Tim Mohr, the translator and author who explored Germany and rock and roll in his works, has died at 55.

Mohr’s death was announced by the publisher Europa Editions, for whom Mohr translated seven novels by Alina Bronsky, including Broken Glass Park, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, and Baba Dunja’s Last Love.

Mohr was born and raised in Washington, D.C., and educated at Yale University. Before becoming a writer and translator, he worked as a club DJ in Berlin; he drew on that experience to write his own book, Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. A critic for Kirkus praised the book as “an appealing, lively cultural history worth reading in an era of corporate punk nostalgia.”

Mohr’s other translations include Wetlands and Wrecked, written by Charlotte Roche, and Why We Took the Car and Sand, written by Wolfgang Herrndorf. He also collaborated with Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan on the musician’s memoir, It’s So Easy, and with KISS frontman Paul Stanley on Face the Music.

McKagan remembered Mohr on the social platform X, writing, “Tim has remained a dear friend all of these years. His cancer prognosis was a shock, but we all couldn’t imagine a world without Tim, so we naturally thought he’d beat it.…Tim loved so much to be a husband and father.”

And Stanley posted, “Tim Mohr—My dear friend, literary collaborator, pure soul, brilliant mind, street food gourmet and so much more has died from pancreatic cancer. I’m heartbroken. If you knew him you loved him. The world has lost a bright light. A huge embrace for his wife Erin, Greta and Augie.”

Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.