German · 1927–2015
Günter Grass won the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature for novels that gave "Black fables" to "the forgotten face of history." "The Tin Drum" introduced Oskar Matzerath, who stops growing at age three to protest the Nazi era—a biting allegory that launched the German author's Danzig Trilogy. Grass's fiction confronted German guilt and memory with grotesque imagery and linguistic invention. His later revelation of wartime Waffen-SS service complicated but did not erase his literary achievement.