LUEBECK, Germany, April 13 (UPI) -- Günter Grass, author of The Tin Drum and a Nobel literature prize winner, has died at a clinic in Luebeck, Germany, at the age of 87.
Grass found success in many art forms, including poetry, drama and sculpting. He was born in 1927 and was conscripted into the German military in 1944 for World War II for about six months before the war ended for him. He "never fired a shot."
He spent months in an American prisoner of war camp after the war.
He published his anti-Nazi novel, The Tin Drum, in 1959 -- which won him the Nobel prize in 1999 for portraying "the forgotten face of history." Critics initially attacked the novel, denied the Bremen literature prize by outraged politicians and was burned in Düsseldorf.
Grass said avoiding the commitment of war crimes was "not by merit."
"If I had been born three or four years earlier I would, surely, have seen myself caught up in those crimes."
Grass opposed Germany's reunification in 1990, later arguing it was carried out too quickly.
"If I had been a Swedish or a Swiss author I might have played around much more, told a few jokes and all that," Grass said in an interview discussing his focus on Germany's troubled past. "That hasn't been possible; given my background, I have had no other choice."
