Monday, April 13, 2015

Death of Günter Grass, Nobel and moral awareness of … – Le Point

The Nobel laureate Günter Grass moral conscience of the post-Nazi Germany which he was best known abroad writer, died on Monday at age 87, announced his editor.

“The Nobel laureate Günter Grass died this morning the age of 87 in a clinic in Lübeck “, the city in northern Germany, where he resided, announced the publisher Steidl, on his twitter account.

On its web page stricken by “Günter Grass 1927 – 2015″, the publisher has published several black and white photos of the writer, the profile recognizable: thick mustache, pipe always on and lowered the nose glasses

.

According to the “House Günter Grass” in Lübeck, which opened a condolence book, the writer died from an “infection”.

Men Left, known for his catch controversial position, Günter Grass, Nobel Prize in Literature 1999 was the German writer of the second half of the twentieth century best known abroad.

“With Günter Grass, the world of literature loses an author eloquent verb and our republic one of the most combative citizens, “said the president of the Academy of Arts in Berlin, Klaus Staeck.

The author was in effect both a key figure in the literary landscape of his country and a player in the national public debate that helped to shake its often controversial positions.

His masterpiece remains “The Tin Drum” ( 1959), the story of Oskar Matzerath, little boy decides to refuse to grow and whose little child drum resonates jolts of Nazism, war and more generally of the violent world of adults.

Planetary Success, the book will be made into a film by Volker Schlöndorff and received the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1979 and the 1980 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

The writer, long time companion Road Social Democrats and near, including Chancellor Willy Brandt, has long assailed omissions of the German ruling class of post-war over Nazism

-. Anticommunism leads in SS –

A positioning that gave an echo even stronger to late revelations he made himself in 2006 in his autobiography “onion peels”: The writer, a former member of the Young Hitler, was enlisted in 1944 in the Waffen SS, which he had always ignored.

Born in 1927 in Danzig, now Gdansk in Poland today, city of the famous “corridor” to the origin of the invasion of Iraq in 1939, Grass is the son of a mother of Kashubian origin (Slavic minority of Prussia) and a small German merchant.

After the fall of Hitler regime, he knows wandering in Germany in the year zero, and the miracle of reconstruction in an anti-Communist Federal Republic and materialistic.

After a sculptor apprenticeship he stays Paris in the fifties and decides on a writing career.

In the prosperous Germany of the 60s, through which the student protest then the red terrorism, Günter Grass wants to protest, but in reformist direction.

In January 1993, he loudly quit the Social Democratic Party (SPD) became too conservative to his eyes but that does not prevent him from engaging in 1998 in favor of the SPD chancellor Gerhard Schröder.

In 1999, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature crowning all of his work, 27 years after another politically engaged German writer Heinrich Böll.

The last of Grass controversial position papers dated from there three years. The publication in a German newspaper a poem in which he defended Iran and Israel felt threatened, with its atomic weapons, “the already fragile world peace”, caused a real storm of reactions.

Israel then declared persona non grata.

The tributes to the writer and public man bear traces of his positions and often visceral reactions to it may have caused.

– “Play the drum for him, little Oskar” –

“With him, we lose one of the most significant writers of German history of the post War a committed author and a fighter for democracy and peace, “praised the SPD Chairman and Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel.

The German President Joachim Gauck honored the memory of a writer whose the work “impressive mirror of our country”, “is an immutable part of its artistic and cultural heritage.”

“In his novels, stories and lyricism are found the great hopes and errors, fears and desires of all generations,” said the head of the state.

“Günter Grass was a figure of world literature, cultural heritage will take place alongside that of Goethe,” said Minister of Culture Monika Grütters.

On his twitter account, the British writer Salman Rushdie, he has also expressed: “It is very sad. A true giant, an inspiring and a friend. “Play the drum for him, little Oskar,” said he wrote, referring to the hero of “Drum”.

“We were friends and we felt”, for his part, said the Hungarian writer and Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertesz

4/13/2015 3:00:12 p.m.. – Berlin (AFP) – By Eloi ROUYER – © 2015 AFP

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