“With his novels, plays, articles and speeches, Mr. Grass became one of Germany’s foremost intellectuals and gadflies. The themes that consumed his literature – guilt, atonement and hypocrisy – were also central to his political commentary. He could be shrill and polarizing, a self-professed ‘troublemaker’ who cultivated what he described as a ‘tendency to bring out into the open what had too long been swept under the carpet.'”