Günter Grass: A Discourse on Danzig Trilogy

Günter Grass in 1982
Marcel Antonisse / Anefo, CC0,
via Wikimedia Commons

Ladies and gentlemen,

It is a privilege to stand before you today to speak about one of the most remarkable achievements in twentieth-century literature — the Danzig Trilogy by Günter Grass, a monumental work comprising The Tin Drum (1959), Cat and Mouse (1961), and Dog Years (1963).

My aim this evening is threefold:

1. To summarise the plots of the three novels and reveal how they connect;

2. To explore the human psychology and symbolism that make them enduring masterpieces; and

3. To explain why these novels are so special — why they deserve to be read and reread across generations.

I. The Trilogy in Summary

1. The Tin Drum

The journey begins with The Tin Drum, the first and most famous of the three. It is narrated by Oskar Matzerath, an extraordinary child born in 1924 in the Free City of Danzig — today’s Gdańsk. On his third birthday, Oskar decides to stop growing. He remains physically a child for the rest of his life, though his mind continues to develop. His constant companion is a tin drum — both a toy and a symbol — and his shrill voice can shatter glass.

Through Oskar’s perspective, we see the absurdities and horrors of the early twentieth century: the bourgeois lives of the Matzerath family, the tensions between Germans and Poles, the rise of Nazism, the devastation of the Second World War, and the uneasy postwar years.

Oskar’s refusal to grow is his protest against the adult world — a world he sees as hypocritical, corrupt, and complicit in evil. The drum becomes his means of expression, his rebellion, his memory, and his art.

This novel is comic, grotesque, tragic, and profound all at once. It is a magical-realist reimagining of German history, a satire on collective guilt, and a meditation on innocence and corruption.

2. Cat and Mouse

The second part of the trilogy, Cat and Mouse, is a shorter but deeply intense novella. Its narrator, Heini Pilenz, recalls his youth during the war and his fascination with a schoolmate named Joachim Mahlke.

Mahlke is a misfit, marked by his prominent Adam’s apple, a physical detail that becomes a metaphor for his difference. He is both admired and mocked by his peers, and he channels this alienation into feats of daring — stealing a medal from a German officer, diving to dangerous depths, trying to prove his worth in a world that measures value by conformity.

Yet Mahlke’s striving ends in failure. He disappears, leaving behind guilt, memory, and a haunting absence that Pilenz cannot shake. The narrator’s act of telling becomes a confession — an attempt to atone for the cruelty and silence of youth.

The title itself — Cat and Mouse — captures the psychological game between hunter and hunted, powerful and powerless, the individual and the system. It is a symbol of life under totalitarian pressure, where moral instincts are smothered by fear and conformity.

3. Dog Years

The third novel, Dog Years, expands the scope enormously. It spans from the 1920s through the 1950s, tracing the intertwined lives of two friends: Eduard Amsel and Walter Matern.

Amsel, who is half-Jewish, is an imaginative boy who creates elaborate scarecrows — grotesque human-like figures dressed in rags and, later, in Nazi uniforms. His friend Walter, a fervent nationalist, is drawn into the Nazi movement. Their friendship, loyalty, betrayal, and eventual reckoning mirror Germany’s moral and historical descent.

The novel is narrated in three distinct voices, shifting perspectives and styles, mirroring the fragmentation of German identity itself. The scarecrows — central symbols in the book — become eerie stand-ins for the dehumanised figures of ideology, the false idols of fanaticism.

In Dog Years, Grass offers a panoramic view of a nation’s transformation from innocence to monstrosity, and the long, painful reckoning that follows.

The Trilogy as a Whole

Together, these three novels form a vast literary tapestry — intimate yet historical, realistic yet surreal. They share settings, characters, and moral questions. Each book deepens the others.

If The Tin Drum is a cry of protest, Cat and Mouse is an elegy of guilt, and Dog Years is a reckoning with the ghosts of history. Collectively, they ask: How does one live with the past? How does a nation remember, or forget? And what role can art play in redeeming memory?

II. Human Psychology and Symbolism in the Trilogy

One of the most powerful aspects of the Danzig Trilogy is its portrayal of human psychology — particularly how individuals experience guilt, trauma, alienation, and resistance.

1. The Outsider’s Mind

Each central character is an outsider.

Oskar Matzerath chooses to remain small, rejecting physical and moral growth. His psyche reflects both resistance and complicity. His refusal to grow is his rebellion, yet his voice often echoes the very chaos he condemns.

Mahlke, the protagonist of Cat and Mouse, is also an outsider — physically marked, socially ridiculed, yet morally sensitive. His ambition to earn a medal and gain acceptance is both noble and tragic.

Amsel, in Dog Years, is doubly alienated — as an artist and as a man of Jewish descent. His scarecrows represent not only the world’s cruelty but also his creative attempt to make sense of it.

Through these figures, Grass explores how individuality and conscience survive — or perish — under oppressive social systems.

2. Symbols and Motifs

Grass’s imagination works through symbols, and each is charged with meaning.

• The Tin Drum: Oskar’s drum is more than a toy; it is his voice, his protest, his memory. It beats against the silence of conformity. It is the rhythm of witness — the sound of history refusing to be forgotten.

• Refusal to Grow: Oskar’s decision not to grow up symbolises humanity’s moral paralysis — the refusal to take responsibility for evil. It is a powerful indictment of the willful blindness that allowed fascism to flourish.

• The Cat and the Mouse: The predator and prey become metaphors for social dynamics — oppressor and victim, ideology and individual. The game is endless, cruel, and psychological.

• Scarecrows: In Dog Years, the scarecrows dressed in Nazi uniforms are haunting emblems of the artificial and the monstrous. They are lifeless reflections of a society that has lost its humanity.

• Danzig Itself: The city, a crossroads between Germany and Poland, becomes a living symbol of divided identity. It embodies the liminality of history — between innocence and guilt, belonging and exile.

Guenter Grass' grave in Behlendorf
BS Hochschulstadtteil, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

3. Memory and Guilt

A recurring psychological theme in all three novels is guilt — personal, collective, inherited. Grass writes not to accuse but to understand. 

His narrators are haunted by what they did, what they failed to do, and what they chose not to see.

In The Tin Drum, Oskar’s confinement in a mental institution frames the entire novel as an act of memory. He beats his drum to remember, because forgetting would be a second betrayal.

In Cat and Mouse, Pilenz’s narration is itself a confession. “I’m writing because it has to go,” he says — a sentence that captures the compulsion of guilt, the need to unburden oneself through language.

And in Dog Years, the multiple narrators embody the fragmentation of a guilty conscience — no single voice can tell the whole truth.

Grass’s psychology is complex and honest. He shows that guilt cannot be washed away; it must be lived with, examined, narrated. Memory is both punishment and redemption.

III. Why the Trilogy Matters

Now, why are these novels so special? Why do they deserve a place in our literary and moral imagination?

1. Literary Innovation

When The Tin Drum appeared, it revolutionised postwar literature. Grass combined satire, surrealism, myth, and realism in a way that was unprecedented. His style — both lyrical and grotesque — captures the absurdity of an age that had lost its moral bearings.

The trilogy’s language is dense, musical, ironic, and layered with imagery. Grass uses fantasy not to escape history, but to confront it more deeply.

2. Moral Urgency

Grass’s trilogy confronts the darkest question of modern Europe: How could a cultured society descend into barbarism? His answer is not in political theory but in human psychology — in the quiet acceptance of evil, the seductions of belonging, the silences of ordinary people.

He does not point fingers from a distance; instead, he implicates everyone. Even the innocent child who refuses to grow is not entirely blameless. The moral brilliance of the trilogy lies in its refusal to offer easy heroes or villains.

3. Universality of the Human Condition

Though rooted in German history, the Danzig Trilogy speaks to all humanity. Its characters struggle with alienation, guilt, identity, and the search for meaning — struggles that transcend time and place.

Every reader can recognise something of themselves in Oskar’s protest, Mahlke’s yearning, or Amsel’s creativity. Grass transforms the specific tragedy of twentieth-century Europe into a universal meditation on conscience.

4. The Enduring Power of Symbolism

The trilogy’s imagery — drums, cats, mice, scarecrows, the city itself — is unforgettable. These symbols continue to resonate because they are not limited to one era. They represent the eternal tensions between innocence and experience, art and destruction, memory and oblivion.

5. A Call to Remember

Above all, Grass’s work is a call to remember. He teaches us that history does not vanish; it echoes in our collective conscience. To beat the drum, to write, to remember — these are acts of moral courage.

IV. Selected Quotations

A few lines from the trilogy illustrate Grass’s depth and irony:

• From Cat and Mouse: “I’m writing because it has to go.” — A voice driven by guilt and memory.

• From The Tin Drum: “I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me … there’s a peephole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown …” — A narrator trapped between madness and truth.

• From Dog Years: “We made scarecrows to frighten birds; in time, the birds became wiser than the men who built them.” — A haunting reflection on human folly.

V. Conclusion

Ladies and gentlemen,

Günter Grass’s Danzig Trilogy is more than a literary masterpiece; it is a mirror held up to history and to ourselves.

It shows us that art can be both beautiful and unsettling, that laughter can coexist with horror, and that memory — however painful — is the only antidote to moral amnesia.

If you read these novels, you will not only encounter unforgettable characters and vivid storytelling, but also a profound exploration of what it means to be human in times of darkness.

So I invite you to take up The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, and Dog Years. Listen to the drumbeat of memory. Watch the cat stalk the mouse. Stand before the scarecrows and ask what they tell us about ourselves.

Because the true power of literature lies not in comfort, but in confrontation — in its ability to make us remember, reflect, and change.

Thank you.