The famous German writer and Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass died of a lung infection on Monday, April 13, in the northern German city of Lübeck. Deutsche Welle reported.
Born in 1927, his life was full of ups and downs and moments of triumph and turmoil.
At the age of 17, he witnessed the horrors of World War II. During his years as a teenager and a young man, he focused on how to survive the war.
In 1952 the Federal Republic of Germany was still in its infancy, and so was the intellectual development of Grass. He was interested in art, studied sculpture and graphic design and traveled a lot.
Grass produced his first novel 'The Tin Drum' in 1959, sparking an uproar in the rather conservative society of former West Germany before it became a huge international success. The book was translated into numerous languages and adapted into a movie. Exactly four decades later, its writer received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Grass wrote dramas, poems, and especially fiction. Most of his works dealt with political conditions and social upheaval, like the sinking of a refugee ship in the Baltic Sea in 1945, the role of intellectuals in the uprising in former East Germany in 1953, the student protests of 1968, federal election campaigns and political relations between the East and West.
Despite some critics lamenting that Grass' books were too heavy and political in nature, all of his works became very successful and sparked heated debates among literary circles in Germany.
He was a multi-talented artist, not only a novelist and poet, but also a sculptor and designer who occasionally also designed the covers of his own books. He was considered by some as a moral authority.
