This book traces the career of the most widely read and influential German novelist in the second half of the Twentieth-century. It shows in particular how his experiences as a teenage Nazi shaped his thinking, both in his novels and his role as critic and campaigner, from The Tin Drum (1959), his most famous novel, to My Century (1999), from his public protest against the building of the Berlin Wall (1961) to his diatribes against Helmut Kohl in the late 1990s. This new paperback edition includes new material on his last two books, My Century and Crabwalk including a revised Bibliography and Chronology.

Dedication List of Plates Acknowledgements Chronology PART I: LIFE AND ART Biographies: Real and Imagined Poet, Playwright, and Artist Multi-Talented Art Student Artistic Cross-Connections Idealists, Absolutes and Crypto-Social Democrats: The Plays PART II: LIVES IN HISTORY The World Novel: The Tin Drum Danzig Requiem Scandal Cat and Mouse : Is Pilenz Guilty? After Kafka - After Man Dog Years : Broken Biographies PART III: THE TURN TO POLITICS A Famous Young Man A Broken Intellectual Tradition I Advise You to Vote ES-PE-DE Writers and Politicians The Student Revolt 'I Meant Myself Just as Much': Brecht in the Crossfire in The Plebians Rehearse the Uprising On Cooking Pigs' Heads: Exhaustively Questioned 'Burn, Warehouse, Burn!': Local Anaesthetic Sceptics and Melancholics: From the Diary of a Snail PART IV: THE END OF HISTORY MAN A State of the Nation Novel: The Flounder 'Social-Democratic Rabelais' False Messiahs on Father's Day Feminism and The Flounder Writers and the State in Germany, 1647-1979: The Meeting in Telgte Orwell's Decade A Critical Intellectual in the Post-Modern Era Exotic Encounters Fiction Against the Bomb: The Rat PART V: WRONG SIDE OF THE WENDE The Galloping Weltgeist Grass and the German Question, 1953-1989 Burying the Past or Melting Pot Utopia: The Calls of the Toad Execution of an Author Fonty/Fontane: Broken Biographies in Too Far a Field Making Sense: Finding Truth Postscript: 1997-2002 Guide to Further Reading Index