Günter Grass, Author of 'The Tin Drum', Passes Away

Günter Grass, the renowned German author and creator of the acclaimed novel 'The Tin Drum', passed away at the age of 87. The German news agency reported on Monday, April 12, citing a spokesperson for the Günter Grass Museum, that the cause of death was an infection. Grass died in a hospital in Lübeck, northern Germany; his publisher has not disclosed further details about the cause of his death. Grass, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999 for his body of work, is considered one of the greatest German-language writers after World War II, with the Nobel Academy describing 'The Tin Drum' as 'the rebirth of the German novel in the 20th century'. This novel narrates the history of Germany in the first half of the 20th century and the years between the two world wars through the life story of a character named Oskar, who decided at the age of three not to grow up and remain the size of a child. 'The Tin Drum' was also adapted into a film by Volker Schlöndorff, which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1979 and the Oscar for Best Foreign Film that same year. This novel has been translated into Persian by Soroush Habibi, as have several other significant works by Günter Grass, such as the novel 'Cat and Mouse', translated by Kamran Fani. However, one of Grass's most controversial works is his autobiography titled 'Peeling the Onion', in which he confessed in an interview shortly before its publication in 2006 that he had been a member of the SS, the military branch of the Nazi Party, during World War II as a teenager. This revelation sparked a wave of negative reactions, leading Lech Wałęsa, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former President of Poland, to request that Grass return the honorary citizenship title of Gdańsk that had been awarded to him. Although Wałęsa later retracted his criticisms and regarded Grass's situation as 'a lesson for others'. Grass was considered a supporter of the Social Democrats in the political arena. In 2012, he made headlines again due to his strong criticisms of Israel expressed in a poem. His opposition to the U.S. war in Iraq was also a notable aspect of his political life. In this context, the Iranian nuclear crisis also reached the poetry of the 84-year-old Günter Grass, who was an undesirable element in Israel but praised by the Iranian government.