The German novelist Gunter Grass (1927- ) was born and came of age in the Free City of Danzig. Three of his best-known novels, The Tin Drum (1959), Cat and Mouse (1961), and Dog Years (1963), are for the most part set in Danzig in the period from the 1920s to the end of the World War II. The three novels have been published in one volume under the title The Danzig Trilogy (1980). The city occupies a central role in these works, its checkered history constituting a microcosm of 20th-century Germany.

The Tin Drum opens with its narrator, Oskar Matzeroth, who is a 30-year-old inmate in a mental institution. He was born in Danzig in the 1920s to a woman whose husband may or, more likely, may not be his father. Oskar, even at birth, is painfully, often hilariously, conscious of the debased world he is entering. He chooses to stop growing at the age of three and, by incessantly beating a drum, communicates his rejection of the growth of Nazism in Danzig. Among the things the Nazis destroyed in Danzig was childhood, turning every little boy into a miniature soldier and every girl into a submissive daughter of the Reich, a potential breeder of the new super race. Oskar's refusal to grow also suggests his protest over the denial of his childhood.

But Oskar is no innocent victim. He is guilty, in the complex paradoxical scheme of the novel, of trying to evade guilt. In this respect Oskar represents his readership--primarily postwar Germany, attempting to blot out its past and, by extension, denying the connection between individual acts and collective history. He also represents the artist who cannot evade his responsibility to disrupt the accepted norms of an evil system. One example of Oscar's playing this role is his effective disruption of a Nazi demonstration. Because of his small size, Oskar is able to slip beneath the speakers' grandstand and sabotage the event by playing "The Blue Danube" and jazz tunes that leave the audience dancing rather than listening to Nazi rhetoric. But there are other times when Oscar goes along with the system, suggesting that Grass's satire is sometimes directed at himself.

Cat and Mouse, the shortest of the three works, focuses on the war years in Danzig. Its narrator, Pilenz, tells the story of his classmate Joachim Mahlke, whose distinguishing characteristic is an unusually large and unstable Adam's apple. At one point in their childhood, Pilenz sicks a cat on Mahlke, because the shifting Adam's apple gives the impression of being a mouse. Mahlke embarks on a career of strenuous heroism, ultimately winning the Iron Cross for bravery in battle, but the Danzig "cat," in the form of a Nazi schoolmaster, refuses to acknowledge his achievement, a rejection that precipitates Mahlke's death. This emblematic story underscores the cruelty and victimization visited upon those whose individualism poses a threat to totalitarian society.

Like The Tin Drum, Dog Years covers the period from the 1920s to the 1950s, the decade of the wirtschaftwunder ("economic miracle") of postwar Germany. The novel's complex, exuberant shifts in language and the various transformations of its characters make it difficult to follow, but its unifying tone, irony barely suppressing rage, compels the reader's attention. The chief characters are Walter Matern and Eddi Amsel, who meet as children in Danzig in the 1920s. Matern defends Amsel, a half-Jewish boy, from schoolyard bullies, from which emerges their complex, mutually dependent relationship of German and Jew, one of the novel's key themes. Amsel early on has developed a distinctive skill, the ability to create lifelike scarecrows that can move somewhat like toy soldiers. Nazi groups like the SA (Sturmabteilung) in the early 1930s prove to be ideal models for his art until a group of masked SA youth attack him, knocking out all of his teeth. Among the group is Matern himself, who has joined the SA as part of his restless search for an ideology to which he can commit himself. At the end of the war, Matern, a prisoner of war, is released and heads home, accompanied by a stray German dog he adopts. The dog happens to be Prinz, one of Hitler's dogs, a gift to him from the city of Danzig. Prinz has escaped from his master's doomed bunker in the last days of the war. Matern and dog team up to form a formidable antifascist duo, hunting down ex-Nazis, particularly the members of the group who attacked Matern's friend Amsel. In the course of these events Matern is himself exposed as an ex-Nazi and plans to flee to East Germany. The novel ends with a reunited Matern and Amsel returning to the abandoned potash mine in Danzig where the story began. In the mine--"hell itself"--they come upon 32 stalls in which scarecrows represent the full range of human folly and iniquity. Despite these revelations Matern clings stubbornly to the illusion that he can ignore the past and start over with a clean slate.

Still another Grass work that focuses on Danzig is From the Diary of a Snail (1972). A mix of fact and fiction, the book is cast as a diary kept by Grass in 1969, while he was assisting the presidential campaign of Willy Brandt. Interwoven into his journal of the campaign is a historical account of the fate of the Jews of Danzig in the Nazi years and a fictional rendering of Hermann Ott, nicknamed "Doubt" (after the allegorical figure Melancholy in the famous engraving of Albrecht Durer). Doubt is a Jewish schoolteacher, hiding out in the cellar of Anton Stomma, an illiterate peasant, whose condition for helping is that he be allowed to beat Doubt regularly. The point both in Doubt's relations with Stomma and in Grass's political campaign is that progress moves at a snail's pace and that patience and persistence are critical virtues in the painfully slow journey to a just society.

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