Bestselling German author Ralph Giordano dies at 91
Source: The Malay Mail
BERLIN, Dec 11 — Bestselling German author and Holocaust survivor Ralph Giordano, whose writing offered a moral compass for the nation in the post-war period, died yesterday aged 91, his publisher said.
His death in hospital in the western city of Cologne followed a bad fall at his home several weeks ago, a spokeswoman for the Kiepenheuer & Witsch publishing house told AFP.
Born to a German Jewish mother and a Sicilian father in 1923, Giordano’s life nearly spanned the century of bloody upheaval in Germany in which the Nazi and communist dictatorships exacted a heavy toll.
A passionate Ferrari driver with an impressive mane of white hair, Giordano weighed in on the most divisive issues of those tumultuous decades in 23 books and countless newspaper articles and rarely skirted controversy.
Culture Minister Monika Gruetters said the country had lost a “potent and contentious character in Germany’s political culture” who prodded the nation “toward a self-critical and rigorous reckoning with our past”.
The experiences of his youth, in which he had to hole up with his family in a friend’s cellar in the northern port city of Hamburg to avert his mother’s deportation to a concentration camp, lent searing urgency to his warnings about the reappearance of far-right ideology and anti-Semitism.
The Giordano family, which nearly starved in hiding, was liberated on May 4, 1945 by the British army.
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