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Günter Grass
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German
novelist Günter Grass,
the Nobel Prize-winning author of "The Tin Drum", an epic treatment
of the Nazi era, died on Monday at the age of 87, his publishers said. A broad-shouldered man
with a drooping moustache, Grass 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 the atrocities of the Nazis. The independent German
Cultural Council called him "more than a writer ... a seismograph for
society" and the Anglo-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie called him "a
true giant, inspiration, and friend".
Reuters report continues:
However, Grass's
concealment until 2006 of the fact that he had served in a Nazi Waffen-SS
regiment as a teenager cost him some of his moral authority.
Although hailed as a
literary innovator for his magical realist style, Grass was more likely to use
public platforms to air his views on issues such as nuclear power and Germans'
historical responsibility than to discuss the craft of novel-writing.
A seasoned left-wing
campaigner, he was a towering figure in West Germans' efforts to keep the door
open to their Communist-ruled cousins in the east during the Cold War.
Yet Grass opposed hasty
reunification after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and hoped a new generation of
German authors from the east would nourish their work on "western
arrogance".
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.
"The Tin Drum"
caused a sensation when it was published in 1959, though it was condemned by
some as obscene. Former West German president Heinrich Luebke is said to have
remarked that he would not sit at the same table with a man whose work he could
not discuss with his wife in the privacy of their bedroom.
The book is told through
the eyes of Oskar Matzerath, a strange, gifted boy who resolves to stop growing
just as Nazism emerges in the 1930s, and relentlessly pounds the drum of the
title. It was made into an Oscar-winning film in 1979 by Volker Schloendorff.
"Cat and Mouse"
(1961) and "Dog Years" (1963) were also set in Danzig in the war
years and after, while "Local Anaesthetic" examines opposition to the
Vietnam war and the generation gap.
Grass had a stormy
relationship with the centre-left Social Democratic Party, criticizing it when
it joined a conservative-led government in the 1960s but campaigning for Willy
Brandt, the party's first post-war chancellor and champion of east-west
detente, in the 1970s.
SPD leader and deputy
German chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said that, with Grass's death, "we lose
one of the most important writers of German post-war history and an engaged
author and fighter for democracy and freedom".
WAFFEN-SS REVELATION
Awarding him the Nobel
Literature Prize in 1999, the Swedish Academy described one of his last works,
a series of essays called "My Century" (1999), as showing "a
particularly keen eye for stupefying enthusiasms".
Not even 12 when war
broke out, Grass was forced like other youngsters to join paramilitary organizations, and entered the Hitler Youth at 14.
Drafted into a Waffen-SS
tank division in 1944, he experienced the full horrors of war when more than
half his company of mostly 17-year-olds were ripped to pieces in three minutes
of shelling.
But the fact that he did
not reveal this part of his history until 2006 brought accusations that he had
been hypocritical when attacking others for failing properly to face up to
Germany's Nazi past.
When Germany surrendered
in 1945, Grass was briefly an American prisoner.
He then worked on a farm,
in a potash mine and as an apprentice stonemason before studying sculpture in
Duesseldorf and West Berlin. He began writing poems and plays in the early
1950s, worked as a journalist, played in a jazz band, and illustrated some of
his own books.
In 2012, his poem
branding Israel a threat to world peace earned him a ban on travelling to
Israel, which Grass compared to his treatment by East Germany's Stasi secret
police.
"Why do I say only
now ... that the nuclear power Israel endangers an already fragile world peace?
Because that must be said which it may already be too late to say
tomorrow," he wrote in the poem, which was criticized by some in Germany
as anti-Semitic.
He died in a hospital in
Luebeck, near his home in northern Germany. His publishers gave no details of
the cause of death.
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