Gunter Grass, the writer who shone a fearless light of truth into Germany's dark past and found himself caught in its beam, has been remembered as an icon who became the conscience of his country.
The novelist, poet, playwright and sculptor, who in 1999 received the Nobel Prize in Literature, passed away in Lubeck, near the farmhouse where he lived with his second wife, Ute. He was 87.
Joachim Gauck, President of the Germany that Grass delighted, provoked and unsettled over 60 years, saluted an author who "made the people of our country think".
From his "Danzig Trilogy" of novels - The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse and Dog Years - to later works such as The Flounder and Crab-walk, Grass did more than any other post-war figure to confront the pain of the past: both the Third Reich itself, and its legacy of division and denial. He was born in Danzig (now Gdansk in Poland) in 1927, child of a German father and Polish mother.
His membership of the Hitler Youth was well known. But it took the 2006 publication of the memoir Peeling the Onion for his conscription in late 1944 into a tank unit attached to the Waffen SS to become public. It prompted bitter disputes, given Grass' record of denouncing others' silence. The teenage soldier, who never fired a shot, had yearned for victory - he wrote - thanks to "the stupid pride of youth".
