Gunter Grass, Nobel-winning German author, is dead at 87
German novelist Gunter Grass became a literary sensation with the 1959 novel The Tin Drum, a book credited with helping revive German culture after World War II and giving voice to the guilt Germans lived with after Nazism. He died on Monday at a hospital in Lubeck, Germany. In giving Grass the 1999 Nobel Prize for literature, the Nobel Academy said of The Tin Drum, "it was as if German literature had been granted a new beginning after decades of linguistic and moral destruction."
Grass had his own controversies, though, including revealing in a 2006 autobiography that he had served in the Nazi Waffen-SS as a teenager. His novels, many set in his birthplace of Danzig (now Gdansk in Poland), drew on his combat experience and time as an American prisoner of war.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
