Günter Grass was born on October 16, 1927 the son of a German grocer, Wilhelm Grass and a Kashubian mother Helena Knoff, in the hospital now known as Kliniczna. Grass’ background was not uncommon in a city where Germans, Poles and the local Kashubian population regularly intermarried and his own story can be viewed as a pocket history of the city in the first half of the 20th century. The mix of cultures in which Grass grew up is also a theme that regularly appears in his work and is particularly evident in Grass’ ‘The Tin Drum’ where the main character Oskar has a Kashubian mother, and two presumptive fathers - the German Alfred Matzerath, his mother’s husband and the Pole Jan Bronski, his mother’s lover. Because Grass uses real places set against a historical background in his fictionalised work, he creates a window into the Danzig of the 1930s and 1940s and the lives of those who lived here during this period.
Many of the locations where the action is set in his novels are real places where Günter Grass spent time during this period and with many having survived the devastation suffered by the main city of Gdańsk/Danzig during World War II, it is possible to walk the streets of Günter Grass’ childhood and at the same time realise the setting of his stories.
