Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
In his younger years, Grass was a member of the Hitler Youth (that's bad). (Source)
Grass fought in World War II and was wounded in 1945 when he was only 18 years old. He ended up being in an American POW camp for about a year. So yeah, the guy had a provocative early life, to say the least. (Source)
Here's what the New York Times had to say about Grass's shocking confession in 2006 that during the war, he was actually a member of the SS, which was the military arm of the Nazi party responsible for mass murders of Jews and other atrocities. (Source)
In 1999, Grass won the Nobel Prize for Literature, which is probably the highest literary honor an author can receive. (Source)
In Grass's Nobel speech, he discussed his mother's favorite cousin, who worked as a clerk at the Polish Post office in Danzig, was captured during the German attack, and shot by a firing squad. There's a lot of autobiography in the novel. (Source)