When Gunter Grass heard the news on Thursday that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he nonetheless insisted on keeping a longstanding dental appointment. It was an appropriately prosaic choice for a writer who, unlike so many German intellectuals, has always made a point of keeping his feet planted firmly on the ground.
Once he started talking to the press, however, he could not resist delivering a lecture to his fellow Germans on their responsibility to remember the past.
"We have our history. This history has often been retold and it is over. But history won't stand still in the year 2000. We have our history and we just have to live with it," he said.
Born in the Hanseatic port city of Danzig (now Gdansk) in 1927 as the son of a colonial trader, Grass has had to live with more history than most writers.
An enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth who served briefly in the army on the Western Front, he was captured by American forces towards the end of the second World War.
When the war ended, his home city became part of Poland and the young Grass, who saw himself as a "refugee child", trained as a stonemason and studied sculpture in Dusseldorf. He hitch-hiked around Europe during the early 1950s, earning extra cash as a trombone player in jazz bands before turning to literature.
It was in a damp basement in the Place d'Italie in Paris that he wrote his first novel The Tin Drum between 1956 and 1958. He had joined an informal group of German writers called the Gruppe 47, who pooled ideas about writing techniques and shared a commitment to changing society through literature.
When Grass read from the manuscript of The Tin Drum at a meeting of the Gruppe 47 in 1958, his audience was electrified by its linguistic virtuosity and the power of the story Grass had to tell. The book, which is narrated by Oskar Matzareth, a dwarf with a voice that can break glass, is set in Grass's home city of Danzig during Hitler's rise to power.
It became an overnight, international success and, not least on account of Volker Schlondorff's film version, remains the author's best-known work.
Grass has written more than a dozen novels since then and has been translated into 27 languages, including Chinese, Russian and Irish.
But Gunter Grass is almost as renowned in Germany for his political engagement as for his books, many of which have been condemned by critics as dull and didactic. In fact, even the most literary-minded Germans sometimes admit that they have never read a Grass novel to the end.
As a witness to the brutal crushing of a workers' uprising in East Berlin in 1953, Grass was never tempted to tread the path of political revolution and, during the late 1960s, he threw in his lot with Willy Brandt's Social Democrats.
He remained a political outsider, however, and was almost alone in opposing German unification in 1989 on the grounds that, after Auschwitz, no European country should be allowed to become so powerful.
He left the Social Democrats in 1993 in protest against the party's support for Helmut Kohl's tightening of Germany's generous asylum laws. He has remained committed to helping minorities in Germany and has pledged to donate part of his Nobel prize money to a foundation he established in support of gypsies.
He supported NATO's intervention in Kosovo but believed that the operation should have been an exclusively European one and criticised the decision not to deploy ground troops during the campaign.
Married twice, he has seven children and numerous grandchildren who visit him at his home in Lubeck in northern Germany.
"It can't be that my children and my grandchildren - and I've got a stack of them - must bear a stigma as Germans. They aren't guilty. But these children born after the war do carry a responsibility to make sure the past does not repeat itself," he said.
Younger German writers, who tend to avoid big themes in their books, regard politically committed novelists such as Grass as figures from a different literary age.
Georg Klein, whose debut novel Libbidissi was a major critical hit last year, dismissed the Nobel laureate as little more than an amateur historian.
"The prize and the author suit one another. Neither the Nobel Prize for Literature nor the author Gunter Grass have much to do with literature in its strictest sense any longer. They move in an extra-literary sphere; it's about representing a society or perhaps a state but it is no longer about what people can experience with a text," he said.
But Germany's chancellor, Gerhard Schroder, probably summed up the popular view of the truculent, septuagenarian author in his congratulatory message.
"Everyone has to grapple with what Grass has to say," he said.
