German novelist and social critic Günter Grass has died. The author, who won a Nobel Prize in 1999, was 87.
Publisher Steidl Verlag confirmed to the New York Times that he died at a clinic in Lübeck, where he had been living for decades. There was no cause of death released.
Grass was one of the most well-known German authors to confront the country’s ugly history after the war. His 1959 novel The Tin Drum became his best known work internationally. He often pushed for antimilitarism around the world, even after Germany reunified.
In 2006, he revealed that he had falsified his own biography, hiding the fact that he was a member of the Waffen-SS during World War II. He revealed the truth just before he published his memoir, Peeling the Onion, in an interview. He was conscripted towards the end of the war and was not accused of participated in war crimes. Nonetheless, it tarnished his image and many called him a hypocrite.
Still, that did not stop him from being a controversial figure in his later years. In 2012, he published a poem that criticized Israel’s stance on Iran. Grass later said that he was only criticizing the Israeli government, not the country itself.
German president Joachim Gauck remembered Grass in a statement today.
“Günter Grass moved, enthralled, and made the people of our country think with his literature and his art. His literary work won him recognition early across the world, as witnessed not least by his Nobel prize,” Gauck said in a statement, notes The Guardian. “His novels, short stories, and his poetry reflect the great hopes and fallacies, the fears and desires of whole generations.”
Grass is survived by his second wife, Ute Grunert and six children.