Gunter Grass

Died: April 13, 2015

EVERY great writer has a book with which he or she is synonymous. For Günter Grass, who has died at the age of 87, it was The Tin Drum which, like Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, drew directly from its author's experience of World War Two.

The Tin Drum's narrator is Oskar Matzerath, a 30-year-old inhabitant of a mental hospital, in which he is incarcerated for a murder he did not commit. Oskar, like Grass, is an anarchist, an artist of sorts, an individualist, living in an era when to be any of these things was likely to be life-threatening. The drum he carries, which he uses to break up Nazi rallies, is his means of being heard, of making a statement, of disrupting that which is collective and malevolent.

Published in 1959, when Grass was 32, The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel in German) was immediately recognised as a work of genius and critics fell over themselves in an attempt to place it in context. One, for instance, invoked Goethe, Jonathan Swift, James Joyce, Aristophanes, Hans Christian Andersen and Rabelais, while others reached for Dickens, Tolstoy and Jaroslav Hašek and his satirical romp, The Good Soldier Švejk. But none was wholly satisfactory for The Tin Drum is sui generis. "This novel is as monstrous as its hero," wrote David Lodge, "pullulating with a kind of anti-life for which one of the most horribly memorable images of the book, a horse's head seething with live eels, serves as a suitable emblem."

Grass's name was made and he would go on to produce an oeuvre that was notable for its distinctiveness. While a few authors claimed to be influenced by him ( John Irving for example) he was not the father of a school, let alone a style. He always said he found writing a laborious act, comparing it to sculpture, which he practised. His own favourite authors were, firstly, Hermann Melville, after whom he would usually mention Alfred Döblin, William Faulkner and John Dos Passos. The Tin Drum was the first part of a trilogy which includes Cat and Mouse and Dog Years. It was his way, he said, of dealing with the war.

Grass was born in Danzig, now Gdańsk, where his parents owned a grocery store, and was raised as a Catholic. He was educated locally and recalled witnessing in 1938 the burning at a Jewish orphanage of school books, prayer books and Torah scrolls, and the beating unconscious of a Jewish teacher. Nearly everybody, he recalled, just stood and watched or turned the other way. Grass was 12 years old when war broke out and 17 years old when it was over. It was thus part of his formation, baggage that he could never hope to shed.

"I am loaded with this German past," he once remarked. "I'm not the only one; there are other authors who feel this. If I had been Swedish or Swiss I might have played around much more, told a few jokes and all that. That hasn't been possible; given my background, I have had no other choice.

"In the fifties and sixties ... politicians didn't like to speak about the past, or if they did speak about it, they made it out to be a demonic period in our history when devils had betrayed the pitiful, helpless German people. They told bloody lies. It has been very important to tell the younger generation how it really happened in daylight, and very slowly and methodically."

In 1943, as the war was beginning to turn in the Allies' favour, Grass was conscripted. A year later, he volunteered for submarine service but was rejected and instead was drafted into the Waffen-SS, serving as a tank gunner with a Panzer Division. He was wounded, captured and sent to an American prisoner-of-war camp.

He did not reveal all of this until 2006 when he was about to publish his memoir, Peeling the Onion. It was, he said, his way of comprehending "the circumstances that probably triggered and nourished my decision to enlist". Many inside and outside Germany were sceptical, not least because for several decades Grass, who in 1999 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, never missed the opportunity to castigate his fellow Germans for their part in the Holocaust.

Among those who regarded him as hypocritical and economical with the truth was the eminent historian Joachim Fest who told Der Spiegel: "After 60 years this confession comes a bit too late. I can't understand how someone who for decades sets himself up as a moral authority, a rather smug one, could pull this off."

Not everyone, however, took such a harsh line. Many were prepared to view Grass's decision to join the SS as the aberration of a young man eager to leave home. But the damage was done and the writer's reputation suffered as a consequence, not least in his home town where there were calls to disown him and for him to relinquish his honorary citizenship.

Throughout his long life, Grass lived variously in Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Berlin, Paris - where he wrote The Tin Drum - and Calcutta. His first wife was the Swiss ballet dancer, Anna Schwarz. His second wife was Ute Grunert, an accomplished organist, whom he married in 1979 and who survives him.

He fathered four children, who also survive him, and many more novels, including Local Anaesthetic, one of the few ever to be set in a dentist's, The Flounder, The Rat, The Call of the Toad and Crabwalk - the story of the sinking in January 1945 of the Wilhlem Gustloff, a former cruise ship turned refugee carrier with some 9,000 people on board. He also wrote poems and plays and for ten years was the German Chancellor Willy Brandt's chief speechwriter. As well as writing his books he always designed their jackets. Asked why he became a writer, he said that as a child he had been a great liar and that his mother encouraged him to write down his lies. "And I continue to do so!"

ALAN TAYLOR