German literary lion Gunter Grass dies at 87

BERLIN: Germany’s most famous writer, Gunter Grass, best known for his 1959 novel “The Tin Drum” but whose reputation was tarnished by his admission he had served in Hitler’s Waffen SS, died Monday aged 87, his publishers said.
The Nobel laureate died in a hospital in the northern city of Luebeck, the Steidl publishing house said on Twitter.
Grass quickly followed his debut and best-known novel “The Tin Drum” with “Cat and Mouse” and “Dog Years,” all dealing with the rise of Nazism in his hometown of Danzig, now Gdansk in Poland.
He won a string of international awards, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999 and continued to publish into his 80s.
Later in life, the novelist, poet, playwright and sculptor, often seen chomping on his pipe and sporting a walrus moustache, courted controversy with a provocative poem that painted Israel as the Middle East’s biggest threat to peace.
The prose-poem entitled “What Must Be Said,” published in 2012, voiced fears that a nuclear-armed Israel could mount a “first strike” against Iran, triggered accusations of anti-Semitism and a ban from Israel.