The German Nobel Prize winning writer, Guenter Grass, has passed away at the age of 87 in the German city of Lubeck. His innovative art and striking personality have been shrouded in controversy, his strong political statements spurred most heated debate.
“Guenter Grass moved, enthralled, and made the people of our
country think with his literature and his art,” German
president Joachim Gauck said in a tribute to the late writer,
while the independent German Cultural Council called him
“more than a writer … a seismograph for society.”
“A true giant, inspiration, and friend” is how British
Indian novelist Salman Rushdie described Grass, reacting to his
death on Twitter.
“He has held up a mirror to the Germans,” Joerg Phillip
Thomsa, Manager of Guenter Grass House in Luebeck told Ruptly
news agency. “His work will stay, he will keep on living
through his books.”
The death of Günter #Grass leaves
a void that will be hard to fill. He was an outstanding writer
and intellectual, and a close friend.
— Martin Schulz (@MartinSchulz) April
13, 2015
The Swedish Academy awarded Guenter Grass the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1999, praising him as a writer “whose
frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of
history”. However, his path to universal recognition was not
an easy one.
Grass’s best known novel, 1959’s The Tin Drum, first sparked
accusations of blasphemy and obscenity as well as legal suits
against the author, but eventually received critical acclaim and
was hailed as a foundation of European ‘magical realism’.
Günter Grass will be remembered as an intellectual powerhouse
whose writing was admired all over the world. He will be
missed. RIP.
— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) April
13, 2015
Grass’s other works provoked similarly controversial reactions,
which as he confessed in his 1999 Nobel acceptance speech taught
him early on, as a 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,” Grass said in his
Nobel acceptance speech.
Grass’s reputation was tarnished in 2006, when he confessed in
his autobiography ‘Peeling The Onion’ to having served
in the Nazi Waffen SS. He specified that he only went to war six
months before it ended and said he “never fired a shot,”
before being wounded and captured by the US forces. Still, many
demanded that his Nobel Prize be revoked following the
revelation.
Grass has been an ardent political campaigner with his views
often running contrary to the mainstream. For instance, he
opposed Germany’s reunification in 1989, after the fall of the
Berlin Wall.
In 2012, Grass wrote a poem, “What Must Be Said”, which
earned him accusations of anti-Semitism and made him a “persona
non-grata” in Israel.
“Why do I say only now … that the nuclear power Israel
endangers an already fragile world peace? Because that must be
said which it may already be too late to say tomorrow,”
reads the poem, which also accuses Tel Aviv of desire to
annihilate Iran.
The then-Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai banned Grass from
entering the country, saying the author was fanning “the
flames of hatred against the state, and against Israel.”
In spite of his age, Grass led an active public life, appearing
in public over the past few weeks, and stated that his political
engagement hasn’t faded with years.
In one of his recent interviews, he spoke of the danger of NATO’s
expansion to the East and accused Europe of promoting unrest in
relations between Russia and Ukraine.
“And in spite of the promise that NATO stop at the Oder,
Poland and the Baltic States have been incorporated into
NATO,” he told derStandart.at. “The cause of the
hysterical reactions we observe is also in a certain aggression
of NATO, which is spreading further and further. I would have
liked Germany to have a more cautious attitude…”