Kolkata : West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Tuesday condoled the death of German Nobel laureate Gunter Wilhelm Grass, saying the novelist was a “great friend” of Bengal.
“Gunter Grass, novelist and poet was a great friend of Bengal. His passing is a great loss for all of us. RIP,” Banerjee tweeted.
Grass, best known for his 1959 novel “The Tin Drum”, died in a hospital in Lubeck at the age of 87 on Monday.
His association with India began in the 1980s when he joined the long list of actvists linked to the country’s peace movement and stayed predominantly in Calcutta (now Kolkata) with wife Ute from August 1986 to January 1987.
His extended sojourn in India resulted into the publishing of “Zunge Zeigen”, an allusion to Kali’s tongue, in 1988. It is a prose work of approximately 90 pages, 80 drawings and a long epic poem of approximately 23 pages and is considered to to recognise Kolkata’s role as a mirror of the global conflicts between the developing and the developed world.