Gunter Grass, Nobel-winning German author, is dead at 87

German author Günter Grass is dead at 87

(Image credit: Sebastian Willnow/Getty Images)

last updated 13 April 2015

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.

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.