Germany bade farewell to its literary giant Gunter Grass on Sunday at a memorial service for the Nobel winner, who died last month aged 87. His friend, US writer John Irving, gave the eulogy at the service in Luebeck’s theatre, attended by some 900 family, friends and admirers, among them President Joachim Gauck and other dignitaries. Grass, who acted as a moral compass in post-war Germany but later provoked criticism over his own World War II past, died on April 13 in the northern city of Luebeck. He achieved world fame with his 1959 debut novel ‘The Tin Drum’, followed by ‘Cat and Mouse’ and ‘Dog Years’, all about the rise of Nazism in his native city Danzig, now Gdansk in Poland. Irving, author of ‘The World According to Garp’, said the world no longer had authors like Grass, whom he saw as an idol. ‘As a writer, Grass was one of the great ones,’ Irving

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