Just as the idea for this volume was being developed for the Cambridge Companion series in the summer of 2006 the dramatic news broke that Günter Grass, the internationally renowned, Nobel prize-winning author who was to be its subject, had admitted for the first time in public that he had been a member, aged seventeen, of the Waffen SS, the elite German army organisation notorious for its fanatical obedience to Hitler and its prominent role in Nazi atrocities. In Germany, Grass's critics rushed to denounce what they saw as his hypocrisy (after all, he had long been lecturing his compatriots on the need to confront their past openly), with conservative journalist and newspaper editor Joachim Fest memorably commenting that he would not buy a used car from 'this man', while his supporters leaped to his defence, claiming that his revelation, overdue though it might be, by no means invalidated more than half a century of vigorous campaigning for the embedding of democratic values in the post-fascist Federal Republic, Grass's unrelenting concern with the Nazi period in his literary works as far back as the publication of The Tin Drum in 1959, or his untiring agitation for freedom and human rights across the globe. Internationally, Grass's fellow authors mostly stood up for an esteemed colleague, pointing not only to his record of political activism and social engagement on causes ranging from environmentalism and the Third World to racism and social exclusion but also to the breadth of his achievements as a writer, poet, dramatist, artist and essayist.