R.I.P. Günter Grass.

To be entirely honest, I have not read The Tin Drum, considered Günter Grass's classic. In fact, the only novel of his I've read is The Flounder, which was greatly enjoyable.

To me, the point is that the life of Grass was a mirror held to the complicated post-war questions of Germany, and what it meant to be German after the conflagration. If, in the end, Grass was a hypocrite for not divulging his Waffen SS experience, it's best understood against a backdrop of what his or any other society would remember -- and might seek to forget.

As Americans, we speak often of the Greatest Generation and its passing. It's a phenomenon occurring in other countries, too, as active memories disappear. As it stands, we happened to win the war. Germany might well have won the peace.

What does it all mean?

Günter Grass obituary, by Jonathan Steele (The Guardian)

Nobel-winning German author who arrived on the literary scene in 1959 with the bestselling novel The Tin Drum

Günter Grass, who has died aged 87, was Germany’s best-known postwar novelist, a man of titanic energy and zest who, besides his fiction-writing, enjoyed the cut and thrust of political debate and relaxed by drawing, painting and making sculptures. Bursting on to the literary scene with his bestselling novel The Tin Drum in 1959, Grass spent his life reminding his compatriots of the darkest time in their history, the crimes of the Nazi period, as well as challenging them on the triumphalism of unification in 1990, which he described as the annexation of East Germany by West Germany in which many citizens became victims.