Gunter Grass died on April 13, 2015. I didn't get around to writing about this until today. Grass won the Nobel prize in literature in 1999. His early novels told stories with the setting being the 1930s and 1940s and, per almost all readers and critics, urged Germans to confess and repent for their Nazi past. In 1985, Grass criticized the visit to the Bitburg cemetery by US President Reagan and German Chancellor Kohl.
However, Grass himself had a Nazi past in that he served in the Waffen SS. He revealed this in 2006 just prior to marketing a new literary product. He may have considered his novels or his left wing politics to be a repentance but never said so.
Was he a hypocrite? Well, yes but not to an enormous extent as his service with the Waffen SS was relatively short (a few months in 1944). This assumes he did not participate in any atrocities (no evidence to date has been provided of such participation).
Was he smug? Yes. Opportunistic? Yes. Sanctimonious? Yes. Was he wrong on major issues (he predicted the reunification of Germany would lead to the militarization of Germany and a new military conflict caused by Germany)? Yes.
He also wrote, in 2012, a famous poem that essentially said that Iran should get a nuclear bomb because Israel had one.
All the info in this (but not the image), is available from the wikipedia page on Grass.
