One of Germany’s most-esteemed postwar authors was born in Danzing, now Gansk, Poland, in 1927 and has lived outside Lübeck for many years. Grass is best known for “The Tin Drum,” published in 1959. Anyone who’s read the novel or seen the film can’t help but to think of the eels-in-the-horsehead scene when traveling along the broad, marshy shores of the Baltic Sea around Hamburg and Lübeck. Grass unleashed a torrent of criticism in 2006 when he revealed, in advance of the publication of his autobiography, that he had served in the Nazi Waffen SS at age 17; some critics suggested the Nobel Prize committee should revoke Grass’s prize. Grass is also a sculptor, watercolorist, printmaker, and charcoal artist, and renderings of eels and fish fill these rooms in an old printing plant, alongside many of his original manuscripts and the machines, from an Olivetti manual typewriter to computers, on which he wrote them. Some of his elegant bronzes grace the courtyard. Next door, at no. 25, step through the baroque portal of the Füchtingshof, an almshouse built in the 17th century for the widows of seamen and merchants (open 9am–noon and 3–6pm); you’ll enter a tranquil courtyard with houses still occupied by widows. Down the street are two more former almshouses, testimony to how well Renaissance Lübeck treated its citizens: the Glandorps-Gang, at no. 41, and the Glandorps-Hof, at nos. 49 and 51.