Where to Start with Günter Grass: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Günter Grass — whether to begin with The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, or The Flounder. A complete reading guide to Grass's Danzig novels.
Günter Grass (1927–2015) is the most significant German novelist of the postwar period — a writer who used magical realism, grotesque comedy, and formal experiment to confront the question that no German writer could avoid: how did a civilised nation produce the Nazi regime and the Holocaust? His Danzig Trilogy — The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, Dog Years — is one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century, and The Tin Drum is among the most important European novels of the postwar era. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999.
Where to Start: The Tin Drum (1959)
One of the defining novels of the twentieth century — and the essential Grass. Oskar Matzerath, narrating from a mental institution in 1952, recounts his life in Danzig from 1924 through the war and its aftermath. At three years old, disgusted by the adult world he sees around him, Oskar decides to stop growing — remaining the size of a toddler while continuing to age mentally — and protests against reality by banging a tin drum and shattering glass with his voice. From this position of deliberate infantilism, he witnesses and participates in the collapse of the Danzig bourgeoisie, the rise of Nazism, and the catastrophe of the war.
The novel is Grass’s most complete reckoning with German guilt: Oskar’s refusal to grow is simultaneously a comic grotesque and a devastating image of the infantilism that enabled fascism. It was controversial on publication (charged with blasphemy and obscenity) and remains one of the most formally daring novels written in German.
The Shorter Classic: Cat and Mouse (1961)
The best Grass for readers who want something shorter and more concentrated — a novella of under 150 pages, narrated by Pilenz, who recounts his complex, possibly homoerotic relationship with Joachim Mahlke, a boy with an unusually large Adam’s apple who overcomes his physical self-consciousness by becoming first a brilliant swimmer and then a decorated war hero. The novella is Grass’s most psychologically intimate work — a study of guilt, obsession, and the way the Nazi period corrupted human relationships — and its portrait of the Gymnasium boys who go to war is among his most devastating.
Dog Years (1963)
The third volume of the Danzig Trilogy — the most formally complex and, for many readers, the most ambitious. Three narrators share the account of Danzig from the 1920s to the 1950s, tracing the intertwined histories of Walter Matern, a miller’s son, and Eduard Amsel, the illegitimate son of a Jewish businessman, whose friendship and separation mirrors the history of German-Jewish relations in the Nazi period. A dog — originally a gift that passes through many hands — serves as one of the novel’s central symbols. Best read after The Tin Drum and Cat and Mouse.
The Flounder (1977)
The most ambitious of Grass’s later novels — a retelling of the Grimm fairy tale of the fisherman and the flounder across eight thousand years of human history, from the Stone Age to 1970s feminist consciousness. The talking flounder, who has advised men throughout human history (and is now on trial before a feminist tribunal), is one of Grass’s most inventive conceits. The novel is a comic and furious meditation on gender, history, and the relationship between men and women, and it is Grass at his most exuberant and most politically engaged.
Reading Günter Grass
Grass is demanding but generous — his fiction is dark but never nihilistic, politically serious but always formally inventive, and his comedy (grotesque, often scatological, rooted in the earthy physicality of the Danzig working class) is one of his most distinctive qualities. Begin with The Tin Drum; read Cat and Mouse for a more concentrated experience of his gifts; continue with Dog Years if the world of the trilogy holds you. The Flounder is a natural next step for readers who want Grass at his most expansive.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Günter Grass?
The Tin Drum (1959) is both the essential starting point and Grass's masterpiece — the novel that inaugurated the Danzig Trilogy and announced one of the twentieth century's most original literary voices. Oskar Matzerath, who at the age of three decides to stop growing and bangs a tin drum to express his protest against the adult world, narrates the history of Danzig (now Gdańsk) through the Nazi period and the war from a position of deliberate infantilism that is simultaneously grotesque, comic, and devastating. Cat and Mouse is the best alternative for readers who want something shorter.
What is The Tin Drum about?
The Tin Drum (1959) is narrated by Oskar Matzerath from a mental institution, where he recounts his life from birth in Danzig in 1924 through the Second World War. Oskar, who decides at age three to stop growing and possesses a scream capable of shattering glass, observes — and participates in — the social collapse that led to Nazism and the catastrophe it produced. The novel is Grass's sustained reckoning with German guilt and the question of how ordinary people become complicit in atrocity. It is also one of the funniest and most formally inventive novels of the century — Oskar is an unreliable narrator of the most extreme kind.
What is the Danzig Trilogy?
The Danzig Trilogy consists of The Tin Drum (1959), Cat and Mouse (1961), and Dog Years (1963) — three interconnected works set in and around Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland), the German-Polish city in which Grass himself grew up. The trilogy traces the history of the city and its people through the Nazi period and the Second World War, using the grotesque, the mythological, and the politically savage to confront the question of German complicity in fascism. Each work is independent; The Tin Drum is by far the most famous but all three reward reading.
Is Günter Grass difficult to read?
The Tin Drum is demanding — long, formally inventive, and narratively non-linear — but its rewards are proportionate to its demands. Grass's prose is exuberant and often darkly funny, and the novel's grotesque surface makes it accessible in a way that more austere experimental fiction is not. Cat and Mouse is much shorter and more tightly constructed; it is the best entry for readers unsure about tackling the full Tin Drum. Dog Years is the most complex of the three and best approached after the first two.
