German novelist Guenter Grass dies

German novelist and Nobel Prize winner “Guenter Grass:“http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/13/gunter-grass-german-nobel-laureate-dies-aged-87 has died, aged 87.

He was best known for “works:“http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2191/the-art-of-fiction-no-124-gunter-grass such as “The Tin Drum.”

Grass was born in the Baltic port of Danzig – now Gdansk in Poland – in 1927, and much of his fiction was set in the city.

He spurned the German tradition of keeping a cool intellectual distance, insisting that a writer’s duty was to be at the frontline of moral and political debate.

For many, he was the voice of a German generation that came of age in World War Two and bore the burden of their parents’ guilt for Nazi atrocities.

However, a belated revelation in 2006 that he had served in the Nazi Waffen-SS as a teenager cast some doubt on his moral authority.

Grass died in a hospital in Luebeck, near his home town in northern Germany. His publishers gave no details of