Günter Grass Books in Order

On his third birthday, Oskar decides to stop growing. With his tin drum, he recounts a life shaped by family deaths, the Nazi years and the disorder of postwar Germany, turning childhood defiance into a disturbing perspective on history.

Self-conscious about his prominent Adam’s apple, fourteen-year-old Joachim Mahlke becomes an exceptional athlete and diver. His quest for recognition unfolds in wartime Danzig, where admiration cannot protect an outsider from the pressures and violence surrounding him.

Across forty years of German history, intertwined human and canine lives expose the society that nurtured Nazism. Fantasy, memory and grotesque humor follow its characters through the Third Reich, wartime collapse and the uneasy complacency of postwar recovery.

During the East German workers' uprising of 1953, intellectuals face demands for solidarity and action. Grass's play examines their failure to support the rebellion, bringing the tension between artistic commitments and political responsibility onto the stage.

Four short plays bring together Flood, Mister, Mister, Only Ten Minutes to Buffalo, and The Wicked Cooks. Through the conventions of absurdist theater, Grass presents situations whose strangeness provides another expression of his dramatic imagination.

Speeches, open letters, and commentaries collect Günter Grass's interventions in political life. Moving beyond his fiction, the volume presents the novelist's public arguments and offers a view of the concerns behind his role as a German citizen.

During extended dental treatment, teacher Starusch watches television and projects his own memories and present concerns onto the screen. His shifting recollections form a satire of private dissatisfaction, public confusion, and the uneasy relationship between experience and spectacle.

During Willy Brandt’s election campaign, Grass interweaves political observations with the history of persecuted Jews in Danzig. Family conversations, memory and the figure of the snail shape his reflections on gradual reform and the burdens of Germany’s past.

A student plans a shocking protest against the use of napalm in Vietnam, intending to burn his dog in public. His teacher tries to stop him as their confrontation exposes opposing ideas about activism and democratic reform.

Günter Grass combines drawings and etchings with photographs by Maria Rama in this illustrated work. Images and translated writing appear together, presenting an encounter between his graphic art and language beyond the form of his novels.

This bilingual collection brings together poems from two earlier selections, with German texts facing their English translations. It offers a view of Grass's poetic work through versions by Michael Hamburger and Christopher Middleton gathered in one volume.

An immortal fisherman and a talking flounder move through centuries beginning in the Stone Age near the future city of Danzig. Their continuing association lets Günter Grass interweave distant eras in an expansive, fantastical account of human history.

As the Thirty Years' War nears its end, German intellectuals gather in 1647 to consider their fractured nation's future. Their meeting centers on language and literature as possible bonds among people separated by war and political divisions.

Harm and Dörte Peters travel through Asia but cannot escape the political upheaval occupying Germany. Their journey becomes the setting for a satire on competing ideologies, religion, capitalism, and the anxieties surrounding whether to have children.

Spanning work from 1954 to 1977, this volume places Günter Grass's drawings alongside his writing. The selection brings his visual art into conversation with language, showing another aspect of the novelist's sustained work across artistic forms.

Etchings from a decade of Günter Grass's artistic career appear alongside selected writing. This illustrated volume brings his visual and literary work together, offering a view of the relationship between the images he made and the words he wrote.

Essays written between 1967 and 1983 bring together Grass’s concerns as a novelist and political activist. He considers the responsibilities of writers, the demands of public engagement and the difficult relationship between literary work and political action.

A narrator debates a female rat who insists that rats will inherit an Earth devastated by humanity. Dreams and reality overlap through nested stories, turning their exchanges into a fantastical confrontation with destruction and the future of civilization.

During an extended stay in Calcutta, Günter Grass records everyday life through words and drawings. His observations of poverty and the city become a reflection on shame, prosperity, and the difficulty of understanding another society.

As the Berlin Wall falls, Günter Grass argues against rapid German reunification. These speeches and debates examine the political choices facing the two German states and the wider consequences of a changing European order.

A German art historian and a Polish restorer meet through a plan to provide burial plots in Gdansk for Germans expelled after the war. Their cemetery venture brings romance and raises questions about memory, displacement, and reconciliation.

Two elderly men wander through Berlin after the fall of the Wall: a former East German official and a spy accustomed to changing regimes. Their observations explore reunification, national identity, and the struggle to preserve the past.

One hundred linked stories, each corresponding to a year from 1900 through 1999, trace the twentieth century's upheavals. Everyday incidents appear alongside war, political change, discoveries, and disasters, building a varied portrait of Germany and its times.

Journalist Paul Pokriefke investigates the wartime sinking that coincided with his birth. His mother's memories and his son's attraction to far-right interpretations force him to confront how a single disaster continues shaping different generations of his family.

Selections from Günter Grass's novels appear alongside short fiction, essays, and poetry, including work newly translated into English. The collection follows his development as a writer while tracing Germany's efforts to confront its past.

Günter Grass recalls his childhood in Danzig, wartime service and captivity, and efforts to become an artist after the war. The memoir follows his early adult life through the writing and publication of The Tin Drum.

Grass imagines his eight children gathering to recall their lives with a father absorbed in writing. Their conflicting memories mingle with the extraordinary photographs of a family friend whose camera appears to reveal more than ordinary reality.

During German reunification, Günter Grass records his travels, political debates, family conversations, and emerging literary ideas. His diary follows a year of upheaval after the Berlin Wall's fall, combining personal observations with arguments about the country's future.

In his final collection, Günter Grass combines prose, poetry, and drawings to reflect on aging, love, artistic work, and the world around him. Brief pieces move between intimate recollection, social criticism, humor, and awareness of approaching death.

A writer visiting Naumburg invites the cathedral's medieval sculptural models to dinner and finds them alive. One becomes an elusive living statue, sending him searching across Europe as distinctions between past and present, art and life begin to dissolve.

Poems written across nearly four decades examine Germany after the Second World War and the Cold War. Surreal images, domestic objects and sharply observed public events carry Grass’s reflections on memory, political responsibility and the persistence of destructive beliefs.