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Novemberland: Selected Poems 1956-1993
These fifty-four poems, spanning four decades, depict a landscape at once recognizably mundane and grotesquely surreal. Grass's spirited humor and linguistic creativity transcend the cant of political poetry. The German originals face the translation. Translated by Michael Hamburger. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book
163 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1966
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About the author
Günter Grass
305 books1,839 followersNovels, notably
The Tin Drum
(1959) and
Dog Years
(1963), of German writer Günter Wilhelm Grass, who won the Nobel Prize of 1999 for literature, concern the political and social climate of Germany during and after World War II.
This novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, and sculptor since 1945 lived in West Germany but in his fiction frequently returned to the Danzig of his childhood. He always identified as a Kashubian.
He is best known for his first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), a key text in European magic realism. He named this style “broadened reality.” “Cat and Mouse” (1961) and Dog Years (1963) also succeeded in the period. These three novels make up his “Danzig trilogy.”
Helene Grass (née Knoff, 1898 - 1954), a Roman Catholic of Kashubian-Polish origin, bore Günter Grass to Willy Grass (1899 - 1979), a Protestant ethnic German. Parents reared Grass as a Catholic. The family lived in an apartment, attached to its grocery store in Danzig-Langfuhr (now Gdańsk-Wrzeszcz). He has one sister, born in 1930.
Grass attended the Danzig gymnasium Conradinum. He volunteered for submarine service with the Kriegsmarine "to get out of the confinement he felt as a teenager in his parents' house" which he considered - in a very negative way - civic Catholic lower middle class. In 1943 he became a Luftwaffenhelfer, then he was drafted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst, and in November 1944, shortly after his seventeenth birthday, into the Waffen-Schutzstaffel. The seventeen-year-old Grass saw combat with the 10th Schutzstaffel panzer division Frundsberg from February 1945 until he was wounded on 20 April 1945 and sent to an American prisoner of war camp.
In 1946 and 1947, he worked in a mine and received an education of a stonemason. For many years, he studied sculpture and graphics, first at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and then at the Universität der Künste Berlin. He also worked as an author and traveled frequently. He married in 1954 and from 1960 lived in Berlin as well as part-time in Schleswig-Holstein. Divorced in 1978, he remarried in 1979. From 1983 to 1986 he held the presidency of the Berlin Akademie der Künste (Berlin Academy of Arts).
During the German unification process in 1989 he argued for separation of the two states, because he thought a unified Germany would resume its past aggression. He moved to the northern German city of Lübeck in 1995. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999. In 2006, Grass caused controversy with his disclosure of his Waffen-Schutzstaffel service during the final months of World War II, which he had kept a secret until publishing his memoir that year. He died of complications of lung infection on 13th of April, 2015 at a Lübeck hospital. He was 87.
This novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, and sculptor since 1945 lived in West Germany but in his fiction frequently returned to the Danzig of his childhood. He always identified as a Kashubian.
He is best known for his first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), a key text in European magic realism. He named this style “broadened reality.” “Cat and Mouse” (1961) and Dog Years (1963) also succeeded in the period. These three novels make up his “Danzig trilogy.”
Helene Grass (née Knoff, 1898 - 1954), a Roman Catholic of Kashubian-Polish origin, bore Günter Grass to Willy Grass (1899 - 1979), a Protestant ethnic German. Parents reared Grass as a Catholic. The family lived in an apartment, attached to its grocery store in Danzig-Langfuhr (now Gdańsk-Wrzeszcz). He has one sister, born in 1930.
Grass attended the Danzig gymnasium Conradinum. He volunteered for submarine service with the Kriegsmarine "to get out of the confinement he felt as a teenager in his parents' house" which he considered - in a very negative way - civic Catholic lower middle class. In 1943 he became a Luftwaffenhelfer, then he was drafted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst, and in November 1944, shortly after his seventeenth birthday, into the Waffen-Schutzstaffel. The seventeen-year-old Grass saw combat with the 10th Schutzstaffel panzer division Frundsberg from February 1945 until he was wounded on 20 April 1945 and sent to an American prisoner of war camp.
In 1946 and 1947, he worked in a mine and received an education of a stonemason. For many years, he studied sculpture and graphics, first at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and then at the Universität der Künste Berlin. He also worked as an author and traveled frequently. He married in 1954 and from 1960 lived in Berlin as well as part-time in Schleswig-Holstein. Divorced in 1978, he remarried in 1979. From 1983 to 1986 he held the presidency of the Berlin Akademie der Künste (Berlin Academy of Arts).
During the German unification process in 1989 he argued for separation of the two states, because he thought a unified Germany would resume its past aggression. He moved to the northern German city of Lübeck in 1995. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999. In 2006, Grass caused controversy with his disclosure of his Waffen-Schutzstaffel service during the final months of World War II, which he had kept a secret until publishing his memoir that year. He died of complications of lung infection on 13th of April, 2015 at a Lübeck hospital. He was 87.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 26, 2018
...mirrors play at being nature. (5)
Our city our city.
All scattered lies Berlin,
leans with its fire walls against winds... (47)
For it was in this, ivy,
the growth rate of immortality,
that he surpassed us. (67)
Some rational nonsense in his lines.
A wounded Germany in his heart.
A little humor.
A little tragedy.
Absorbing creativity.
Two poems for a review:
Nursery Rhyme
Who laughs here, who has laughed?
Here we have ceased to laugh.
To laugh here now is treason.
The laugher has a reason.
Who weeps here, who has wept?
Here weeping is inept.
To weep here now means too
a reason so to do.
Who speaks here or keeps mum?
Here we denounce the dumb.
To speak here is to hide
deep reasons kept inside.
Who plays here, in the sand?
Against the wall we stand
players whose games are banned.
They've lost, they've burned their hand.
Who dies here, dares to die?
"Defector!" here we cry.
To die here, without stain,
is to have died in vain. (21)
*
Writing
In reality
the glass was filled only hip high.
Plump, well-rounded. Lies in the dregs.
Engrave syllables.
Live next to the garbage disposal unit
and distinguish between a stench and a smell.
Deprive the cake of its springform.
Books
in their cases
can't fall over.
That, often interrupted, is how my thoughts went.
When does the milk grow funny?
Measure progress in crayfish gait.
Wait patiently until metal tires.
Let the bridge slowly,
so that the writing keeps pace,
collapse.
Before that, calculate its value as scrap.
Sentences bid farewell to sentences.
When politics
become
the weather's way of speaking:
A high-pressure belt over Russia.
At home
to have gone abroad; on travels
to remain at home.
We will not change the climate.
Only naïveté
wants to make something live,
declare it dead.
Be stupid, always want to begin from scratch.
Please remind me as soon as I say
hay fever or the Corso of Flowers in Zoppot.
Retrospectively look out of the window.
Rhymes for snipes' droppings.
Loudly join in when anyone's talking nonsense.
Urbin, that's it!–Urbin, that's it!
Hit on the imprecise thing precisely.
Pockets
are full of old admission tickets.
Where is the car key?
Delete the car key.
Compassion with verbs.
Believe in the eraser.
Conjure an umbrella in the Lost and Found.
Bulldoze the moment with the rolling pin.
And take the connections apart again.
Because ... due to ... when ... so that ... to ...
comparisons and similar adhesive aids.
This story must come to an end.
Conclude with a colon:
I'm coming back. I'm coming back.
Remain cheerful in a vacuum.
Steal only things of one's own.
Chaos
more skillfully executed.
Not adorn-write: (*Yes, it ends there. 63/65)
This is a bilingual edition of selected poems from four decades. It would have been great to read some more notes for a little more context. If you don't do a research of your own, it is quite inaccessible.
Dec 14, 14
* Also on my blog.
** Photo credit: Shoey Nam.
March 27, 2017
Who speaks here or keeps mum?
Here we denounce the dumb.
To speak here is to hide
deep reasons kept inside.
Culled from 40 years, this a rather mixed assemblage. The images always appear afoot with history. The smoke of tragedy faint in the wind. The harvest remains hopeful as the shipwrecked muse over the mercy of milk. I wasn't transported by much of this, my personal baggage leading off the trail. This likely deserves a second reading.
Here we denounce the dumb.
To speak here is to hide
deep reasons kept inside.
Culled from 40 years, this a rather mixed assemblage. The images always appear afoot with history. The smoke of tragedy faint in the wind. The harvest remains hopeful as the shipwrecked muse over the mercy of milk. I wasn't transported by much of this, my personal baggage leading off the trail. This likely deserves a second reading.
June 10, 2017
Mercy, mercy. Somewhat ragged, Grass grows on you. His poems are like apple cider that's started to turn: dark, sweet, and with a little kick.
COMFORTED
After 40, all people should be suckled again
publicly, at a fixed price,
till they are comforted, wishless, and needn't cry anymore,
cry in the john, alone.
COMFORTED
After 40, all people should be suckled again
publicly, at a fixed price,
till they are comforted, wishless, and needn't cry anymore,
cry in the john, alone.
February 13, 2012
Largely inaccessible, yet I'd liked the poems in "The Rat." Maybe it's the translation? The context?
May 31, 2025
Smoke, Memory, and Murmurs: Novemberland Took Me Somewhere Cold and Familiar
I picked up Novemberland: Selected Poems by Günter Grass not really knowing what to expect. I knew Günter Grass as a novelist, a heavy one, with layered stories and historical weight. But these poems? They surprised me.
They whispered. They didn’t shout.
Each piece felt like a smudge of ash on a cold window. Sad, yes—but also sharp, political, and deeply personal. Grass writes with a kind of quiet anger, the kind that doesn’t need exclamation marks to make you feel something deep in your chest.
The poems drift through war, memory, guilt, old cities, foggy mornings, and stubborn hope. I found myself rereading them out loud—slowly. Some lines felt like walking over broken glass. Others like standing still in drizzle, hands in your pockets, thinking about your country, your choices, your ghosts.
There’s a heaviness, sure. But also humor, irony, even tenderness. Grass balances weight with rhythm, history with humanity.
What I liked most was how the poems don’t try to be beautiful. They’re honest. They crackle and rust. They say, “Here it is—our November.” And somehow, in all that gray, I saw light.
Novemberland doesn’t offer comfort. But it offers clarity.
And sometimes, that’s more valuable. Especially when the wind picks up. Especially when you still care.
I picked up Novemberland: Selected Poems by Günter Grass not really knowing what to expect. I knew Günter Grass as a novelist, a heavy one, with layered stories and historical weight. But these poems? They surprised me.
They whispered. They didn’t shout.
Each piece felt like a smudge of ash on a cold window. Sad, yes—but also sharp, political, and deeply personal. Grass writes with a kind of quiet anger, the kind that doesn’t need exclamation marks to make you feel something deep in your chest.
The poems drift through war, memory, guilt, old cities, foggy mornings, and stubborn hope. I found myself rereading them out loud—slowly. Some lines felt like walking over broken glass. Others like standing still in drizzle, hands in your pockets, thinking about your country, your choices, your ghosts.
There’s a heaviness, sure. But also humor, irony, even tenderness. Grass balances weight with rhythm, history with humanity.
What I liked most was how the poems don’t try to be beautiful. They’re honest. They crackle and rust. They say, “Here it is—our November.” And somehow, in all that gray, I saw light.
Novemberland doesn’t offer comfort. But it offers clarity.
And sometimes, that’s more valuable. Especially when the wind picks up. Especially when you still care.
September 14, 2022
Lyrik ist noch immer neu für mich.
Diese 13 Sonette verarbeiten Naturbeschreibungen mit dem erstarkten Fremdenhass kurz nach dem Anschluss der DDR an die BRD. Sie starke Tagesaktualität lässt Texte in der Regel schlecht altern. Leider fühlen sich viele dieser Gedichte heute sehr aktuell an, so als lebten wir noch/wieder in Novemberland. Die Naturbeschreibungen tun ihr übriges, um den Sonette Zeitlosigkeit einzuhauchen. Sprachliche Bilder, das war schon immer Grass' Stärke.
Diese 13 Sonette verarbeiten Naturbeschreibungen mit dem erstarkten Fremdenhass kurz nach dem Anschluss der DDR an die BRD. Sie starke Tagesaktualität lässt Texte in der Regel schlecht altern. Leider fühlen sich viele dieser Gedichte heute sehr aktuell an, so als lebten wir noch/wieder in Novemberland. Die Naturbeschreibungen tun ihr übriges, um den Sonette Zeitlosigkeit einzuhauchen. Sprachliche Bilder, das war schon immer Grass' Stärke.
July 31, 2025
Quarrel
Four birds quarreled.
When no leaf remained on the tree,
Venus came, disguised as a pencil,
and, in a beautiful script
signed autumn,
a conversion that soon would fall due.
Four birds quarreled.
When no leaf remained on the tree,
Venus came, disguised as a pencil,
and, in a beautiful script
signed autumn,
a conversion that soon would fall due.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews