Germany’s Nobel-winning author, Gunter Grass, who acted as a moral compass for many in the postwar nation but later provoked criticism over his own World War II past, died Monday aged 87, his publishers said. The writer, one of Germany’s most influential if controversial intellectual figures, died in a hospital in the northern city of Luebeck, the Steidl publishing house said. Grass achieved world fame with his debut and best-known novel ‘The Tin Drum’ in 1959, quickly followed by ‘Cat and Mouse’ and ‘Dog Years’, all dealing with the rise of Nazism in his city of birth, Danzig, now Gdansk in Poland. He pressed Germany for decades to face up to its Nazi past, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, when the Swedish Academy said his ‘frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history’. Chancellor Angela Merkel led tributes to Grass, who was also a
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