Death of the Nobel prize Günter Grass – Le Figaro

DISAPPEARANCE – Author of such a masterpiece that controversy, the German writer died this morning in Lübeck. He was 87.

The Nobel laureate Günter Grass died this morning at the age of 87 years at a clinic in Lübeck. It was known in 1959 with the publication of Drum , the story of a young boy in Nazi Germany. The novel was made into a film by Volker Schlöndorff. All the work of Grass central theme in the history of Germany, particularly in its darkest days.

polemicist engaged, taboo-breaker, it will have been constantly shake public opinion and to spur the intellectuals. In 2006 he again scandal by revealing his voluntary service in the Waffen-SS at the age of 17, in 1944. This belated admission, the secret that this “has always haunted” had was unveiled at the time of the release of his last autobiographical book, onion peels .

Among his best known works and most remarkable, written in a well removed language full of fantasy and irony, we note The cat and mouse (1961), Dog Years , the latter closing its called Danzig trilogy, Diary of a Snail, Turbot, a meeting in Westphalia whole story in 1995 (and which had caused an uproar in Germany), La Ratte and My Century , in 1999. For his part, Michel Tournier had argued that in the German literary landscape, “If decent and cultured, Grass stands alone as a squeaky and barbaric idol.”

In 1999, Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature “For portrayed the forgotten face of history in the fables of a black gay.”

Born October 16, 1927 in Danzig (now Gdansk in Poland today), a mother Kashubian origin (Slavic minority of Prussia) and a German father, Grass lives a “German model youth “ for his generation but while ” torn between the Holy Spirit and the Führer. “ Enlisted to eleven years in the Hitler Youth before leaving for the battlefields of the World War II, he was captured by the Americans and released in 1946.

He then led a bohemian life, follows visual arts studies, sculpts, paints, tries to poetry. He decided in the 50s for a writing career and will engage later alongside the anti-fascist writers of the “Group 47″ (Ingeborg Bachmann, Heinrich Böll …) and the Social Democrat Willy Brandt.

Among his most significant commitments in recent years, the coalition in favor of “red-green” combining the Social Democrats of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder environmentalists, or opposition to the “crusade” of US President George W. Bush against Iraq in 2003. In 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he was firmly opposed to German reunification to “preserve the socialist heritage” of the GDR; he will even talk about Anschluss.

The writer, father of four, who lived in Lübeck (northern Germany), had triggered a controversy in 2012 by publishing in the German press a poem slamming Israel and accusing the country of “threaten world peace.” The Jewish state said then persona non grata .

In his acceptance speech at the Royal Swedish Academy, he said: “Why is feared as writers? This is because they willingly put themselves on the losing side of history. And whoever shall call upon the vanquished questions the victory. “ Remain his books, the most important of the German and European literature.