Nobel laureate Guenter Grass died at the age of 87. The author of works such as “The Tin Drum” died on Monday at a clinic in the city of Luebeck where he was taken during the weekend. He died of pneumonia, report German media.

An outspoken public figure, Grass sparked controversy over the last decade. In 2006, he confessed that in 1943 he volunteered for military service and ended up in the Waffen SS. He had said that he had no excuses and had even been excited by belonging as what he viewed as an elite group when he was a teenager.

He also accused Germany of selling submarines to Israel, a potential aggressor, out of guilt over the Holocaust. German commentators at the time had described him as anti-Semitic.

A member of the Socialist Democratic Party, Grass published a stinging rebuke of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s uncompromising attitude to Greece’s economy.

Throughout his writing career he wrote more than 30 plays, novels, poetry books, essays and memoirs. He won the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Greek PM expresses grief

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras expressed his grief over the German novelist’s death:

“Today we lost one of the reference points of the European culture; and Greece lost a valuable friend who did not hesitate to stand by the Greek people during the difficult times of the economic crisis when the stereotypes against Greece were at their peak,” Tsipras said.

“Guenter Grass was not only the Nobel laureate virtuoso of speech but also the combative intellectual of the democratic and social commitment” and noted that “his ‘tin drum’ is the indelible landmark of the European political and anti-fascist literature.”