Death of Günter Grass

Günter Grass died on 13 April 2015 in Lübeck, aged 87. A German writer and artist born in Danzig, now Gdańsk, Grass became world famous with his first novel, The Tin Drum, published in 1959, a grotesque and imaginative story of a boy who refuses to grow up, set in the Nazi years. It was the first part of his Danzig Trilogy, with Cat and Mouse and Dog Years. He was also a poet, a sculptor, a graphic artist and a vocal supporter of the Social Democratic Party. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999. In 2006 he revealed in his memoir that, as a teenager, he had served in the Waffen-SS, which caused a heated debate in Germany.

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