Germany\u2019s Nobel-winning author G\u00fcnter Grass said he feared humanity was \u201csleepwalking\u201d into a world war in the last interview he gave before his death on Monday.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have on the one side Ukraine, whose situation is not improving; in Israel and Palestine things are getting worse; the disaster the Americans left in Iraq, the atrocities of Islamic State and the problem of Syria,\u201d he told the Spanish newspaper El Pa\u00eds in the interview published on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is war everywhere; we run the risk of committing the same mistakes as before; so without realising it we can get into a world war as if we were sleepwalking,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Spain\u2019s top-selling newspaper said the interview, carried out at the author\u2019s home in L\u00fcbeck in northern Germany on 21 March, was his last before his death aged 87.<\/p>\n
Grass, who achieved worldwide fame with his debut and best-known novel, The Tin Drum, in 1959 was a pacifist, opposing the installation of nuclear missiles on German soil.<\/p>\n
In his lengthy interview with El Pa\u00eds, he also expressed concern over climate change and overpopulation.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll of this together makes me realise that things are finite, that we don\u2019t have an indefinite amount of time,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Grass pressed Germany for decades to face up to its Nazi past, winning the Nobel prize for literature in 1999, when the Swedish academy said his \u201cfrolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Germany\u2019s Nobel-winning author G\u00fcnter Grass said he feared humanity was \u201csleepwalking\u201d into a world war in the last interview he gave before his death on Monday. \u201cWe have on the one side Ukraine, whose situation is not improving; in Israel and Palestine things are getting worse; the disaster the Americans left in Iraq, the atrocities …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":677,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[36,94,93,87],"class_list":["post-676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-unrecognized","tag-business","tag-gunter-grass","tag-interview","tag-world"],"yoast_head":"\n