{"id":56624,"date":"2015-04-20T12:00:29","date_gmt":"2015-04-20T11:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=56624"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:25:51","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:25:51","slug":"world-famous-german-author-nobel-literature-laureate-gunter-grass-dies-at-age-87","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/04\/world-famous-german-author-nobel-literature-laureate-gunter-grass-dies-at-age-87\/","title":{"rendered":"World Famous German Author [Nobel Literature Laureate] G\u00fcnter Grass Dies at Age 87"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"G\u00fcnter<\/a>

G\u00fcnter Grass<\/p><\/div>\n

14 April 2015 – <\/em>German author G\u00fcnter Grass has died at the age of 87 in L\u00fcbeck, Germany following an infection. He is one of the most important German writers of the 20th century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.<\/p>\n

Born in Danzig in 1927, Grass was a member of a generation whose youth was marked by Nazism. He was seven years old when Hitler came to power and eighteen when the Third Reich collapsed.<\/p>\n

After the war Grass studied graphics and sculpture. In the mid-1950s he also turned to writing. His literary breakthrough came in 1959 with his first novel, The Tin Drum<\/em>, which became a worldwide success.<\/p>\n

The central themes of The Tin Drum<\/em>\u2014coming to terms with National Socialism and its background, the problem of guilt and memory\u2014played a central role in most of Grass\u2019s subsequent novels and stories. In 2006 he published his memoirs under the title, Peeling the Onion<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Grass did not limit his social commitment to the realm of art. Towards the end of his life he increasingly took up pressing political issues and did not shy away from fierce disputes. His political views never rose above social democratic reformist politics, but he was prepared to clash with the Germany Social Democratic Party (SPD) on such issues as militarism and democratic rights.<\/p>\n

Grass was especially active with the SPD in the 1960s in the election campaigns of Willy Brandt, supporting the latter\u2019s Ostpolitik<\/em> (opening up towards the east) which he regarded as a means of reconciliation. He resigned from the SPD in 1993 when the party agreed to the de facto abolition of the right to asylum.<\/p>\n

The World Socialist Web Site<\/em> will publish an assessment of Grass\u2019s life and work in the coming days. Today we provide links to a number of articles that deal with Grass critically, while defending him against political attacks from the right.<\/p>\n

In 1999 the WSWS published a review<\/a> and critical comments on his book My Century<\/em>, a collection of hundreds of stories, each dedicated to a year of the 20th century.<\/p>\n

In 2006, the WSWS defended the Nobel Prize winner in the article \u201cG\u00fcnter Grass and the Waffen-SS<\/a>\u201d against grotesquely exaggerated accusations made by his political opponents in response to his belated admission that he had been called up into the Nazi Waffen-SS at the end of the war as a 17-year-old.<\/p>\n

Six years later, in 2012, these accusations blew up again after Grass published the poem \u201cWhat must be said\u201d in a number of international newspapers. He accused the \u201cnuclear power, Israel\u201d of endangering \u201cthe already fragile world peace\u201d with its threats directed against Iran. Although Grass called merely for international control of Israel\u2019s nuclear weapons and Iranian nuclear facilities, while at the same time stressing his attachment to Israel, he was accused of anti-Semitism<\/a> and placed on a par with the Nazis.<\/p>\n

The WSWS published the comments \u201cDefend G\u00fcnter Grass!<\/a>\u201d and \u201cStop the warmongers! Defend G\u00fcnter Grass!<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

Meetings conducted by the Partei f\u00fcr Soziale Gleichheit (Socialist Equality Party, PSG) in defense of G\u00fcnter Grass in Frankfurt, Berlin and Leipzig were subsequently attacked by far right provocateurs<\/a>. Peter Schwarz summed up<\/a> these experiences, and Ulrich Rippert dealt with<\/a> Grass\u2019s relationship to the SPD, which had lined up with the author\u2019s opponents.<\/p>\n

Finally a resolution<\/a> passed at a congress of the PSG pointed out how the perfidious attacks on the Grass were directly bound up with the revival of German militarism.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 wsws.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

14 April 2015 – German author G\u00fcnter Grass has died at the age of 87 in L\u00fcbeck, Germany following an infection. He is one of the most important German writers of the 20th century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[226],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-obituaries"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56624\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}