Erik Kirschbaum and Stephen Brown

Gunter Grass, Controversial German Nobel Laureate, Dies at 87

German novelist Guenter Grass, the Nobel Prize-winning author of “The Tin Drum,” an epic treatment of the Nazi era, died on Monday at the age of 87, his publishers said. A broad-shouldered man with a drooping mustache, Grass spurned the German tradition of keeping a cool intellectual distance, insisting that a writer’s duty was to…