German novelist Guenter Grass, the Nobel Prize-winning author of ‘The Tin Drum’, an epic treatment of the Nazi era, died on Monday at the age of 87.

For many, he was the voice of a German generation that came of age in World War Two and bore the burden of their parents’ guilt for the atrocities of the Nazis. Hearing of his death, novelist Salman Rushdie called him “a true giant, inspiration, and friend”.

A broad-shouldered man with a drooping moustache, Grass spurned the German tradition of keeping a cool intellectual distance, insisting that a writer’s duty was to be at the frontline of moral and political debate.

Awarding him the Nobel Literature Prize in 1999, the Swedish Academy described one of his last works, a series of essays called ‘My Century’ (1999), as showing “a particularly keen eye for stupefying enthusiasms”.

His mos famous work, ‘The Tin Drum’ caused a sensation when it was published in 1959, though it was condemned by some as obscene.

The book is told through the eyes of Oskar Matzerath, a strange, gifted boy who resolves to stop growing just as Nazism emerges in the 1930s, and relentlessly pounds the drum of the title.

However, Grass‘s concealment until 2006 of the fact that he had served in a Nazi Waffen-SS regiment as a teenager cost him some of his moral authority. The fact that he did not reveal this part of his history until 2006 brought accusations that he had been hypocritical when attacking others for failing properly to face up to Germany‘s Nazi past.

He died in a hospital in Luebeck, near his home in northern Germany. No details of the cause of death was given.