Gunter Grass, Nobel Prize winner, dies aged 87

Grass, who is best known for his first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), a seminal text in European magic realism, died on April 13, in the German city of Lübeck. He was a novelist, poet, essayist, dramatist, sculptor and graphic artist but his reputation was tarnished by his admission he had served in Adolf Hitler's Waffen SS. The Tin Drum was a satire of those, like his parents, who were seduced by Nazi ideas and the novel was decried as blasphemous pornography and banned in numerous dictatorships. continue