Nobel laureate Gunter Grass has died

German writer Gunter Grass, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999, has died at the age of 88, the foundation bearing his name announced today.

Grass, whose most famous work is "The Tin Drum", was born in the port of Gdansk on the Baltic Sea in 1927, and most of his fiction took place in that city, Reuters reported.

For many, Grass was the voice of a generation of Germans who came of age during World War II and carried the burden of their parents' guilt for the crimes committed by the Nazis during the war, the British agency stated.

Grass was a strong supporter of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

When in 2006, after decades of concealing the truth, he admitted that as a young man in the last few months of World War II he had served in the elite Nazi SS units, there were calls for his Nobel Prize to be revoked, which was not possible.