Günter Grass: Nobel-winning novelist dies aged 87

He gave voice to a generation who had kept silent about the Nazi past, and was lauded with the Nobel prize for his epic novels, including The Tin Drum.

The German novelist Günter Grass has died at 87.

He was hailed by politicians and fellow authors as a true giant and an inspiration – his literary work won him recognition across the world.

But he was a man of contradictions: after his activism against Germany’s Nazi silence, he only revealed late in life that he had joined the Waffen SS during the war.

But his novels reflected the hopes and fears of a generation, and his work will be celebrated as a triumph of literary prose.

His novel Tin Drum is partly based on his own beginnings – he grew up in the Free city of Danzig, now Gdansk and it is a story that takes place in the first half of the 20th century, under the rise of the Nazis, through the life of a boy who refuses to grow up. Critics hailed Grass’s “magical realist” style.

Forty years later it won him the Nobel prize for literature, hailed as “one of the enduring works of the 20th century”.

And it was praised for embracing “the enormous task of reviewing contemporary history by recalling the disavowed and the forgotten: the victims losers and lies that people wanted to forget because they had once believed in them”.