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Die Danziger Trilogie #1-3
The Danzig Trilogy: The Tin Drum / Cat and Mouse / Dog Years
In 1999, Günter Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Danzig Trilogy contains three of the author's most acclaimed works.
The Tin Drum
Acclaimed as the greatest German novel written since the end of World War II, The Tin Drum is the autobiography of thirty-year-old Oskar Matzerath, who has lived through the long Nazi nightmare and who, as the novel begins, is being held in a mental institution. Willfully stunting his growth at three feet for many years, wielding his tin drum and piercing scream as anarchistic weapons, he provides a profound yet hilarious perspective on both German history and the human condition of the modern world.
Cat and Mouse
The provocative story centers on the narrator's vivid recollection of a boyhood scene in which a black cat is provoked to pounce on his friend Mahlke's "mouse"--his prominent Adam's apple. This incident sets off a wild series of utterly "Grassian" events that ultimately leads to Mahlke's becoming a national hero. Because of Grass's singular storytelling virtuosity, ICat and Mouse/I is marvelously entertaining, powerful, and full of funny episodes.
Dog Years
In this vast novel, packed with incident, Günter Grass traces the dark labyrinth of the German mentality as it developed during the rise, fall, and aftermath of the Third Reich.
The Tin Drum
Acclaimed as the greatest German novel written since the end of World War II, The Tin Drum is the autobiography of thirty-year-old Oskar Matzerath, who has lived through the long Nazi nightmare and who, as the novel begins, is being held in a mental institution. Willfully stunting his growth at three feet for many years, wielding his tin drum and piercing scream as anarchistic weapons, he provides a profound yet hilarious perspective on both German history and the human condition of the modern world.
Cat and Mouse
The provocative story centers on the narrator's vivid recollection of a boyhood scene in which a black cat is provoked to pounce on his friend Mahlke's "mouse"--his prominent Adam's apple. This incident sets off a wild series of utterly "Grassian" events that ultimately leads to Mahlke's becoming a national hero. Because of Grass's singular storytelling virtuosity, ICat and Mouse/I is marvelously entertaining, powerful, and full of funny episodes.
Dog Years
In this vast novel, packed with incident, Günter Grass traces the dark labyrinth of the German mentality as it developed during the rise, fall, and aftermath of the Third Reich.
1030 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1987
21 people are currently reading
974 people want to read
About the author
Günter Grass
311 books1,841 followersNovels, notably
The Tin Drum
(1959) and
Dog Years
(1963), of German writer Günter Wilhelm Grass, who won the Nobel Prize of 1999 for literature, concern the political and social climate of Germany during and after World War II.
This novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, and sculptor since 1945 lived in West Germany but in his fiction frequently returned to the Danzig of his childhood. He always identified as a Kashubian.
He is best known for his first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), a key text in European magic realism. He named this style “broadened reality.” “Cat and Mouse” (1961) and Dog Years (1963) also succeeded in the period. These three novels make up his “Danzig trilogy.”
Helene Grass (née Knoff, 1898 - 1954), a Roman Catholic of Kashubian-Polish origin, bore Günter Grass to Willy Grass (1899 - 1979), a Protestant ethnic German. Parents reared Grass as a Catholic. The family lived in an apartment, attached to its grocery store in Danzig-Langfuhr (now Gdańsk-Wrzeszcz). He has one sister, born in 1930.
Grass attended the Danzig gymnasium Conradinum. He volunteered for submarine service with the Kriegsmarine "to get out of the confinement he felt as a teenager in his parents' house" which he considered - in a very negative way - civic Catholic lower middle class. In 1943 he became a Luftwaffenhelfer, then he was drafted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst, and in November 1944, shortly after his seventeenth birthday, into the Waffen-Schutzstaffel. The seventeen-year-old Grass saw combat with the 10th Schutzstaffel panzer division Frundsberg from February 1945 until he was wounded on 20 April 1945 and sent to an American prisoner of war camp.
In 1946 and 1947, he worked in a mine and received an education of a stonemason. For many years, he studied sculpture and graphics, first at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and then at the Universität der Künste Berlin. He also worked as an author and traveled frequently. He married in 1954 and from 1960 lived in Berlin as well as part-time in Schleswig-Holstein. Divorced in 1978, he remarried in 1979. From 1983 to 1986 he held the presidency of the Berlin Akademie der Künste (Berlin Academy of Arts).
During the German unification process in 1989 he argued for separation of the two states, because he thought a unified Germany would resume its past aggression. He moved to the northern German city of Lübeck in 1995. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999. In 2006, Grass caused controversy with his disclosure of his Waffen-Schutzstaffel service during the final months of World War II, which he had kept a secret until publishing his memoir that year. He died of complications of lung infection on 13th of April, 2015 at a Lübeck hospital. He was 87.
This novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, and sculptor since 1945 lived in West Germany but in his fiction frequently returned to the Danzig of his childhood. He always identified as a Kashubian.
He is best known for his first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), a key text in European magic realism. He named this style “broadened reality.” “Cat and Mouse” (1961) and Dog Years (1963) also succeeded in the period. These three novels make up his “Danzig trilogy.”
Helene Grass (née Knoff, 1898 - 1954), a Roman Catholic of Kashubian-Polish origin, bore Günter Grass to Willy Grass (1899 - 1979), a Protestant ethnic German. Parents reared Grass as a Catholic. The family lived in an apartment, attached to its grocery store in Danzig-Langfuhr (now Gdańsk-Wrzeszcz). He has one sister, born in 1930.
Grass attended the Danzig gymnasium Conradinum. He volunteered for submarine service with the Kriegsmarine "to get out of the confinement he felt as a teenager in his parents' house" which he considered - in a very negative way - civic Catholic lower middle class. In 1943 he became a Luftwaffenhelfer, then he was drafted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst, and in November 1944, shortly after his seventeenth birthday, into the Waffen-Schutzstaffel. The seventeen-year-old Grass saw combat with the 10th Schutzstaffel panzer division Frundsberg from February 1945 until he was wounded on 20 April 1945 and sent to an American prisoner of war camp.
In 1946 and 1947, he worked in a mine and received an education of a stonemason. For many years, he studied sculpture and graphics, first at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and then at the Universität der Künste Berlin. He also worked as an author and traveled frequently. He married in 1954 and from 1960 lived in Berlin as well as part-time in Schleswig-Holstein. Divorced in 1978, he remarried in 1979. From 1983 to 1986 he held the presidency of the Berlin Akademie der Künste (Berlin Academy of Arts).
During the German unification process in 1989 he argued for separation of the two states, because he thought a unified Germany would resume its past aggression. He moved to the northern German city of Lübeck in 1995. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999. In 2006, Grass caused controversy with his disclosure of his Waffen-Schutzstaffel service during the final months of World War II, which he had kept a secret until publishing his memoir that year. He died of complications of lung infection on 13th of April, 2015 at a Lübeck hospital. He was 87.
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
December 3, 2023
Omnibus edition of the three Grass novels that constitute the Danzig Trilogy. The novels are independent but together provide a (deliberately unreliable?) history of interwar Germany and especially Danzig (now Gdańsk) from the master of magic realism. Intensely personal and political, but also incredibly mystical, imaginative, and powerful writing.
October 11, 2009
I would like to visit Poland, my college roomate got lyme disease in the mountains there.
May 18, 2017
I think its pretty safe to say that when most people think about the words "magical realism" (if they think about the term at all) they probably link it with, in approximate order, Latin American literature, Penn and Teller and live-action role playing, with German literature appearing way, way down the line. So an entire trilogy centered around Germany before, during and after World War II featuring magical realist elements might be a tough sell for a lot of people, especially when you sweeten the pot by mentioning the unreliable narrators, oblique descriptions of events, and general literary tomfoolery. But hey, a challenge is a challenge.
If you had told me about any of these I might have hesitated but alas, I tend to buy these kinds of books blindly and thus had no idea what I was in for. And while its tough going at times, the moments that work mostly make up for the times when you're wondering if the book was translated correctly.
Gunter Grass was a German novelist born in what is now Poland but back then was considered a (deep breath) semi-autonomous city-state called the Free City of Danzig, which is where the trilogy is mostly centered in and around. One thing I probably should have done before starting the trilogy was do a little background reading on Danzig, which might have explained some of the events going on in the course of the novel, including things like Nazis taking over the government and treating people in the typically horrific way they treated anyone who wasn't a Nazi, a brief relocation in West Prussia (before that went "poof" as well), the Soviets coming in and clearing the city out and then it eventually becoming part of Poland again. A lot more of the references would have made sense and while the novels are not that autobiographical except for the historical parts (presumably Grass didn't spend time as a dwarf or be transformed while trapped inside a snowman) it does help ground the proceedings in the real world, perhaps more than the book itself does. So I recommend that as a primer for anyone looking to brave a thousand pages of this stuff.
The trilogy is probably the work Grass is most famous for, with the first book "The Tin Drum" made into a decently received movie at one point. Its probably the flashiest of the three books, featuring a fairly outrageous character and situation as we're told the story by Oskar, a dwarf who is currently locked in an asylum. Having been born with the awareness of an adult, he does what every rational would do and decides to remain the size of a three year old. He's also very attached to a series of drums, or as you might call them, metaphors, running through one after the other as he attempts to enact a Germanic magical realist version of Todd Rundgren's hit song "Bang the Drum All Day". Oh, and did I mention he has a penchant for screaming at such a high volume that he literally shatters glass. Later on he manages some control over this and basically starts a one man European version of the X-Men.
With that as our starting point, Grass via Oskar takes us through the history of Danzig from just before the war to during it, along the way mixing realistic characters with slightly more ridiculous ones, all with the background of historical events. Oskar is a fairly weird narrator, randomly referring to himself in the third person and sometimes lurching about through facts like an actual three year old. Anyone who has read Michael Moorcock's Colonel Pyat sequence might find some of this familiar, although instead of the narrator masking his racist delusions here Oskar proves to have a somewhat fluid interpretation of events at times, especially when it comes to personal relationships.
But he's a personable narrator, which is good because otherwise the book might devolve into parody. Grass' prose here (and through all three books in the trilogy) is a dense rippling of paragraphs that often only number two or three to a page, his characters are loquacious and don't skimp on the detail, meaning that the reader is forced to parse some rather thick sentences (I generally read fairly quickly and this is the slowest I've ever read an author since Proust) and event seen through the eyes of someone who lives in that particular time and place, which means a little context goes a long way.
He gets a decent amount of mileage out of the novelty of Oskar's condition, but where it works best is when he ties it into a ground level view of what it was like for everyone to live in those times, which wind up being a combination of the terrible and the absurd. Events like the attack on the Polish Post Office serve as microcosms on how warped this all is (and again, background reading is enlightening) and while it can hard at times to feel too emotionally attached to Oskar, when Grass offs a couple of the regular cast its a weird imposition on reality on what otherwise could be interpreted as a bit of a wacky lark, especially when Oskar does things like join a jazz band and play solos that literally take people back.
It all adds up to a fairly unique experience in literature, a historical novel narrated by someone who may or may not be actively crazy but in some way that seems to be the point, that there's no real way to process these events as rational unless you're a little touched in the head.
But while "Tin Drum" is the best known of the trilogy, the others mine similar territory with nearly as effective results. "Cat and Mouse" is far shorter, barely a hundred pages and plays like a slow motion tragedy that starts among schoolboys, where our vaguely coherent narrator Pilenz tells about alienated Mahlke as they grow up heading into the 1940s and the war. Pilenz is if anything even more of a challenge than Oskar was (who cameos here and there, blending into the background as a much as a screaming dwarf playing a drum constantly can) since he tends to be resolutely nonlinear in telling us the story but doesn't exactly clue us in to when he's slipping in and out of time. When the book starts to cohere, especially during the tragic latter pages, it starts to gain some momentum and weight but prior to that it feels like a series of scenes searching for a story. Grass' keen eye for detail and prose style save a lot of this from being too tedious (the length helps too) but that depends on how much you enjoy being told a story in the most obtuse and abstract form possible. He gets some nice imagery out of the proceedings, however, with a sunken minesweeping ship that the kids play on serving as both a literal and metaphorical anchor to events. Mahlke himself stands out as well, the narration conveying his loner nature and feelings of separation from everyone else despite the narrator doing his best to tell us a cut up version of events.
Reading the trilogy in order it makes for a nice palette cleanser (if your method of cleansing your palette from difficult literature is to read a shorter work of equally difficult literature) and the first two make for a nice preparation for "Dog Years", if anything can prepare you for it.
"Dog Years" is a weird one, because while I was reading it I was constantly asking myself "where is he going with this?" and now that its over I think it might actually be the best of the three, both in audacity and getting its aims across. Or maybe I was just more attuned to the style by then. Its much tougher going at first. Without the shortness of "Cat and Mouse" or the cuteness of a crazy dwarf musician narrator to make things go down easier. Reading the cover copy you'd think it would be the most straightforward, as the publisher of my version describes the book as a boy and Hitler's dog avenging Nazi war crimes in post-war Germany, which sounds like a great idea for a TV show ("He's a traumatized soldier unable to come to grips with his past, the other used to enjoy belly rubs from unrepentant blots on humanity. Together, they fight crime.") but by the time that even becomes relevant you're way into the book.
Indeed Grass seems to be going out of his way to double down on being oblique, with the book divided into three parts, each from the point of view of someone else. The first part tells of two boys, Edward Amsel (who's half-Jewish and you'd be foolish to think that doesn't come into play at some point) and Walter Matern as they grow up with friends and families, doing the stuff that kids do, like make bizarre designs for scarecrows and deal with the country gradually falling into war. That stuff hits the hardest but it tends to percolate in the background while Grass focuses more on the scarecrows and other bits of magical realism (this is around where the snowman transformation takes place, causing an overweight girl to transform into a star ballerina), none of which seems to cohere into anything resembling plot momentum, forcing the less patient to ask the aforementioned "what is he doing?" question. I know I did.
Turns out he's playing the long game as things become more focused in the second part, which is a series of letters from someone on the periphery of events to his cousin, further describing not only the changing friendship between Walter and Edward but the world of ballet dancing and the changing emotions of the times as Germany starts to go off the rails into fairly scary territory. The nod to an epistolary style is much easier to digest and feels like a breath of fresh air compared to the denser earlier part.
The third part is what brings it all together, as Matern takes center stage as the narrator, picking up Prinz (Hitler's dog) and proceeding to take a rambling path across post-war Germany enacting revenge. Those hoping this turns into a Quentin Tarantino film are going to be sorely disappointed as the "revenge" either takes place off-screen or amounts to driving to someone's front door to tell them what a terrible person they are. What makes the difference is the focus on the still evolving friendship of Amsel and Matern, along with how a man named Brauxel fits into all of it and how Germany tries to pick up the pieces of itself after the war and take the first steps to coming to grip with the not very exemplary things they helped along as a country.
To that end Grass puts forward several decent set pieces amidst all the wandering around. A bit about glasses that allows kids to see their parents as they really are speaks a lot about how parents weren't exactly forthcoming in telling their kids what they were up to in the 1940s and another longer sequence where Matern participates in a discussion that sort of puts everyone on trial for the stuff they'd rather not talk about. But its not until the final sequence that you see the real arc of things, as Grass brings back the scarecrow motif from earlier, mixes it in with what seems to start out as a reenactment of Dante's Hell and seems to point a way for Germany to understand its own recent past. It feels like a real culmination (unlike "The Tin Drum" which seems to simply run out of plot) and makes the book feel like a more fully formed work. Its something that demands you engage it on its own terms and I'm not going to lie, at times it hit me more intellectually than anything else as I tried to figure out where all the symbolism and themes fit in.
None of it is easy but all of it feels necessary in a way (and Grass' later admission that he wasn't quite honest about what he did during the war (instead of spending all of it in a labor service, he was drafted into a tank unit . . . considering his moralizing throughout his life, its not out of line to criticize him as a little bit of a hypocrite for leaving that part out for years) really changes nothing about the book's impact, even if it might change how you feel about him personally). Its not really an door into the mindset of how this madness might have happened but it tries to depict what it was like to live through that confusion, make decisions that might have been prudent under the circumstances but later seem a bit ill-informed, and then try to decide if one can make one's peace with those decisions. Its three books where almost no one comes off well and it makes them both wrong and deeply human in the process, a window into a time both mentally and geographically everything was going to hell. And if the people to show us that are all damaged in some way, that skewed and absurdist view may be the only way to confront and understand it, to see a world so twisted that the only rational response is to vow to never let it happen again.
If you had told me about any of these I might have hesitated but alas, I tend to buy these kinds of books blindly and thus had no idea what I was in for. And while its tough going at times, the moments that work mostly make up for the times when you're wondering if the book was translated correctly.
Gunter Grass was a German novelist born in what is now Poland but back then was considered a (deep breath) semi-autonomous city-state called the Free City of Danzig, which is where the trilogy is mostly centered in and around. One thing I probably should have done before starting the trilogy was do a little background reading on Danzig, which might have explained some of the events going on in the course of the novel, including things like Nazis taking over the government and treating people in the typically horrific way they treated anyone who wasn't a Nazi, a brief relocation in West Prussia (before that went "poof" as well), the Soviets coming in and clearing the city out and then it eventually becoming part of Poland again. A lot more of the references would have made sense and while the novels are not that autobiographical except for the historical parts (presumably Grass didn't spend time as a dwarf or be transformed while trapped inside a snowman) it does help ground the proceedings in the real world, perhaps more than the book itself does. So I recommend that as a primer for anyone looking to brave a thousand pages of this stuff.
The trilogy is probably the work Grass is most famous for, with the first book "The Tin Drum" made into a decently received movie at one point. Its probably the flashiest of the three books, featuring a fairly outrageous character and situation as we're told the story by Oskar, a dwarf who is currently locked in an asylum. Having been born with the awareness of an adult, he does what every rational would do and decides to remain the size of a three year old. He's also very attached to a series of drums, or as you might call them, metaphors, running through one after the other as he attempts to enact a Germanic magical realist version of Todd Rundgren's hit song "Bang the Drum All Day". Oh, and did I mention he has a penchant for screaming at such a high volume that he literally shatters glass. Later on he manages some control over this and basically starts a one man European version of the X-Men.
With that as our starting point, Grass via Oskar takes us through the history of Danzig from just before the war to during it, along the way mixing realistic characters with slightly more ridiculous ones, all with the background of historical events. Oskar is a fairly weird narrator, randomly referring to himself in the third person and sometimes lurching about through facts like an actual three year old. Anyone who has read Michael Moorcock's Colonel Pyat sequence might find some of this familiar, although instead of the narrator masking his racist delusions here Oskar proves to have a somewhat fluid interpretation of events at times, especially when it comes to personal relationships.
But he's a personable narrator, which is good because otherwise the book might devolve into parody. Grass' prose here (and through all three books in the trilogy) is a dense rippling of paragraphs that often only number two or three to a page, his characters are loquacious and don't skimp on the detail, meaning that the reader is forced to parse some rather thick sentences (I generally read fairly quickly and this is the slowest I've ever read an author since Proust) and event seen through the eyes of someone who lives in that particular time and place, which means a little context goes a long way.
He gets a decent amount of mileage out of the novelty of Oskar's condition, but where it works best is when he ties it into a ground level view of what it was like for everyone to live in those times, which wind up being a combination of the terrible and the absurd. Events like the attack on the Polish Post Office serve as microcosms on how warped this all is (and again, background reading is enlightening) and while it can hard at times to feel too emotionally attached to Oskar, when Grass offs a couple of the regular cast its a weird imposition on reality on what otherwise could be interpreted as a bit of a wacky lark, especially when Oskar does things like join a jazz band and play solos that literally take people back.
It all adds up to a fairly unique experience in literature, a historical novel narrated by someone who may or may not be actively crazy but in some way that seems to be the point, that there's no real way to process these events as rational unless you're a little touched in the head.
But while "Tin Drum" is the best known of the trilogy, the others mine similar territory with nearly as effective results. "Cat and Mouse" is far shorter, barely a hundred pages and plays like a slow motion tragedy that starts among schoolboys, where our vaguely coherent narrator Pilenz tells about alienated Mahlke as they grow up heading into the 1940s and the war. Pilenz is if anything even more of a challenge than Oskar was (who cameos here and there, blending into the background as a much as a screaming dwarf playing a drum constantly can) since he tends to be resolutely nonlinear in telling us the story but doesn't exactly clue us in to when he's slipping in and out of time. When the book starts to cohere, especially during the tragic latter pages, it starts to gain some momentum and weight but prior to that it feels like a series of scenes searching for a story. Grass' keen eye for detail and prose style save a lot of this from being too tedious (the length helps too) but that depends on how much you enjoy being told a story in the most obtuse and abstract form possible. He gets some nice imagery out of the proceedings, however, with a sunken minesweeping ship that the kids play on serving as both a literal and metaphorical anchor to events. Mahlke himself stands out as well, the narration conveying his loner nature and feelings of separation from everyone else despite the narrator doing his best to tell us a cut up version of events.
Reading the trilogy in order it makes for a nice palette cleanser (if your method of cleansing your palette from difficult literature is to read a shorter work of equally difficult literature) and the first two make for a nice preparation for "Dog Years", if anything can prepare you for it.
"Dog Years" is a weird one, because while I was reading it I was constantly asking myself "where is he going with this?" and now that its over I think it might actually be the best of the three, both in audacity and getting its aims across. Or maybe I was just more attuned to the style by then. Its much tougher going at first. Without the shortness of "Cat and Mouse" or the cuteness of a crazy dwarf musician narrator to make things go down easier. Reading the cover copy you'd think it would be the most straightforward, as the publisher of my version describes the book as a boy and Hitler's dog avenging Nazi war crimes in post-war Germany, which sounds like a great idea for a TV show ("He's a traumatized soldier unable to come to grips with his past, the other used to enjoy belly rubs from unrepentant blots on humanity. Together, they fight crime.") but by the time that even becomes relevant you're way into the book.
Indeed Grass seems to be going out of his way to double down on being oblique, with the book divided into three parts, each from the point of view of someone else. The first part tells of two boys, Edward Amsel (who's half-Jewish and you'd be foolish to think that doesn't come into play at some point) and Walter Matern as they grow up with friends and families, doing the stuff that kids do, like make bizarre designs for scarecrows and deal with the country gradually falling into war. That stuff hits the hardest but it tends to percolate in the background while Grass focuses more on the scarecrows and other bits of magical realism (this is around where the snowman transformation takes place, causing an overweight girl to transform into a star ballerina), none of which seems to cohere into anything resembling plot momentum, forcing the less patient to ask the aforementioned "what is he doing?" question. I know I did.
Turns out he's playing the long game as things become more focused in the second part, which is a series of letters from someone on the periphery of events to his cousin, further describing not only the changing friendship between Walter and Edward but the world of ballet dancing and the changing emotions of the times as Germany starts to go off the rails into fairly scary territory. The nod to an epistolary style is much easier to digest and feels like a breath of fresh air compared to the denser earlier part.
The third part is what brings it all together, as Matern takes center stage as the narrator, picking up Prinz (Hitler's dog) and proceeding to take a rambling path across post-war Germany enacting revenge. Those hoping this turns into a Quentin Tarantino film are going to be sorely disappointed as the "revenge" either takes place off-screen or amounts to driving to someone's front door to tell them what a terrible person they are. What makes the difference is the focus on the still evolving friendship of Amsel and Matern, along with how a man named Brauxel fits into all of it and how Germany tries to pick up the pieces of itself after the war and take the first steps to coming to grip with the not very exemplary things they helped along as a country.
To that end Grass puts forward several decent set pieces amidst all the wandering around. A bit about glasses that allows kids to see their parents as they really are speaks a lot about how parents weren't exactly forthcoming in telling their kids what they were up to in the 1940s and another longer sequence where Matern participates in a discussion that sort of puts everyone on trial for the stuff they'd rather not talk about. But its not until the final sequence that you see the real arc of things, as Grass brings back the scarecrow motif from earlier, mixes it in with what seems to start out as a reenactment of Dante's Hell and seems to point a way for Germany to understand its own recent past. It feels like a real culmination (unlike "The Tin Drum" which seems to simply run out of plot) and makes the book feel like a more fully formed work. Its something that demands you engage it on its own terms and I'm not going to lie, at times it hit me more intellectually than anything else as I tried to figure out where all the symbolism and themes fit in.
None of it is easy but all of it feels necessary in a way (and Grass' later admission that he wasn't quite honest about what he did during the war (instead of spending all of it in a labor service, he was drafted into a tank unit . . . considering his moralizing throughout his life, its not out of line to criticize him as a little bit of a hypocrite for leaving that part out for years) really changes nothing about the book's impact, even if it might change how you feel about him personally). Its not really an door into the mindset of how this madness might have happened but it tries to depict what it was like to live through that confusion, make decisions that might have been prudent under the circumstances but later seem a bit ill-informed, and then try to decide if one can make one's peace with those decisions. Its three books where almost no one comes off well and it makes them both wrong and deeply human in the process, a window into a time both mentally and geographically everything was going to hell. And if the people to show us that are all damaged in some way, that skewed and absurdist view may be the only way to confront and understand it, to see a world so twisted that the only rational response is to vow to never let it happen again.
August 21, 2011
A classic of the 20th Century. One you should read before you die, but only when you're ready to shut yourself off from the world for many days. Flawed, yes, and perhaps too long-winded at times (reduced by a third it would have been perfect) but this is an important, mind-expanding trilogy that you can absolutely lose yourself in. It shows you what a novel can achieve and it opened the door for so many great writers, such as John Irving and Salman Rushdie, etc etc
March 1, 2020
This is an exceptional book about Germany and Poland around the second world war. Usually I find magic realism tedious but this fable of the twentieth century is breathtaking in its imagination and inventiveness. At its core is an examination of guilt.
If I have a criticism, it is that I thought it overlong. It has taken me a month to read!
If I have a criticism, it is that I thought it overlong. It has taken me a month to read!
January 5, 2018
The tin drum and cat and mouse are entertaining books, but the story often feels drawn out, particularly the last book. Oscar is certainly a memorable character and the first book is the most recommended, but overall experience was detracted by the last book.
August 29, 2022
I enjoyed reading the Danzig Trilogy (Cat and Mouse in particular) The three books in the trilogy are: The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, and Dog Years. One of the best books I’ve read in a long time and would highly recommend this trilogy.
January 21, 2008
This huge volume is stuffed with the guilt-plagued writings of Gunter Grass, the Good German. In the last few years, as his membership in the Waffen SS at the end of the war came to light he was accused of hypocracy but that was nonsense. He was a seventeen-year-old private during the last months of the war. The books in the trilogy range from the brilliant Tin Drum, the forgettable Cat and Mouse, and the ponderous Dog Years. The Tin Drum, whose first half was made into Volker Schlondorff's masterpiece film, is amazing. Its the best example of Grass' Joycian stream-of-consciousness writing and flows along with few drops into obsession and overkill. Cat And Mouse starts well but flounders early. Very forgetable. Dog Years was supposed to be the magnum opus. Although it contains some interesting passages it declines into a dull exposition involving astrology and attempts to go in an almost science fiction direction. Tin Drum is well worth the price of the whole volume, the other two are worth reading once.
March 28, 2014
I read these books many years ago, as well as the Flounder, and have always enjoyed the writing and storytelling of Grass. One of my literary partners in crime, Phillip Lee Duncan, turned me on to him early in our relationship, and by strange happenstance, the author came to Houston for a book signing which we attended. I still have my autographed copy of "The Flounder" which is still my favorite of his books. That being said, all of these books are great as well, just my contrary nature makes me have to choose a less talked about book for my favorite, but all three of these are right on par, if not superior, and are essential Grass. Never mind his more recent history that has shamed him in the eyes of many (look it up, Wiki-dude) and just read the books. His details are lush and invigorating to the mind, and you will be transported directly into his world of struggle and ugly post-WWII realities, his humanizing the cold annuls of understood historical record, and just pure inventiveness. Pynchonian but with (dare I say it from a cold German) soul and humanity.
July 28, 2012
"The Tin Drum" is one of my favorite books just because it's so bizarre. I couldn't get into "Cat and Mouse" and "Dog Years" in the same way. The plot of "Dog Years" seemed really complex and hard to follow. In many parts, I wasn't sure if I was following what Grass was trying to say. Also, he has this obsession with listing things, which gets tired when you're struggling with the plot.
I still respect Grass as a writer because of his way with words. His translator must have had a hell of a time.
I still respect Grass as a writer because of his way with words. His translator must have had a hell of a time.
June 7, 2007
The Tin Drum is the best of the three. But two and three have their merits. I was hooked at the second sentence "and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through by a blue-eyeed type like me." The narrator's first memory is of a ceiling fan in his living room. The image has been in my head for years. Most of what Gunther Grass writes is shit. This is him possessed by genius.
Read
August 16, 2015Eerder dit jaar zag ik de film naar de blikken trommel voor de tweede keer, nu op tv. Net als indertijd in de bioscoop: sterk!
Nu stond een stadsreis naar Gdansk/danzig op ons programma: een goede aanleiding om de Danzig/triologie erbij te pakken.
Nu stond een stadsreis naar Gdansk/danzig op ons programma: een goede aanleiding om de Danzig/triologie erbij te pakken.
June 19, 2007
Fastastic writing, in every sense of the word. I'm not really into WWII stories but this reaches beyond all that.
December 21, 2008
i loved all of these books
July 1, 2009
Stunning characterization and description of a key period in German history
July 20, 2012
Magnificent
October 19, 2014
I love The Tin Drum, and am re-reading in preparation for finishing the trilogy.
<3 <3
<3 <3
October 6, 2012
Some of the most amazing characters I've ever encountered. Truly.
April 5, 2013
While not as spellbinding as The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse and Dog Years continued in the same vein.
September 28, 2016
My favorite German author.
Want to read
February 19, 2019The Tin Drum was used as an example of influence and intertextuality in Jaidev's paper "Intertextuality and Influence: Connections and Boundaries".
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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