Iain Bamforth

In 1997, in the space of four months, more than three-quarters of a million people – the highest attendance for any postwar exhibition in Germany – queued to be admitted to the Bodyworlds (Körperwelten) exhibition at the Technical and Industrial Museum in Mannheim. The show produced similar attendance figures when it moved to Japan and to the traditional European capitals of...

Günter Grass stands so prominently in the line of fire of Germany’s still polarised and politicised cultural life, and has been sniped at so often since The Rat (1986) – A Wide Field (1995) was literally ripped up for the benefit of the press by that other Grand Old Man of German letters, the critic and TV personality Marcel Reich-Ranicki – that it comes almost as a surprise to find a barely noticed survivor: Grass the poet.’