Berlin--Germany's Nobel-winning author, Gunter Grass, who acted as a moral compass for many in the postwar nation but later provoked criticism over his own World War II past, died Monday aged 87, his publishers said.
The writer, one of Germany's most influential if controversial intellectual figures, died in a hospital in the northern city of Luebeck, the Steidl publishing house said.
Grass achieved world fame with his debut and best-known novel "The Tin Drum" in 1959, quickly followed by "Cat and Mouse" and "Dog Years", all dealing with the rise of Nazism in his city of birth, Danzig, now Gdansk in Poland.
He pressed Germany for decades to face up to its Nazi past, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, when the Swedish Academy said his "frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history".
Writers and politicians paid tribute to Grass, who was also a poet, playwright and sculptor, and was often seen puffing on his pipe, sporting a walrus moustache.
But he shocked his admirers and provoked an outcry in 2006 when he admitted, six decades after World War II, that he had been conscripted into Hitler's notorious Waffen SS as a 17-year-old.
In 2012 he courted controversy and was declared persona non-grata by Israel by publishing a prose-poem, "What Must Be Said", that painted Israel as the Middle East's biggest threat to peace.
In the piece, Grass voiced fears that a nuclear-armed Israel would mount a "first strike" against Iran and wipe out its people, prompting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to slam the poem as "shameful".
Grass, a longtime leftist activist, said he was particularly stung by widespread accusations of anti-Semitism against him in the German media.
AFP
