Cherrypicker | 10th anniversary of Günter Grass's death  The fatal cartilage

Günter Grass died 10 years ago. The shortest part of his Danzig trilogy offers an accessible yet challenging introduction to the work of the Nobel Prize winner.

13 April 2025 marks the tenth anniversary of Günter Grass' death. In 1999, a good 25 years ago, the German writer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Grass was part of Gruppe 47 (Group 47), which characterised the literary scene in post-war Germany for two decades. He became famous overnight in 1959 with his debut novel Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) and went on to become one of the most important German-language writers of the second half of the 20th century.

Die Blechtrommel was the first part of his Danzig trilogy. While another extensive novel, Hundejahre (Dog Years), concluded the trilogy in 1963, the second part, Katz und Maus (Cat and Mouse, 1961), is a novella. All three works are set in Danzig (Polish: Gdańsk) - the city where Grass was born in 1927 and grew up. His parents ran a grocery shop in the Langfuhr district of Danzig.

An eccentric as the main character

Katz und Maus is a good introduction to Grass' work and a good way to familiarise yourself with his literary method. Originally conceived as a novel, Grass abandoned work on the centrepiece of his trilogy and decided to turn part of the material into a novella. The plot is set during the Second World War and revolves around the first-person narrator Heini Pilenz and his former schoolmate Joachim Mahlke. Pilenz moved to Düsseldorf after the war, where Grass also studied graphic art and sculpture at the art academy from 1948 to 1952, and tells the story in retrospect.

Mahlke is the actual main character, an eccentric with a centre parting fixed by sugar water, who suffers from his oversized Adam's apple. HE tries to hide it under a screwdriver on his shoelace, a bow tie, fashionable pom-poms and finally under the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross. The "fatal cartilage" is a stigma for Mahlke: As if that wasn't strange enough, Grass endows this character with further oddities. Mahlke is addicted to the cult of the Virgin Mary: "Of course I don't believe in God. The usual scam to dumb down the people. The only one I believe in is the Virgin Mary. That's why I'm not getting married." Despite his aversion to "the military, war games and this over-emphasis on soldiering", he later volunteers and ends up in an armoured unit, where - accompanied by a picture of the Virgin Mary - he destroys so many Russian tanks that he is awarded the Knight's Cross.

The caricature of the Saviour

Pilenz has an ambivalent relationship with Mahlke. At first, he also takes part in teasing the outsider, for example when he sets a cat on the Adam's apple, which constantly moves up and down and resembles a mouse, at the beginning of the novella. Later, he is fascinated by "Great Mahlke" and his courage to be headstrong and different. He was also caricatured as a Christ figure by a fellow pupil due to his expression of suffering: "Mahlke the Saviour was perfect and never failed to make an impact."

Pilenz's narrative motivation is his sense of guilt. It plagues him because he abandons Mahlke in the end when he deserts and hides below deck of a sunken Polish minesweeper, where he had made himself at home in the radio cabin above water level, including a "Marienkapellchen" (little chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary). Mahlke literally never resurfaces. Pilenz searched for him after the war, but never found him again.

Posthumously, he has to write this story out of his mind, it is like a confession. "I'm writing because it has to go," explains the protagonist at one point. He compulsively records his memories, but writing brings no relief, let alone redemption. The novella is "about remembering and forgetting personal guilt, about the contradiction between the compulsion to communicate and the failure to communicate in the German problem of remembrance", writes Hans Zimmermann in his biography of Grass. Remembering is perhaps also a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Just as the mouse has no chance of escaping the cat, man cannot escape his history either, no matter how desperately he tries to come to terms with it in memories.
 

Masturbation at the Baltic Sea

Grass's sprawlingly described group masturbation scene of the teenagers on the deck of the sunken minesweeper is infamous. A clique, including Pilenz and Mahlke, regularly swims out to this boat, a place of refuge where prevailing norms are suspended. The boys masturbate, spurred on by a girl called Tulla Pokriefke, who sometimes accompanies them and is aroused by it: Mahlke also stood out in this respect in the literal sense:

Danzig is (almost) everywhere

Grass' novella contains many typical elements of his writing and linguistic style: his playful and experimental use of language, the frequent alternation between dialect and standard language, the enormous wealth of allusions, resulting in a complex network of symbols and motifs. Grass' penchant for obscenity and the detailed description of physical peculiarities, including abnormalities, is not only evident in the scene above.

In addition, the reader is often left in the dark, which is why unreliable narrators - such as Pilenz in Katz und Maus - are commonplace. And finally, a high degree of intertextuality is typical of Grass, especially between his own works. The characters from his Danzig cosmos accompany us throughout his oeuvre, for example, the diminutive tin drummer Oskar Matzerath appears several times in Katz und Maus, while Pilenz and Tulla Pokriefke make appearances in Hundejahre. And even in later works, such as the novella Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk, 2002), certain characters appear again and again. After all, Danzig is (almost) everywhere.

 

04/2025