Gunter Grass was the winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature. His talents are revealed in a variety of disciplines: He is not only a novelist, poet and playwright, but also a renowned painter and sculptor. As he himself stresses, his creations are closely related to his unique personal history. His father was a German who joined the Nazi party in World War II, while his mother was Polish. As a result, he constantly suffered contradictory feelings: as a Pole who had been victimized, and as someone guilty of harming the Poles. The torment in his heart led him to denounce the Nazis and his political activism has continued throughout his career. His commitment to the peace movement and the environmental movement as well as his unfailing quest for justice has won him praise as “the conscience of the nation.”
In the spring of 1996, he was inspired during a trip to Italy to write a poem with his watercolor brush directly on one of his paintings. Before long, a collection of his “water poems” was born. Painting and literature have become his major forms of creativity. For him, painting is a form of creation with concrete, sensual elements, while writing is a hard and abstract process. When he cannot find words to convey his thoughts, painting helps him find the words to express himself. In this way, Grass not only creates simple depictions of the objects he is fond of in life, such as melons, vegetables, fish, and mushrooms, but also uses them as symbols for mental associations of various kinds. For example, to express the complexity of reality, he sometimes places unrelated objects in the same painting, such as a bird and a housefly, or a mushroom and a nail. Grass has depicted a wide variety of natural scenes, animals and plants, and even human artifacts of the German countryside, portraying them in poems, and allowing words to make the paintings rich in literary value.
Why was Grass’s trip to Italy important to him?