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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