![German novelist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Guenter Grass smokes his pipe during a meeting in Gdansk in this September 11, 2005 file picture.](http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/media/images/82282000/jpg/_82282306_mediaitem82281960.jpg)
Guenter Grass, German Nobel literature prize winner and author of The Tin Drum, has died aged 87.
His publisher said he passed away at a clinic in Luebeck on Monday morning.Born in what was then Danzig, Grass served in the German military in World War Two and published his breakthrough anti-Nazi novel, The Tin Drum, in 1959.
Later in life he became a vocal opponent of German reunification in 1990, and argued afterwards that it had been carried out too hastily.
Grass's work was "a formidable reflection of our country and a permanent part of its literary and cultural heritage," German President Joachim Gauck said in a statement (in German).
Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier was "deeply dismayed" to hear of the author's death, the German foreign ministry