<p>The lyrics of Roy Rogers’s song “Don't fence me in” were introducing the post-war era which for many young Germans was after 1945 very unclear. The traces of the past were still strongly visible in the society, yet they all believed that they were able to create a brand new world of freedom. At that time Günter Grass would Begin his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf. He would experiment with various artistic forms of expression, writing poetry and travelling to Italy and France apart from sculpting and drawing. Later on he would refer to those times as a moment when “words and signs were born out of the same ink”. Till recently, our knowledge about this period of Grass’s artistic activities was very limited. Only after in 2013 when 150 pieces hidden under the staircase in his Düsseldorf apartment were discovered and secured. Among them drawings, water colours, sculptures, as well as unpublished poems and fragments of novels like “The Tin Drum”. The words dated between 1948-52 together with the materials from Medienarchiv in Bremen, City Museum in Düsseldorf and the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf presented at the exhibition in Gdańsk, will recall the spirit of the Grass’s generation torn between the feeling of guilt for the war and the feeling of fear connected with the survival.</p>