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Ute Grass with husband Günter Grass in 2006
Photo: Metodi Popow / imago
The world knew her mainly from dancing. Taller than her husband, with long, tossed hair, she used to lead the famous mustache at her side across the floor on official occasions. Ute Grass, born in 1936 as Ute Grunert on Hiddensee, had been married to the writer Günter Grass since 1979. She was a trained organist, worked as a teacher and she was the mother of two children from her first marriage, whom the patriarch immediately accepted into his large Grass family kingdom: "We have eight children" was the motto from now on.
Ute Grass stopped working as a teacher after getting married.
She was his "Utchen" - that's what the "Tin Drum" author now called her.
She was a great writer's wife, accompanied her famous husband everywhere, to the month-long research stay in India, to the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm.
Where he was, she was too.
But this "Utchen" remained a self-confident, independent woman who put her macho man in his place if he thought he could continue to live out his free love life in a serene way.
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Ute Grass with husband Günter Grass around 1985
Photo: stock & people / Leemage / imago
She infected him with her literary passions, Fontane was her favorite author, whose revenant made Grass the hero of his novel "A Wide Field".
She was the first and strictest critic of his works.
If she had an objection, he fell silent.
And worked around.
In some pictures you can see her in the audience when he is explaining the world again upstairs at the microphone.
She looks up at him with everyone else in the room.
But it seems a little bit lacking in the ultimate seriousness.
From all the big words on stage, from the whole hollow dignity of public appearances, a little air escapes when she is there.
That didn't really hurt the big man.
It rather made him more alive.
Make the appearance more effective.
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He was a little afraid of her X-ray vision and her secret knowledge about him and the world.
A little poem by him about her goes like this: Ute's pillow / on which she lays her ear / is - which is supposed to be good for the neck - / filled with millet / allowed to travel / and knows more than I suspect . "
Ute Grass never gave the impression that she had grudged her husband with the glare of the headlights.
On the contrary.
When she stood with him in these cones of light, it always seemed as if she did not change this light at all.
While he was always in a pose next to her.
Always the Nobel Laureate actor too.
Try lying in the coffin
In his last book, Vonne Endlichkait, Günter Grass writes about his fear that she might die before him. The idea was a horror for him. It turned out differently. Günter Grass died in 2015. His last book was published after his death. Ute Grass was present at the presentation in Göttingen. Blonde, shoulder-length hair, tall, brightly colored cloth around her neck, she stood quietly at the edge and watched.
In the book her husband also wrote how they both prepared for death. How they had two coffins made by a carpenter and how they both tried them side by side in them. Ute Grass, as her husband described it, regretted not having taken a photo of her husband after they got out of the boxes. "You looked so pleased." Eight handles made of sturdy linen were to be attached to the side, "according to the number of our children" who were to carry the coffins to the grave. Ute Grass died on April 24th in Berlin. She was 85 years old.