The Tin Drum has been called a picaresque novel, a Bildungsroman, and sheer pornography. In a famous account of modern German literature, Grass's style is described as "naturalistic … with an alloy of surrealist gags," and as "the attempt at a 'black' literature in Germany." I should like to approach his novels primarily as satires and to begin by considering The Tin Drum from the points of view of folklore, myth, and above all of literature. Certainly it is a work of linguistic art…. (pp. 129-30)

Basically the grotesque gnome Oskar Matzerath is an artist, and as such, mainly a satirist. People cannot resist the magic rhythms of his drum: he has the impact of a bizarre Orpheus; his spell is more powerful, though less sinister, than that of the magician Cipolla in Thomas Mann's Mario and the Magician. Further, his own voice has telekinetic power…. Thus Oskar cannot only enrapture the masses; he can destroy and sabotage, and often does. Sometimes he acts out of sheer mischief: he often indulges in satire for satire's sake. Yet in his major performances he destroys, or at least ridicules, the meretricious and corrupt. (p. 131)

Oskar's far-reaching voice makes one think of Apollo; and it should be no surprise that the dwarf combines, in his own scurrilous way, Apollonian and Dionysiac aspects. Needless to say, Grass's use of mythological allusions is not highfalutin. Neither is it obvious, but it is there. For one thing, a writer so steeped in Joyce's work and obviously familiar with Mann's would not be likely to eschew the employment of myth completely. (p. 132)

A destroyer of shams, conventions, or anything else that annoys him, Oskar Matzerath is pretty clearly a miniature Apollo. As we know from the Iliad, Apollo, when angry, is formidable indeed: he slaughters his victims from afar…. Similarly, Oskar directs the music of his drum or his piercing voice against anyone who has incurred his anger or disapproval—whether a relative, a schoolteacher, or a particularly unpleasant Nazi. Only images of Jesus and the Dove prove invulnerable, but Oskar is annoyed, rather than religiously moved, by this circumstance.

His greatest feat, however, is a Dionysiac one. He refused to join the spectators in front of a grandstand where the Nazis are about to stage a political demonstration, for his friend Bebra has told him that "people like us"—artists, that is—belong on the grandstand, not in front of it. But typically, he approaches it from behind—seeing its seamy side, so to speak—and then takes advantage of his tiny stature to slip underneath the stand, drum and all. Here he deliberately sabotages the celebration by striking up "The Beautiful Blue Danube" from his hiding place. There is loud laughter; many of the spectators join in. The color blue suffuses the whole place, Grass tells us; the nationalistic songs of the brown shirts are driven away. When the Nazi leaders (Grass uses their actual names) approach the speakers' stand, Oskar strikes up even bluer music, a Charleston, "Jimmy the Tiger." All the spectators begin to dance; the occasion is ruined, from the Nazi point of view; but the squads of SA and SS men sent to look for socialist or communist saboteurs never suspect that a whistling three-year-old child is the culprit.

Since Oskar's drum is apparently only a toy, few people take it seriously: he is an artist among Philistines. (pp. 132-33)

Whatever his vices, Oskar … is basically concerned with finding and expressing the truth. We recall that, at the age of three, he deliberately arranged the accident which made him a dwarf for life—or so he claims. Better to remain an outsider, a grotesque cripple, than to grow into a Philistine or a Nazi. In fact, there is a hint that Oskar's eventual hospitalization corresponds to his own preference: he would rather retreat into a metaphorical hermit's cell than be involved in the teeming but to him boring activity of the Federal Republic…. (p. 134)

To turn to The Tin Drum as a verbal work of art: one may best characterize it, I believe, as baroque. This long, rich book is full of the violent contrasts, the extreme tensions which we generally ascribe to that style…. While there are scenes and images of great beauty—like the evocation of the January night in the chapter "Show Windows"—the language inevitably tends toward the grotesque. Of course Oskar's presence alone would account for that; his love affairs are particularly bizarre. Grass is addicted to picturing eels in a remarkably repulsive way, and his descriptions of vomit are almost literally emetic. His sense of death and underlying evil resembles that of the seventeenth century or the late Middle Ages. At the very end of the book, a sinister black cook is evoked; she seems to symbolize guilt and may remind us of the black spider in Jeremias Gotthelf's novella of that name. For all his sense of comedy and wit, Oskar is whistling—or rather drumming—in the dark. (pp. 135-36)

Although The Tin Drum is basically a satirical novel, it has another, in a sense tragic, aspect. There is much concern with guilt, with Oskar's loss of innocence, and with related themes. When he changes from a dwarf into a small hunchback, he realizes, perhaps even exaggerates, his responsibility for the deaths of his mother, of Jan Bronski, and of his putative father, Matzerath…. At the end of the novel, Oskar is no longer primarily the satiric genius and rogue, but a man heavily burdened by his past.

In its title, Cat and Mouse (1961), Grass's novella recalls the cat-and-mouse situation typical of Kleist's dramas: the protagonist, like the Prince of Homburg, Alcmene, or the Marquise of O―, is cruelly played with by a stronger power (or person), though he may eventually fight his way to salvation. Further, a central symbol of the novella is the Adam's apple of the protagonist, Joachim Mahlke, which happens to be exceptionally prominent…. I believe that the interwoven, and typically Kleistian, motifs of cat and mouse and Adam's apple provide the key to Grass's story. In the first paragraph of Cat and Mouse one of his schoolfellows encourages a young cat to leap at Mahlke's twitching Adam's apple while he lies resting, apparently asleep, and the characteristic motifs recur consistently.

To turn to the action of the novella: it too is set at the time of the Second World War. Joachim Mahlke is an unusual youth, extremely brave, ambitious to a fault, and rather grotesque in appearance. He is tall and very thin, with an embarrassingly large Adam's apple. (There is said to be a belief among German schoolboys that this protuberance is an index to the sexual powers of its possessor. Although the actually highly sexed Mahlke is the most chaste of his group, the familiar association of apple, sin, and sex is clearly established.) In any case, his Adam's apple stamps the protagonist as a marked man. (pp. 138-39)

Grass has "distanced" the story by making a personal defeat, not some Nazi crime, the occasion of Mahlke's defection. It is nevertheless, I believe, a moral parable. Joachim Mahlke is a person of quite exceptional will power and courage. He also has more than his share of the "old Adam," but generally he keeps it in check: normally, he is downright ascetic. Here of course his devotion to the Virgin is relevant. His greatest strength—and weakness—is his extraordinarily competitive spirit…. Typically, the appeal to competition is responsible for his only indulgence in one of the less attractive forms of adolescent sexual play. An obscure sense of rivalry also leads him to steal the officer's decoration; characteristically, he confesses the theft voluntarily. Clear now about his own motives, he can win a cross of his own. In his eagerness to blot out his disgrace by appearing at his old school, he is abnormally sensitive: the director's refusal amounts to the end of his career. Fate or the era is playing a cat-and-mouse game with him.

Symbolically seen, the Knight's Cross represents to Mahlke a talisman, in fact a sort of "antiapple," which makes the embarrassing "apple" or "mouse" on his own throat irrelevant. When, however, he realizes that the way of life represented by that decoration is false, he throws it—and presumably his life—away. By so doing he saves his soul—to use an expression which Grass might find old-fashioned. Mahlke is the most admirable person in Grass's fiction, and the narrator … is impelled by a persistent guilt complex to write about his friend. We have no way of knowing whether the mouse Mahlke would have survived in a time when the cats were less cruel and vicious. (pp. 140-41)

Equally ambitious and almost equally long, Dog Years is darker in tone than The Tin Drum. It treats the same period, and most of its action takes place in the same areas: the territory of the Free City and the Rhineland. In fact, Oskar and his drum are mentioned several times. Its overall structure is more complex: there are three sections, each with its own narrator.

The other side of the coin is that Dog Years is less sharply focused than its predecessor. For one thing, the dog, or rather the succession of dogs, is not as potent a centralizing symbol as is Oskar with his drum—and with all respect for dogs, one must say that the dwarf is much more interesting than they. The second novel is harsher and less distanced than The Tin Drum. At times, the satire is heavy-handed, as in the account of the rumors circulated about Hitler's dog Prince after the Führer's inglorious demise. Yet Dog Years is a rewarding, many-faceted, and important book. (p. 142)

The plot of Dog Years is basically simple: we read of boys growing up in and around Danzig, of the impact of Hitlerism and of the war, and of the postwar period. Perhaps the most interesting figure is Walter Matern, who protects his gifted, half-Jewish friend Eddie Amsel from bullies, but later betrays him. After the war, Matern, filled with guilt and anger, takes grotesque revenge on all the former Nazis he can reach. Amazingly enough, Eddie Amsel survives; his nickname in the third part is Gold Mouth: Nazi bullies, including his ambivalent friend Matern, have knocked all his teeth out.

The most striking aspect of the book is Grass's phenomenal virtuosity of style. Adroitly rotating his narrators, and repeatedly shifting the time of the narrative from around 1960 to the days before the war and back again, Grass revels in parody, puns, and other Joycean devices. (p. 143)

Usually exuberant, sometimes excessively wordy, Grass's style can be concentrated and nervous. At times, to avoid banality, he breaks off a sentence before its end, leaving the reader to infer the rest…. Grass is indeed a man of many devices, and often his verbal arabesques and baroque flourishes obscure the narrative line.

Often fantastic though he is, Grass includes realistic, even naturalistic touches. To recreate the atmosphere of the Danzig region, he brings in local history, mythology, and superstitions. Frequently he has recourse to dialect. He names actual persons and firms…. (p. 145)

Yet, as in The Tin Drum, it is the major symbols which really take us to the heart of the matter. The first important one arises from Eddie Amsel's hobby of constructing grotesque scarecrows…. Although Amsel's creations do actually frighten away the birds, they are essentially artistic renderings of his own experiences: he portrays in them people he has met and even records in scarecrow form an incident in which his schoolmates, already anti-Semitic, beat him cruelly. Surrealistic though these unusual mobiles are, they are based on nature: he feels that they are part of nature. Amsel's most important constructs, however, are images of SA men…. While the ordinary, obedient Germans appear as dogs, the Nazis are scarecrows, monsters. Amsel also plans to build a giant, phoenix-like bird which will always burn and give off sparks but never be consumed—a symbol of the creative artist, and perhaps of his own survival.

As the strength of the Nazi movement increases, in the second part of the story, so does the number of swastika flags along the Danzig waterfront. Eventually the war breaks out. The dog motif becomes more important: nasty little Tulla, so called after a mythical figure … repeatedly sets the dog Harras on an inoffensive piano teacher. Prince, the puppy Harras has sired, is trained by the Danzig police and then presented to the Führer. For her part, Tulla, shocked by a swimming accident, regresses for a time into sheer animality: she spends a week in Harras' kennel, sleeping there and sharing his rations. Dog years indeed! (pp. 146-47)

The symbol of the prophetic meal worms—they live in a bag of flour belonging to Matern's father—is of a farcical sort. These worms can foretell the future, so leading industrialists and intellectuals make pilgrimages to the house of old miller Matern, who becomes more and more prosperous as the "economic miracle" continues. Finally the East Germans kidnap the remarkable little animals. All this may seem—or be—excessively farfetched, but I believe that Grass is satirizing a vein of superstition which still persists in Germany. (p. 147)

The most successful symbol … is the magic spectacles which play a decisive role in the radio program…. These eyeglasses, produced in great quantity by the mineowner Brauxel—as Eddie Amsel now calls himself—enable young people to see exactly what their elders did in the Nazi years. Thus when the ten-year-old Walli sees Matern through the spectacles he has just bought her, she screams and runs away—and Matern is by no means the worst of his generation. Such eyeglasses are indeed easily available in Germany today—in accounts of the trials of Eichmann and other criminals, in movies, in dramas like The Diary of Anne Frank and The Deputy, and of course in innumerable books. The chasm between the generations could hardly be wider and deeper. It is a bitter but inevitable situation. (pp. 147-48)