Born in Danzig (now Gdańsk), Poland, Günter Grass had been living just outside Lübeck for 13 years when he collected his Nobel Prize in 1999. But this post-war literary colossus initially trained as an artist, and he always continued to draw and sculpt. The Günter Grass-Haus is filled with the author’s leitmotifs – flounders, rats, snails and eels – brought to life in bronze and charcoal, as well as in prose. The small bookshop is excellent.

　　You can view a copy of the first typewritten page of Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum; 1959). Grass died in Lübeck in 2015.