrators as cowards, telling them they lack "even the courage to step on the lawn." (Brecht's private diaries reveal that he was contemptuous of workers generally, despite his declaration of loyalty to the "workers' state." See hisArbeitsjournal, ed. Werner Hecht [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973], 2:1010.) In the play, Brecht asks the demonstrators to remain in the theater, where unbeknownst to them, he records their responses to his provocations and insults on a tape recorder. He later plays back their responses for the purpose of using their uprising in his Shakespeare adaptation. When he learns that they have been killed in demonstrations outside, Brecht realizes his failure and supposedly plans to resign. In reality, Brecht did no such thing, of course, later accepting the Stalin Peace Prize. But Grass wanted to portray Brecht as a "typical" German intellectual who in most cases refuses to involve himself in politics. The play met with mixed reviews but was performed in numerous German theaters thereafter.

Grass has been awarded dozens of prizes and awards, among them the Büchner Prize, the Fontane Prize, the Premio Internazionale Mondello (1977), the Alexander-Majakowski Medal from his native Danzig (now Gdaüsk), the Antonio Feltrinelli Prize (1982), and the Grand Literature Prize of the Bavarian Academy, along with honorary doctorates from Kenyon College, Harvard University, and the universities of Gdansk and Poznan.