What is Günter Grass's writing style?

Grass writes long, self-correcting sentences full of the names of ordinary objects, spoken by a first-person narrator whose position in the story makes his account inadmissible. The three Danzig books, Die Blechtrommel, Katz und Maus and Hundejahre, each hand the telling to somebody compromised, and the comedy in them is real comedy that turns into an accusation a beat later. You are handed evidence and denied a summing-up. That is the whole arrangement, and it holds from the first page of the first book to the last of the third.

Why does Oskar stop growing in The Tin Drum?

He decides to, on his third birthday, and stages a fall on the cellar steps so the grown-ups are handed an explanation that suits them. The book declines to settle which of the two did it. That refusal is deliberate and it lasts the whole novel: his family treats him as a damaged child, he treats himself as the author of his own condition, and the reader is left unable to close the question, which means the narrator's authority stays provisional to the last page.

Is The Tin Drum magical realism?

The label gets attached to it, and one element in the novel earns it: Oskar's voice can shatter glass. Everything around that element is documentary, down to the grocer's shop the family keeps and the streets of Danzig, so the book reads as a realist novel with a single impossibility inside it rather than as a world where anything can occur. That ratio is worth knowing before you open the book. A reader arriving in the hope of a world saturated with the marvellous finds a documented city with one hole punched in it, and the hole is where the pressure comes from.

Is Günter Grass difficult to read?

The vocabulary is not the obstacle, and a reader with school German will find the dictionary mostly stays shut. The sentences are the work. German holds the verb back to the end of a subordinate clause, so a Grass sentence makes you carry three or four unresolved clauses before anything closes, and the strain on a reader is memory rather than meaning. Read him in long sittings and it eases, because the pattern becomes familiar. In translation the syntax has to be rebuilt on other rules, which is worth knowing before you decide the style is overrated.

Which Günter Grass book should you start with to learn his technique?

Start with Katz und Maus. The novella is short, it runs the whole method once through, and because the cast is a handful of schoolboys you can watch the machinery without a century of history sitting on top of it. Read The Tin Drum second, where the same method carries three generations. Save the later novels until you can see how the first two are put together, because by then the narrators have started arguing with each other and it helps to know what the argument is about.

How do you write an unreliable narrator without confusing the reader?

Keep the world fixed while the interpretation moves. Grass lets Oskar reframe, excuse and contradict himself, but the dates hold, the weather holds, the furniture stays where it was put, and the shop downstairs stays a grocer's. A reader will tolerate a great deal of distortion from a narrator as long as there is a stable surface to catch him against, because catching him is the pleasure. Take that surface away and the reader stops testing and starts skimming, which is the point at which unreliability turns into fog.

Fiction

Günter Grass Writing Style

Born October 16, 1927 – Died April 13, 2015

Analysis by Prosematter's editorial team · Updated September 6, 2026

Give a narrator a body that makes his testimony inadmissible, and the verdict on everything he describes falls to the reader.

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Writing Style Overview

Writing style overview of Günter Grass: voice, themes, and technique.

Günter Grass wrote first-person historical novels narrated by people the reader has a physical reason to distrust. Die Blechtrommel, published in English as The Tin Drum, is written from a bed in a mental institution between 1952 and 1954 by a man whose keeper, Bruno, buys him the paper and watches him through a peephole in the door. The sentences run long and pick up clauses as they go, and they are crowded with the names of ordinary things: drums, eels, potatoes, skirts. Nothing in that voice tells you what to think about the years it covers.

The refusal to grow is machinery before it is a plot event. Oskar Matzerath decides on his third birthday to stop growing, and then throws himself down the cellar stairs so that the adults around him have a cause they can live with. Look at the order of those two things. The device comes first and the accident is arranged afterwards to cover it, which is how Grass buys an adult mind a three-year-old's line of sight and strips the narrator of any standing to pass judgement.

He furnishes a scene well past the point realism needs. The novel opens on Oskar's grandmother at the edge of a potato field in four potato-brown skirts, with a fire of potato haulm smoking beside her, when a fugitive arsonist crawls underneath and stays. You get the count of the skirts. You get the colour, the smoke, the field, and the man's offence. What is missing is the sentence explaining that this is a scene about shelter, or about Poland, or about how Oskar's mother came to exist, which it is.

Writers keep coming back to him because he rebuilt the apparatus for each book. One novel is written in an asylum bed by its inmate. A third of another is a run of love letters to a cousin. In a third, a talking flounder shares the narration with the man who caught it. Little about the Grass sentence transfers on its own. The procedure does. Decide who is telling this, work out what their position stops them from saying, and let the gap carry the argument you have decided not to make in your own voice.

How to Write Like Günter Grass

Writing techniques and exercises to emulate Günter Grass.

1
Disqualify the narrator before you plot anything
Decide the physical fact that makes this person's account inadmissible, and put it on the first page. A bed he does not leave. A height that keeps his eyes at table level. A birth date that coincides with the disaster he has to report. Then hold the draft to it: he reports what that body could reach and no more, and he does not get to summarise. That single constraint does most of the selecting a writer usually has to do by taste, and it will cost you scenes you were fond of.
2
Draft the event twice and throw away the wider one
Take one scene and write it from where the narrator actually stands. Then write it again as a calm adult onlooker would summarise it afterwards. Put the two side by side. The second version will contain a judgement the first could not reach, because reaching it needed a vantage the narrator does not have. Delete the second version. What is left is a scene with a hole in it exactly where the moral used to sit, and the reader will fill that hole faster and harder than your sentence would have, with a judgement they now own instead of one they were handed.
3
Name things the way a shopkeeper would
Go through the draft and replace each general word with the object itself. Not a garment, a work skirt worn over three others. Not cookware, a cutting board and a paring knife. Then add three things the action has no use for, because a room containing only what the plot needs reads as a set. Finally, strike out the lines that say what any of it means. Read the list back afterwards, and treat anything you could not buy in a shop as a word you liked rather than a thing you saw.
4
Let the sentence amend itself, then stop it dead
Write one long sentence that begins on something physical in the room and grows by revising itself, each clause adjusting what the clause before it implied, until the reader has been carried some distance from the starting point without noticing the trip. Then a short one. Read both out loud, and if the short sentence editorialises, you have written the moral you promised to leave out, so cut it and try again. Run the pattern twice in a scene at most, because a third time teaches the reader to hear the short sentence coming and to brace for it.
5
Reorder the story by what the narrator can face
List the events in the order they happened. Then rank them by how hard each one is for this narrator to say out loud, and rebuild the sequence from the second list. The worst thing goes late, approached from the side, glanced at twice before he turns to face it. The route he takes around the thing he will not look at is the portrait.

Günter Grass's Writing Style

Breakdown of Günter Grass's writing style: sentence structure, tone, pacing, and dialogue.

Sentence Structure

Start with the first sentence of Die Blechtrommel. It concedes something, then names the institution, then the keeper, then the door, then the peephole, then the colour of the eye behind it, so the reader is walked outward from the narrator's body one object at a time. Each clause revises what the last one implied. That is the engine: the long sentence in Grass advances by correcting itself, which is what stops it turning into a list. Where Thomas Mann builds a period that balances and closes, Grass builds one that keeps amending its own evidence. Then a short flat sentence lands after the chain. It records a fact and attaches no opinion, and because it is there you know where the accumulation stopped.

Vocabulary Complexity

Look at what the Onion Cellar is built out of. Guests at that club pay to be handed a cutting board, a knife and an onion, because they have lost the ability to cry and want it back. Three kitchen nouns carry the whole scene. Grass reaches for the shop word rather than the rare one, and his prose is hard for a different reason: the plain words are put in positions plain words are not supposed to occupy, so a knife arrives where a psychiatrist would be, and the translating is left to you. The nouns are things a hand could pick up. The strain sits in the syntax instead, and it shows up the moment you read a paragraph aloud.

Tone

On the Maiwiese, Oskar gets in under the speakers' rostrum with his drum and beats out a waltz. The band up above picks up the rhythm. The crowd starts to dance. Grass adds no line telling you that a party rally has been dissolved by a toy, and the absence of that line is the whole tonal method: the joke is funny first, then it convicts, and the second beat arrives inside the reader instead of on the page. Kurt Vonnegut worked the same seam over Dresden in Slaughterhouse-Five, though Vonnegut steps forward and says so in his own voice. Grass leaves you holding it.

Pacing

Im Krebsgang tells you its tempo in the title. The narrator, Paul Pokriefke, was born on the January night in 1945 when the Wilhelm Gustloff went down, so the catastrophe he has to report is also his birthday and he has no position outside it. He moves the way a crab moves. Sideways, then backwards, then a little forward, approaching 1945 from the flank because he cannot walk straight at it. Salman Rushdie gave Saleem Sinai the same problem in Midnight's Children, a narrator born into the hour he has to describe. Sequence in Grass follows what the teller can bear to say rather than what the calendar did. The stalling is characterisation.

Dialogue Style

In Katz und Maus the schoolboys give Mahlke's Adam's apple a nickname, the mouse, and once the thing has a nickname they are excused from saying out loud what is wrong with him. Grass writes speech that dodges. Characters correct each other's grammar, quote regulations, tell the joke the table has heard before, and the one subject in the room goes unnamed for pages while the objects in the scene state it plainly. Ishiguro built a whole novel out of that gap. The Remains of the Day works because a butler's stiff correctness is the evidence against him. Write the line that avoids. The object on the table does the telling.

Descriptive Approach

Grass rarely lets an object hold still. In the Good Friday chapter of Die Blechtrommel a man on the harbour mole hauls a rope out of the water, and on the end of it is a horse's head with eels working their way out. Oskar's mother is sick on the stones. Her husband buys four of the eels off the fisherman, carries them home and cooks them, and by evening she has sat down at the table and eaten the cold dish with a face that refuses to apologise. One object, four states, inside a single chapter. Description here is what happens to a thing rather than what a thing looks like, which is why the scenes keep their weight when you try to recall them a week later.

Signature Writing Techniques

Signature writing techniques Günter Grass uses across their work.

Knee-height reporting

Oskar keeps the body of a three-year-old for most of the book, which puts his eyes at the level of table edges, trouser cloth and the underside of things. Adults reach him as hands, hems, breath and smell long before they reach him as opinions or politics. That ordering is the tool. A reader who has met a man by his shoes and his breath does not take his politics neutrally twenty pages later. The discipline is the hard part. One sentence that body could not have witnessed, and the whole apparatus lets go.

A count borrowed from a body

Der Butt runs to nine chapters, one for each month of a pregnancy going on in the present-day frame, while the narrator lays out a kitchen history stretching back centuries. The structure is a list whose length comes from a body rather than from a plan, so a sprawling book gets a deadline the reader can feel without being told about it. Borrowed counts work because the reader already knows what nine months does to people. Honouring one is the difficulty, since the ninth chapter has to arrive when the pregnancy arrives, whether the material is ready or not.

One impossible power, itemised

The scream that breaks glass is the one impossible power in Die Blechtrommel, and Grass spends it on named panes. The glass of the standing clock at home. The classroom windows, and then the lenses in Fräulein Spollenhauer's spectacles. A theatre foyer, from the top of a tower. Each use has an address and a victim. An impossible ability that obeys rules and costs somebody something reads as a finding, while one that expands to fit whatever the plot needs reads as an excuse, and a reader can tell the two apart long before being able to say why, because the first kind leaves damage that later scenes have to work around.

A documented coincidence doing the plotting

Wilhelm Gustloff was a Nazi official shot dead by a student called David Frankfurter, and the ship named after him was later torpedoed by a Soviet submarine with refugees aboard. Both events happened. Grass hangs Im Krebsgang on the fact that they share a name, and on a narrator born the night the second one occurred. Building on a documented coincidence buys a novelist something invention cannot. The reader is unable to write the pattern off as convenient, because the pattern was there before the book was.

An object with a career

Track the drum across the length of the book. It arrives as a third-birthday present, becomes a refusal the moment his father tries to take it away, and ends up under a grandstand breaking up a rally. One object, three jobs, and the reader carries all three forward. A motif works this way when each return puts the thing to a different use instead of reminding you it exists. Reminder is the failure mode. If the drum came back doing what it did last time, the reader would file it as a tic and stop reading it as evidence.

The small stolen object that measures the large event

Mahlke, the boy at the centre of Katz und Maus, steals a Knight's Cross off a visiting speaker who has come to the school to talk about the war. The war stays mostly offstage. What a reader needs about it sits in the size of that decoration, in whose neck it came from, and in what a schoolboy imagined it would fix. Scale the object down and the reader does the multiplication. A theft is a scene with a shape, and a front is a subject with none.

Literary Devices Günter Grass Uses

Literary devices that define Günter Grass's style.

Reliably unreliable narration

James Wood calls this kind of narrator reliably unreliable in How Fiction Works: the distortion is legible because the author has made it so. Grass flags Oskar in the opening sentence by putting him in an institution with a keeper at the door, so the reader is taught how to read him before the first memory arrives. Wood's other half matters as much. The genuinely bottomless narrator, the one a book gives you no way to measure, is rare, and Grass is not writing one. Compare Faulkner, whose Benjy in The Sound and the Fury is off-centre in another way, since he registers everything and interprets none of it. Grass's man interprets without pause and is wrong on purpose. Both hold up, because the surrounding text supplies enough for the reader to keep score.

Making strange, then bringing it back

Viktor Shklovsky argued in his 1917 essay Art as Technique that art exists to break the habit which stops us seeing things, and Grass takes the second half of that job as seriously as the first. Der Butt puts a talking fish in a courtroom. The fish is impossible. The courtroom has minutes, charges and an order of business, and it is the paperwork around the fish that makes the fish bearable, because the reader is handed something ordinary against which to measure the strangeness, and the measuring is what keeps them inside the book instead of filing the whole thing as a fable and holding it at arm's length. Overdo the strange and you get a carnival that means nothing. Grass holds the ratio at roughly one impossibility per fully furnished world.

The narrator who switches person mid-sentence

Oskar tells his own story as I and as Oskar, and the switch can happen inside a single sentence. Going to the third person buys him distance from himself at the moments he wants it, and the reader can watch the distance being taken. It is the most legible confession device in the book, because the grammar does the confessing. A weaker version would have the narrator announce his discomfort. Grass lets a pronoun slip and moves on. Watch which episodes push him out of the first person, because that list is the real index of what he cannot own.

A table of contents that is in character

The first book of Hundejahre is divided into Frühschichten, early shifts, because the man writing it runs a mine, and the third book is a run of Materniaden, named for Walter Matern, who is the one telling it. Grass takes the organising vocabulary of the novel out of the narrator's working life rather than out of a manual on structure. A structural unit named by the narrator tells the reader who is in charge of the shape of the book before a single event has happened, and it removes the last neutral surface a novel has. Name your own divisions out of your narrator's trade, then look at the contents page and count how much it has given away.

Imitation Mistakes

Common imitation mistakes when copying Günter Grass.

Giving the narrator a quirk instead of a disqualification

A tic is decoration. He hums, he collects tram tickets, he will not sit with his back to a door. None of that changes the evidence he can gather, so the book is unaffected by it, and a reader works that out inside a chapter. Oskar's condition forbids some things and permits others. He cannot be held responsible, cannot be questioned as a witness, and cannot be lied to carefully by adults who take him for an infant. Test your own trait by asking what it forbids. An answer of nothing means the trait is a habit, and you can delete it without the book noticing.

Piling up objects without counting them

Grass is exact. Four skirts, four eels, three books, nine chapters. Imitators reach for abundance instead and produce a heap, which reads as atmosphere and dissolves by the second page, because a heap has no parts a reader can hold. An arithmetic the reader can carry is what turns a list into evidence, and the count doubles as a promise: name four and the fourth had better do something. Before you put the fifth thing in the room, work out what the fourth one is for.

Explaining the joke a line after it lands

The comic turn only pays if the reader is left alone with it for a beat. Add the sentence naming what the laugh cost and you have done the accounting on their behalf, which lets them off, and the discomfort you were building leaks out through the explanation. The setup is the other half of the same mistake. A joke that has been carefully prepared arrives already licensed, and the reader laughs at something they were invited to laugh at, which is a transaction with no guilt in it. Cut the line after the joke. Then cut the one before it.

Starting from the era and looking for a household to put it in

The direction of travel is the thing people get backwards. Grass starts on a potato field and the century turns up there uninvited, arriving through what has gone missing from the kitchen and what the neighbours have stopped saying out loud. Start from the era and you write a costume drama, in which each domestic detail has been picked to illustrate a point you had already made, and the characters work as unpaid extras in your argument, which a reader picks up quickly, because a person who exists to demonstrate something has stopped being able to surprise anybody by the second scene they turn up in. The household has to exist first. Then the history can walk in and damage it.

Books

Explore Günter Grass's books and discover the stories that shaped their writing style and voice.

The Tin Drum
The Tin Drum

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about Günter Grass's writing style and techniques.

What is Günter Grass's writing style?: Grass writes long, self-correcting sentences full of the names of ordinary objects, spoken by a first-person narrator whose position in the story makes his account inadmissible. The three Danzig books, Die Blechtrommel, Katz und Maus and Hundejahre, each hand the telling to somebody compromised, and the comedy in them is real comedy that turns into an accusation a beat later. You are handed evidence and denied a summing-up. That is the whole arrangement, and it holds from the first page of the first book to the last of the third.
Why does Oskar stop growing in The Tin Drum?: He decides to, on his third birthday, and stages a fall on the cellar steps so the grown-ups are handed an explanation that suits them. The book declines to settle which of the two did it. That refusal is deliberate and it lasts the whole novel: his family treats him as a damaged child, he treats himself as the author of his own condition, and the reader is left unable to close the question, which means the narrator's authority stays provisional to the last page.
Is The Tin Drum magical realism?: The label gets attached to it, and one element in the novel earns it: Oskar's voice can shatter glass. Everything around that element is documentary, down to the grocer's shop the family keeps and the streets of Danzig, so the book reads as a realist novel with a single impossibility inside it rather than as a world where anything can occur. That ratio is worth knowing before you open the book. A reader arriving in the hope of a world saturated with the marvellous finds a documented city with one hole punched in it, and the hole is where the pressure comes from.
Is Günter Grass difficult to read?: The vocabulary is not the obstacle, and a reader with school German will find the dictionary mostly stays shut. The sentences are the work. German holds the verb back to the end of a subordinate clause, so a Grass sentence makes you carry three or four unresolved clauses before anything closes, and the strain on a reader is memory rather than meaning. Read him in long sittings and it eases, because the pattern becomes familiar. In translation the syntax has to be rebuilt on other rules, which is worth knowing before you decide the style is overrated.
Which Günter Grass book should you start with to learn his technique?: Start with Katz und Maus. The novella is short, it runs the whole method once through, and because the cast is a handful of schoolboys you can watch the machinery without a century of history sitting on top of it. Read The Tin Drum second, where the same method carries three generations. Save the later novels until you can see how the first two are put together, because by then the narrators have started arguing with each other and it helps to know what the argument is about.
How do you write an unreliable narrator without confusing the reader?: Keep the world fixed while the interpretation moves. Grass lets Oskar reframe, excuse and contradict himself, but the dates hold, the weather holds, the furniture stays where it was put, and the shop downstairs stays a grocer's. A reader will tolerate a great deal of distortion from a narrator as long as there is a stable surface to catch him against, because catching him is the pleasure. Take that surface away and the reader stops testing and starts skimming, which is the point at which unreliability turns into fog.

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