Gunther Grass (1927-2015)

Source:  LINKcat

Günter Grass Dies at 87; Writer Pried Open Germany’s Past but Hid His Own.  (The New York Times, 4/13/2015)

He was propelled to the forefront of postwar literature in 1959, with the publication of his wildly inventive masterpiece “The Tin Drum.” Critics hailed the audacious sweep of his literary imagination. A severed horse’s head swarming with hungry eels, a criminal hiding beneath a peasant woman’s layered skirts and a child who shatters windows with his high-pitched voice are among the memorable images that made “The Tin Drum” a worldwide triumph.

In awarding Mr. Grass the Nobel Prize in 1999, the Swedish Academy praised him for embracing “the enormous task of reviewing contemporary history by recalling the disavowed and the forgotten: the victims, losers and lies that people wanted to forget because they had once believed in them.” It called “The Tin Drum” “one of the enduring literary works of the 20th century.”

Mr. Grass was a playwright, essayist, short-story writer, poet, sculptor and printmaker as well as a novelist, but it was as a social critic that he gained the most notoriety, campaigning for disarmament and broad societal change.