Nobel winner novelist Günter Grass dead at 87

Günter Grass, who has died aged 87, won the 1999 Nobel Prize in literature mainly for his first novel, Die Blechtrommel (“The Tin Drum&#8221, his satire on Germany under the Nazis which became an immediate bestseller on its publication in 1959.

There was, therefore, disbelief when in 2006, at the age of 78, Grass confessed in an interview prior to the publication of his autobiography, Peeling the Onion, that in the final months of the Second World War, when he was 17, he had been drafted into the Waffen-SS, the military wing of the Nazi corps that played a leading role in the Holocaust.
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It was the All Saints' Day holiday weekend in 1958, and a fug of pipe and cigarette smoke hung heavy in the air at the Schwarzer Adler Inn in the Allgäu region of the German Alps, where legend has it that farmers gathered during the German Peasants' War in the 16th century. Standing underneath the stag's antlers hanging on the wall, Hans Werner Richter, president of the famed Gruppe 47 literary association, rang a cowbell. It was time for the assembled writers to quiet down and let the debut novelist seated to his right begin his reading.

As Richter later recalled, all it took was a few sentences for the room to be electrified....
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