We are a club of English language and culture friends. We meet in Guadalajara every thursday from 18:45 to 20:45 in order to talk in english.

We usually have a topic of the day but the conversation normally flows by itself and we have fun talking about lots of things. We meet in the Social Centre in Calle Cifuentes.

Why don't you try next Thursday? Meet us, talk and enjoy. If you like it and decide to be a member it's only 20 Euros a year, and we have a lot of resources, like a library service with lots of books, games and films, and some magazines such as Think in English, Speak Up and National Geographic.

viernes, 17 de abril de 2015

Günter Grass Nobel-winning German novelist, dies aged 87

QUOTES BY GUNTER GRASS

I belonged to the generation that grew up under National Socialism, and was blinded and led astray - and allowed itself to be led astray.
Everyone is born into a certain era. I wouldn't want to see anyone faced with the circumstances that prevailed at the time, when there were few or no alternatives.
I did not volunteer for the Waffen SS, but was, as were thousands of my year group, conscripted. I did not then know as a 17-year-old that it was a criminal unit. I thought it was an elite unit.
I was assigned to the Waffen-SS but was never involved in any crime. Besides, I always felt the need to write about my experiences in a larger context one day. This has only developed recently, now that I have overcome my inner aversion to writing an autobiography in the first place, specifically one having to do with my younger years.
I had an uncle who was a postal official at the Polish post office in Gdansk. He was one of the defenders of the Polish postal service and, after it capitulated, was shot by the Germans under the provisions of martial law. Suddenly he was no longer a member of the family, and we were no longer allowed to play with his children.
As a child I was a great liar. Fortunately my mother liked my lies. I promised her marvelous things.
Believing: it means believing in our own lies. And I can say that I am grateful that I got this lesson very early.
I don't believe in writing at night because it comes too easily. When I read it in the morning it's not good. I need daylight to begin. Between nine and ten o'clock I have a long breakfast with reading and music.
The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.
I'm always astonished by a forest. It makes me realise that the fantasy of nature is much larger than my own fantasy. I still have things to learn.
Art is uncompromising and life is full of compromises.
Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is a fight to the finish between black charcoal and white paper.
We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.
Writers know that sometimes things are there in the drawer for decades before they finally come out and you are capable of writing about them.
Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.
What I do is sometimes - at least in Germany - met with wounding campaigns. I always face the question: should I grow myself a thick skin and ignore it, or should I let myself be wounded? I've decided to be wounded, since, if I grew a thick skin, there are other things I wouldn't feel any more.

Günter Grass Nobel-winning German novelist, dies aged 87


         
Günter Grass was born in 1927 in Danzig-Langfuhr of Polish-German parents. After military service and captivity by American forces 1944-46, he worked as a farm labourer and miner and studied art in Düsseldorf and Berlin. 1956-59 he made his living as a sculptor, graphic artist and writer in Paris, and subsequently Berlin. In 1955 Grass became a member of the socially critical Gruppe 47 (later described with great warmth in The Meeting at Telgte), his first poetry was published in 1956 and his first play produced in 1957. His major international breakthrough came in 1959 with his allegorical and wide-ranging picaresque novel The Tin Drum (filmed by Schlöndorff), a satirical panorama of German reality during the first half of this century, which, with Cat and Mouse and Dog Years, was to form what is called the Danzig Trilogy.
In the 1960s Grass became active in politics, participating in election campaigns on behalf of the Social Democrat party and Willy Brandt. He dealt with the responsibility of intellectuals in Local Anaesthetic, From the Diary of a Snail and in his "German tragedy" The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising, and published political speeches and essays in which he advocated a Germany free from fanaticism and totalitarian ideologies. His childhood home, Danzig, and his broad and suggestive fabulations were to reappear in two successful novels criticising civilisation, The Flounder and The Rat, which reflect Grass's commitment to the peace movement and the environmental movement. Vehement debate and criticism were aroused by his mammoth novel Ein weites Feld which is set in the DDR in the years of the collapse of communism and the fall of the Berlin wall. In My Century he presents the history of the past century from a personal point of view, year by year. As a graphic artist, Grass has often been responsible for the covers and illustrations for his own works.
Grass was President of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin 1983-86, active within the German Authors' Publishing Company and PEN. He has been awarded a large number of prizes, among them Preis der Gruppe 47 1958, "Le meilleur livre étranger" 1962, the Büchner Prize 1965, the Fontane Prize 1968, Premio Internazionale Mondello 1977, the Alexander-Majakowski Medal, Gdansk 1979, the Antonio Feltrinelli Prize 1982, Großer Literaturpreis der Bayerischen Akademie 1994. He has honorary doctorates from Kenyon College and the Universities of Harvard, Poznan and Gdansk.
When Mr. Grass received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, the Swedish Academy credited the book with having granted German literature “a new beginning after decades of linguistic and moral destruction.”
He has died on the 13th – April – 2015 at 87.