Überlingen (dpa) – Martin Walser has been described as a “potent personality” and a writer “of global importance”. Now his death has prompted shock, sadness and expressions of condolence. According to his publisher Rowohlt, the author has died aged 96. Walser was considered one of the most important contemporary authors in Germany, whose writing and public speeches were both admired and fiercely criticised for decades.
Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz used Twitter to send his condolences to Walser’s family. “Generations of people have read his books, and his love of argument made for many lively debates,” he wrote.
Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth described Walser as a leading intellectual. “In his literary works he revealed the empty deception of post-war Germany’s bourgeois facades,” she said. Walser’s remarks in his speech at the 1998 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, in which he voiced his opposition to an “instrumentalization of Auschwitz”, attracted fierce opposition.
Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said that in Walser, Germany had lost “a magnificent person and a writer of global importance.”
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