Günter Grass: Life in pictures

The Nobel Prize laureate died on April 13, 2015, at the age of 87. He was one of Germany's most significant post-war authors. As a politically active intellectual, he tended to polarize the public, kicking off polemical debates on German guilt, Nazism and current political topics.

Grass was born on October 16, 1927 in what was then East Prussia. He grew up in humble circumstances in Danzig (now Gdansk in Poland). As a child, he served as an altar boy and became a member of the Hitler Youth. He published his first stories in their magazine, "Hitlerjugend."

Grass volunteered for military service in order to escape the narrowness of his family. In 1944, the 17-year-old was drafted into the Nazi special forces unit, known as the Waffen-SS. Towards the end of the war, he was captured by the Americans as a prisoner of war.

After the war he began training as a stonemason and studied graphics and sculpture in Dusseldorf. He also spent some time in Berlin and Paris. His sculptures and graphics were shown in some exhibitions. He continued to work as an artist throughout his entire life and designed the covers for his own books.

In the 1950s, Grass increasingly turned to literature. In 1955, the "Group 47," an influential group of writers, took notice of his work. In one of their meetings he read two chapters from his yet unpublished novel "The Tin Drum."

His international breakthrough occurred in 1959 following the publication of "The Tin Drum." In 1979, it was turned into a movie by Volker Schlöndorff (pictured). With "Cat and Mouse" (1961) and "Dog Years" (1963), Grass completed his "Gdansk Trilogy" focusing on German guilt and the Third Reich. He never stopped appealing to Germans to grapple with the crimes of National Socialism.

Grass was also politically active and was an outspoken proponent of German-Polish reconciliation. In the1960s, he worked as a campaigner for the Social Democrats (SPD), although he was a party member only from 1982 to 1992. He continued to support the SPD throughout his life.

In 1995, Germany’s most renowned and controversial literary critic, the late Marcel Reich-Ranicki, tore Grass' novel "Too far Afield" apart. The political novel, which paints a panorama of German history between 1848 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, sparked heated debate on Grass' alleged falsification of history.

Four years later, Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. According to the committee, he was honored for "portraying the forgotten face of history in brisk black fables, and for the fact that 'The Tin Drum' will forever remain one of the most significant literary works of the twentieth century."

In 2002, Grass was crowned by success once again: His novella "Crabwalk," featuring the sinking of the "Wilhelm Gustloff" in 1945 and the expulsion of ethnic Germans from the East, was a sensational hit. Critics lauded Grass for tackling such a difficult issue and praised the thrilling scenes in the novel.

His autobiographical novel "Peeling the Onion" sparked a debate in Germany in 2006. In the book, Grass admitted for the first time that he had joined the Nazi special unit, Waffen-SS in 1944. Critics then questioned his moral integrity and credibility.

On his 80th birthday in 2007, Grass was once again recognized as a great author. But another storm of criticism soon followed suit when a poem of his, which was critical of Israel’s politics, was published by the daily "Süddeutsche Zeitung" in April 2012. The poem came under attack for its allegedly bad style, and Grass was accused of political ignorance and anti-Semitism.

In December 2013, Grass became one of the 562 signatories of "Writers Against Mass Surveillance" calling on people to protest against the surveillance practices of US intelligence services. Until his death, Grass remained a fierce intellectual.