( CNN ) Nobel literature laureate Guenter Grass , best known around the world for his novel `` The Tin Drum , '' has died , his publisher said Monday . He was 87 . Grass died in a clinic in the city of Luebeck , where he was taken over the weekend , said Steidl publishing spokeswoman Claudia Glenewinkel . German media are reporting he died of pneumonia . Grass focused in much of his work on learning from the horror of war and genocide by exploring motifs from his childhood city of Danzig , which is now Gdansk , Poland . During the Nazi era , ethnic Poles and Jews were persecuted and deported from the multicultural city , at a time when they faced the possibility of mass murder . `` In his excavation of the past , Günter Grass goes deeper than most and he unearths the intertwined roots of good and evil , '' the Nobel committee wrote , when it awarded him the literature prize in 1999 . But Grass , an outspoken public figure , has sparked controversy in the last decade . In 2006 , he confessed that at the age of 15 , in 1943 , he volunteered for military service in Germany 's war of aggression and ended up in the notoriously bloody Waffen SS . Grass said he had no excuses for his choices back then , and that , as a teen , he may even have been excited about belonging to the unit , which he saw then as an elite group . A year later , he penned a detailed account in The New Yorker on how he spent his war years up to the death of German dictator Adolf Hitler . Three years ago , Grass drew controversy again , when he published a poem in a German newspaper discouraging Germany from selling more submarines to Israel . In `` What must be said , '' Grass accused Germany of selling weapons to a potential aggressor out of guilt over the Holocaust . Grass said Israel could use nuclear weapons to kill masses of Iranians . German commentators pilloried him as subconsciously anti-Semitic . Israel invoked a visa ban , and then-Interior Minister Eli Yishai declared Grass a `` persona non grata '' in Israel , the Jerusalem Post reported . Grass ' novel characters are the forgotten , the downtrodden and the weird , the Nobel committee said . And like Oskar Matzerath , the boy in `` The Tin Drum , '' they often slip into surreal situations . This was a literary innovation , the committee said , which was furthered by other great authors , such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez , Nadine Gordimer and Salman Rushdie . On Monday , Rushdie tweeted about Grass ' death : `` This is very sad . A true giant , inspiration , and friend . '' `` The Tin Drum , '' which was published in 1959 , `` breaks the bounds of realism by having as its protagonist and narrator an infernal intelligence in the body of a three-year-old , a monster who overpowers the fellow human beings he approaches with the help of a toy drum , '' the Nobel committee wrote . The committee praised Grass ' mastery of the German language and his ability to artfully exploit its possibilities of creating seemingly endless yet graceful sentences . Grass was an icon in contemporary German culture with an unchanging iconic look -- his broad mustache , his eyes gazing over the top of his glasses , a tobacco pipe a constant companion in hand . In his later years , he became known for his continuing critique of human history in the 20th century -- and of current events . As recently as March , Grass criticized the anti-Islam movement PEGIDA , Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West . He used the opportunity fire a jab at government that he said was corrupted by money interests . `` It 's not Islam that threatens the Federal Republic ( of Germany ) , '' he said in an interview with rp-online.de , `` but political lobbying . Democracy has decayed into fake democracy . '' Grass has also suggested that Germans should be forced to invite refugees from crisis regions to live in their homes as a way of offering more shelter to the world 's destitute .
Grass tried in his literature to come to grips with Holocaust and the Nazi era . His characters were the downtrodden , and his style slipped into the surreal . He stoked controversy with his admission to being a member of the Waffen SS .