Günter Grass's Danzig Trilogy

About Danzig Trilogy

Günter Grass's Danzig Trilogy — The Tin Drum (1959), Cat and Mouse (1961), and Dog Years (1963) — is the defining German-language fictional engagement with the Nazi period and its aftermath, set in the city of Danzig (now Gdańsk) and its surrounding region. Cat and Mouse, the novella, is the most concentrated of the three: Joachim Mahlke and his enormous Adam's apple, the sunken minesweeper, the Knight's Cross. Grass won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, cited particularly for his Danzig work. The three books share landscape and atmosphere but not characters, and each can be read independently; The Tin Drum is universally recommended as the starting point.