Word: grass
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...past two years, the growing success of three writers-Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll and Uwe Johnson-has signaled a change. Their achievement represents the fulfilled promise of a handful of serious writers, most of them young and linked with a maverick literary movement known as Group 47, who have persistently gone on trying to probe beneath the surface prosperity to the uneasy past. As artists, they know that the dramatic story of Nazi Germany must lie not with the wolves but in the everyday lives of the lambs-those many individuals whose accumulation of fear, self...
Whisper to Howl. Most spectacular example is a sprawling, scurrilous first novel, Günter Grass's Tin Drum, which has won prizes and stirred anger all over Europe, sold 150,000 copies in Germany, and will be out in the U.S. next month...
...Grass, a 35-year-old ex-tombstone carver, is probably the most inventive talent to be heard from anywhere since the war. In The Tin Drum, he employs every technique from realism to surrealism, every tone from a whisper to a howl. The gaudiest gimmick in his literary bag of tricks, however, is a character named Oskar Matzerath. For Oskar is that wildly distorted mirror which, held up to a wildly deformed reality, gives back a recognizable likeness...
...Like Grass, Oskar is the son of a German grocer and his pretty Polish wife. Unlike Grass, Oskar, when he is three years old, refuses to grow any more. He remains 31 inches tall. With a man's intelligence in a baby's body, he is largely ignored by adults. What he sees and overhears as a result adds up to a dwarfs-eye view of the Third Reich...
Trains & Bicycies. Like Böll and Grass -and most of his Group 47 contemporaries-Uwe Johnson, 28, views today's Germany as the dangerous and corrupt legacy of yesterday. But his main target is less the confrontation of the past than the misunderstood present. Johnson, who grew up in East Germany and moved (not fled, he insists) to the West in 1960, has become famous writing about the side he came from and the interplay across the border. Johnson's books seem to offer Germans the gloomiest of choices. East Germany is a police state, less oppressive...