German novelist and Nobel Prize winner Guenter Grass has died, aged 87. He was best known for works such as “The Tin Drum.” Grass was born in the
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German novelist and Nobel Prize winner Guenter Grass has died, aged 87.
He was best known for works such as “The Tin Drum.”
Grass was born in the Baltic port of Danzig – now Gdansk in Poland – in 1927, and much of his fiction was set in the city.
He spurned the German tradition of keeping a cool intellectual distance, insisting that a writer’s duty was to be at the frontline of moral and political debate.
For many, he was the voice of a German generation that came of age in World War Two and bore the burden of their parents’ guilt for Nazi atrocities.
However, a belated revelation in 2006 that he had served in the Nazi Waffen-SS as a teenager cast some doubt on his moral authority.
Grass died in a hospital in Luebeck, near his home town in northern Germany. His publishers gave no details of the cause of death.