Germany: Gunter Grass, the German novelist, social critic and Nobel Prize winner, died

Gunter Grass, the German novelist, social critic and Nobel Prize winner, died of undisclosed causes on April 13 in the German town of Lubeck. He was 87 years old. Grass wrote additional than 30 plays, novels, books of poems, essays and memoirs. He was the author of “The Tin Drum”, an epic treatment of the Nazi era.

A broad-shouldered man with a drooping mustache, Grass spurned the German tradition of keeping a cool intellectual distance, insisting that a writer’s business was to be at the frontline of moral and political debate.
For a lot of, he was the voice of a German generation that came of age in World War II and bore the burden of their parents’ guilt for the atrocities of the Nazis.

However, Grass’ concealment until 2006 of the fact that he had served in a Nazi Waffen-SS regiment as a teenager cost him some of his moral authority. The Waffen-SS was the combat unit of the Nazi’s elite military police force.

Not even 12 at the same time as war broke out, Grass, like a lot of other children, joined the Hitler Youth Movement.
He was again drafted into a Waffen-SS tank division in 1944. He experienced the full horrors of war at the same time as additional than half his company of mostly 17-year-olds were ripped to pieces in three minutes of shelling.

But the fact that he did not reveal this part of his history until 2006 brought accusations that he had been hypocritical at the same time as attacking others for failing properly to face up to Germany’s Nazi completed.

Life next war

At the same time as Germany surrendered in 1945, Grass was briefly an American prisoner of war.
He again worked on a farm, in a mine and as an apprentice stonemason before studying sculpture in Duesseldorf and West Berlin. He began writing poems and plays in the early 1950s, worked as a journalist, played in a jazz band, and illustrated some of his own books.
Grass said he regretted the years in which he did not speak the full truth about himself. “I kept silent,” Grass wrote in his memoir.
Why was he attracted to the SS?

“It was the newsreels,” he concluded. “I was a pushover for the prettified black-and-white ‘truth’ they served up.”
Trying approaching to terms with the completed is the basis for much of his writing, says Siegfried Mews, a Gunter Grass scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the US.

“He has produced works which were not necessarily eagerly welcomed,” Mews said in an interview with the US’ NPR. “That is authentic, for instance, of his initial large novel, The Tin Drum, but you can’t just ignore it.”
“The Tin Drum” tells the story of a boy, Oskar, who gets a tin drum for his third birthday, again decides to turmoil Nazi policy by at no time growing up. As an eternal child, Oskar witnesses an adult world that is chaotic and cruel, with Jews being persecuted and fierce fighting erupting between Germans and Poles. It was made into an Oscar-winning film by German director Volker Schlondorff.