Gunter Grass: Nobel Prize-winning author, 1927-2015

Gunter Grass, the controversial Nobel Prize-winning German author, died on Monday aged 87.

The writer, who won the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature, was known for his critical view of Germany's Nazi past, developed in imaginative novels, including the Tin Drum.

But his reputation as a moral authority suffered in 2006 when he revealed that he had, as a 17-year-old conscript, served briefly in the Waffen SS, a military formation of the Nazi party.

Grass was criticised not so much for joining the Waffen SS, which many young men were forced to do in the desperate days at the end of the second world war, but for keeping silent for so long. He explained that only late in the day had he found "the literary form" in which to write about the experience - in a memoir entitled Peeling the Onion.

But his critics charged him with hypocrisy, wondering aloud how he could have been so critical of other Germans' reckoning with the Nazi era when his own was flawed, or, at best, incomplete. Some accused him of keeping quiet so as not to tarnish his name as a world-famous writer and leading German thinker.

However later some of the critics relented: the former Polish president Lech Walesa who initially condemned Grass's silence later made his peace with the German writer praising his contribution to helping the world to move from the second world war and its aftermath.

On Monday, the controversy was largely set aside, with tributes emphasising Grass's huge literary achievements. Norbert Lammert„ the parliamentary speaker, said: "With Gunter Grass we are losing not only one of the most significant writers in the German language but also an engaged citizen who repeatedly took public positions."

Imre Kertesz, a Hungarian-born Jewish writer and Holocaust camp survivor, who also won the Nobel literature Prize, said: "We did not deal with the same subjects but we were friends and we had mutual respect."

The main discordant note was struck in Israel where national radio said Grass had gone too far in his criticism of the Jewish state. As a German who had lived through the Nazi past, he could not be objective, it said.

Grass was born in 1927 in what was then the free city of Danzig, a cosmopolitan Baltic port with a German-speaking majority and a Polish-speaking minority, over which the Polish state had some limited rights.

Grass retained a love for the city, which became the Polish city of Gdansk after 1945, visiting often and contributing to postwar German-Polish reconciliation.

As a boy and young man he witnessed the rise of the Nazis, the second world war and its aftermath.

He settled in the late 1940s in West Germany and trained initially as a stonemason and sculptor before turning to writing. He later divided his time between Berlin and a home near Lubeck, like Danzig a Baltic port city with a long history. It was in Lubeck, that he died, his publisher confirmed.

Grass's youthful experiences formed the basis of his Danzig Trilogy, three works in which he explored this dark German history, starting in 1959 with the publication of The Tin Drum. This was followed by Cat and Mouse and Dog Years.

Grass developed his ideas in a complex imaginative forms, not least the magical realism that suffuses The Tin Drum. When he won his Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy praised works "whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history".

Alongside literature, Grass involved himself in German politics, supporting the social-democratic party and left-of-centre ideas generally, though staying well clear of political radicalism.

In 1990, he came out against German reunification, warning that a reunited German state would inevitably become aggressive. The controversy generated by these views was overshadowed by the storm that erupted 16 years later with the Waffen SS revelations.

Like most German teenagers at the end of the war, Grass was obliged to serve the state, first in the national labour service. In late 1944, just after he turned 17 and came of military age, he volunteered for the navy but was rejected. He was instead conscripted into a Waffen SS tank division. He was wounded in April 1945, captured by the US forces and spent time at an American prisoner-of-war camp.

The revelation sparked outrage as Grass had for decades maintained that he had served only in anti-aircraft gun units. Hans-Ulrich Walter, a historian, told the FT at the time that he could "not get excited" about Grass's Waffen SS service. It was not, by 1944-45, a core element of Nazi terror, with most units, like Grass's, engaged in a hopeless military defence of Germany.

However Mr Walter said he "simply could not explain" why Grass had waited so long.

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