The assistant at the Gunter Grass Haus was not exactly run off her feet when I ambled in from Lubeck's cobbled streets. Standing in the foyer, she was surrounded by prints and sculptures, diverse creations of one remarkable mind, and by bookshelves neatly laden with Gunter Grass publications. I was her sole visitor that morning, writes Frank Shouldice
Gunter Grass Haus occupies a triangular, three-storey Hanseatic-style house on Glockengieberstrasse in the shadow of St Jacob's, one of five towering redbricked churches that steeple this medieval port-city.
The building served as Grass's studio so it is a fitting place to explore the thoughts of one of Germany's greatest artists. Permanent exhibitions such as these are usually dedicated to achievements of the dead, but aged 79, the bespectacled, pipe-smoking Grass is very much alive. Not only is he a formidable writer and polemicist but, as I was about to learn, also a sculptor and painter of some repute.
Grass was born 300 miles away in the former Prussian city of Danzig - now the Polish shipbuilding city of Gdansk. He now lives in Behlendorf, but in recent years has been adopted by Lubeck, a port further west on Germany's Baltic coast. He donated his literary works to Glockengieberstrasse in 1995 and occasionally uses an upstairs room to write. On display downstairs, each original draft reveals the creative process at play, starting out longhand in pen and ink, then meticulously re-worked in the margins before the next draft is typed out.
Rather than call it a museum, the organisers describe Gunter Grass Haus as "a crossroads forum where literature and the visual arts meet" and the emphasis is on its subject's "double gift". A current exhibition is devoted to the drawings of Otto Pankok, an art teacher who had a formative influence on Grass.
Of course it is as a writer that Grass is most famous. After the second World War he trained as a stonemason and was working as a sculptor when he published The Tin Drum in 1959. Told with an imaginative flourish, the novel centres on Oskar Matzerath, a high-pitched boy who refuses to grow during Germany's Nazi years. The novel marked Grass as a truly original voice and launched the author into the publishing stratosphere. He maintained a steady output on all fronts, turning out a stream of novels, poems, plays and essays and forcefully entering the political debate on Germany's reunification in 1989.
Yet away from this glare Grass refused to limit his creativity to words. Despite the pressure to produce written work and the intensity of that process, he continued to draw, paint and sculpt, seeking a breadth of artistic expression that was for him both natural and essential. The centre at Glockengieberstrasse houses some of his collection of 3,400 drawings and paintings, 500 etchings and 100 sculptures.
Just as his writings often favour metaphor, his sculpture and etchings draw on many of the same images - crustaceans, fish, rats, fungi. Few artists have the virtuosity to alternate their language of expression but Grass can articulate ideas using ink, paint, bronze or clay. A small garden at the centre features a characteristic bronze sculpture - a human hand rising out of the ground with a meaty flounder clenched in its maw.
At a time when international baubles carry excessive significance Gunter Grass was accorded a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. In his acceptance speech to the Swedish Academy he announced, "I come from the land of book-burning" during a speech entitled, "To Be Continued. . ."
He also hinted at his own past during that address. "At 15 I donned a uniform, at 16 I learned what fear was, at 17 I landed in an American POW camp."
However, for a voice reliably courageous, often provocative, occasionally strident, Grass was a little economic with personal detail. Only last year he admitted to joining the Waffen SS at 15 years of age and training as a tank gunner. Two years later he was injured in battle.
After 60 years' silence on the issue Grass has taken heavy criticism for such a belated admission. He has just published Peeling the Onion in an effort to discuss his past. "My silence through all these years is one of the reasons why I wrote this book," he said. "It had to come out finally."
But for many former admirers the confession is too little too late and the assistant at Gunter Grass Haus admitted the disclosure had damaged his reputation. "It is not so easy being a prophet in your own country," she suggested, expressing a hope that the cycle of public understanding will return to support him.
The people of Gdansk have already shown him genuine compassion. With the SS nightmare tattooed on Poland's consciousness the Law and Justice party demanded that his honorary citizenship be withdrawn. However a poll among the people of Gdansk decreed otherwise, allowing the 79-year-old Grass an error of judgment to reconcile with his own conscience.
In the city of his birth they first honoured him for his genius; by this gesture they have decided that even a genius can make a mistake.