Günter Grass

Grass grew up in the Free City of Danzig, and near the war's end, at seventeen, was drafted into the Waffen-SS, a fact he concealed for sixty years, revealing it only in his 2006 memoir Peeling the Onion, to widespread shock given his stature as West Germany's foremost moral conscience. Captured by American forces, he trained afterward as a sculptor and graphic artist in Düsseldorf and Berlin, and joined Group 47, the influential postwar writers' circle.

The Tin Drum (1959), the first volume of his Danzig Trilogy, made him famous overnight and became the founding text of a new German willingness to confront the Nazi past through grotesque, uncensored imagination. He remained politically active for decades, campaigning for Willy Brandt's Social Democrats and speaking out on reunification and the Iraq War. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999 and died in Lübeck in 2015.