‘Tin Drum’ author who was in SS dies at 87
Print Edition
GERMANY’S Nobel-winning author, Gunter Grass, who acted as a moral compass for many in the postwar nation but later provoked criticism over his own World War II past, died yesterday aged 87.
The writer, one of Germany’s most influential if controversial intellectual figures, died in a hospital in the northern city of Luebeck, his publisher, Steidl, said.
Grass achieved world fame with his debut and best-known novel “The Tin Drum” in 1959, quickly followed by “Cat and Mouse” and “Dog Years,” all dealing with the rise of Nazism in his city of birth, Danzig, now Gdansk in Poland.
He pressed Germany for decades to face up to its Nazi past, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, when the Swedish Academy said his “frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history.”
He shocked his admirers and provoked an outcry in 2006 when he admitted he had been conscripted into Hitler’s notorious Waffen SS as a 17-year-old.
In 2012 he was declared persona non-grata by Israel by publishing a prose-poem, “What Must Be Said,” that painted Israel as the Middle East’s biggest threat to peace.
British author Salman Rushdie said the news of Grass’s death was “very sad,” calling him “a true giant, inspiration, and friend.”
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said the country had lost one of its greats, who had been the “father figure for the thinking and writing of a Germany that was coming of age.”
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