Günter Grass's Dog Years

About Dog Years Grass

Günter Grass's Dog Years (Hundejahre, 1963) is the third and most ambitious volume of the Danzig Trilogy — a vast, three-narrator novel following Edward Amsel and Walter Matern from childhood in the Vistula delta through the Nazi period and postwar West Germany. The scarecrows Amsel builds throughout are its central metaphor; the dog Prinz's journey from the delta to Hitler's bunker traces German history's arc. Dog Years is the longest and formally most demanding of the trilogy, sharing the Danzig landscape and the burden of Nazi memory with The Tin Drum and Cat and Mouse but reaching further in scope and formal ambition. Grass won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.