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Novelist Günter Grass, the Nobel laureate who is perhaps best known for his novel 

and who shocked his country when he revealed in 2006 that he had been a member of the Waffen SS in the last months of World War II, has died. Grass was 87.
The news was announced by his publisher, Steidl Verlag, 

. The publisher said Grass died at a clinic in the town of Lübeck, Germany. It did not provide a cause of death.
Grass emerged as one of Germany's leading public intellectuals after World War II — a man whom his biographer Michael Juergs 

, an anti-Nazi novel, propelled Grass to literary stardom. 


In announcing his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, the Nobel committee 

 the publication of the novel made it seem "as if German literature had been granted a new beginning after decades of linguistic and moral destruction."


Grass was an often controversial figure — and he touched on that aspect of his reputation in his Nobel acceptance speech.


"The publication of my first two novels, 

 taught me early on, as a relatively young writer, that books can cause offence, stir up fury, even hatred, that what is undertaken out of love for one's country can be taken as soiling one's nest," 

. "From then on I have been controversial."


 when he acknowledged in his autobiography, 

, that he had been drafted into the Waffen SS, the military branch of the Nazi Party, in the final months of World War II. Juergs, his biographer, said in the 2006 interview with NPR that the controversy would reduce Grass' stature in Germans' eyes.
"There's a lot of people who don't care, of course, because we are not an intellectual country at all," Juergs said. "That's not the point, but in the literary scene and the political scene and in the scene of my generation — and they say OK, Günter Grass, we will read your books. Everything is OK, you can write and so on and so on, but please don't talk about moral anymore."  Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Krishnadev Calamur

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In 2006, Grass admitted that as a teen during World War II, he had served with the Waffen-SS -- the combat unit of the Nazi Party's elite military police force.

Gunter Grass, Nobel-winning author of 'The Tin Drum,' dies at 87

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