Cat and Mouse

A nuanced story which is part the Christ (Mahlke) story and part anti-war. A heart breaker. When you google the book, you will discover that many professional reviewers liken Joachim Mahlke to Christ, and indeed, it helps to be familiar with the Crucifiction story.

A profoundly interesting and informative autobiography of this great German literary figure!

It's the Cat and Mouse!

Excellent follow-up to Die Blechtrommel ...

Growing up in Danzig in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s must have been a highly challenging and fearful experience. German Nobel Prize writer Gunter Grass comes back to this time of his life again and again in various books. In “Cat and Mouse” he presents a fascinating coming of age tale for a group of teenage boys whose story would be fairly unexceptional were it not for their time in the Hitler Youth and WWII. All memory is a form of fiction, but this moving account is probably truer than we know.

A book by the German author who won the 1999 Nobel prize, best known for his novel The Tin Drum. The story is set during World War II in Danzig, a free city on the Baltic Sea between Poland and Germany until the Nazis took it over. Today it’s Gdansk, Poland.There are two main characters, two boys of early high school age, the only two Catholics who hang out with a group of ten or so Lutheran boys and occasionally girls. In summer they swim out daily to their hangout – a half sunken Polish minesweeper some distance out in the harbor. One main character is the narrator who tells the story of the real main character who becomes the main theme of the book --- his radical changes over time.At first the main character is shy and awkward. Today we’d call him a geek or a dork. The other boys avoid him and make fun of him. He says he wants to be a professional clown. He’s tall and gangly with big ears and can’t even swim at first. (His huge Adam’s apple is a joke in the title of the book.) Since they often swim naked he’s also admired for the size of his, let’s say, ‘dangling participle.’But once they teach him how to swim he becomes the best swimmer and diver among them. He’s the only one who dives underwater into the ship’s hold and daily starts bringing up medals, pictures, equipment, tools and even cans of food from the sunken part of the vessels. He transforms into a hero and the kids start calling him the “Great Mahlke.”Both the Catholic boys are very religious but in different ways. The narrator is a daily altar boy. The Great is excessively devout in taking communion but even his priest worries about his Mariolatry. The Great says “Of course I don’t believe in God. He’s just a swindle to stultify the people. The only thing I believe in is the Virgin Mary. That’s why I’m never going to get married,”The Great lives in a household of females – his mother and her female relatives. His father died before the war in a work accident. More transformations. He seems to disparage the Nazi war effort, listlessly singing patriotic songs and having the audacity to steal a medal from a visiting war hero speaking at their school. Yet as soon as he is old enough he suddenly runs off to enlist in the army and becomes a recognized war hero for shooting so many enemy tanks, which he writes home bragging about. He also acquires a reputation as a lady’s man, going after officers’ wives while men are at the front.He transforms again. Home on leave he suddenly announces he’s going AWOL and hides out on the boat with the help of his friend. To me, I did not get a good sense of what all these transformations were about or why they occurred.So a bit strange but the story moved along and kept my interest. It’s fairly short, less than 200 pages. We get snippets of ships and naval battle statistics. I thought it was a worthwhile read.

Beautiful and heartbreaking, this is a story about two school friends, taking place in Germany during World War II.Pilenz is one of a crowd of teenaged boys who like to hang out together at the beach, occasionally swimming out together to a partially submerged Polish minesweeper. Mahlke is just a kid who wants to belong.But Mahlke is deeply flawed, Pilenz explains. He is independent, inventive, original and individual, at a time when it was deadly dangerous to deviate in any way from the crowd. With dread, the reader begins to understand that, in telling this story, the narrator is performing a kind of atonement, seeking to repent of an as-of-yet unnamed sin.A profoundly moving book. You don't have to look far to find the enemy, says Grass. He is already there, inside you, waiting for just the right time to pounce.

Okay, I'll admit freely: "Katz und Maus" was required reading in school, which obviously biased me against it immediately. What's worse, it was German postwar literature, which never fails to be depressing and downbeat. I knew I was in for a greuling read.And then, suddenly, it wasn't. In fact, I started liking it from the first line, and carried on until the end, which I'd give away if I said wasn't an end, so I'll let you read it yourself.The story is complicated and non-linear. It is told from a first person narrative, the exact reliability of which is consatantly brought into question, either by the fog of the years or deliberate misconstruction due to feelings of guilt, the narrator never seems too sure about what happened, often offering several different versions of the same story at the same time, and even going so far as to admit his own fictitiousness. The story that serves as a Leitmotiv, as well as title of the book, is the cat that attacked Mahlke's adam's apple, and exactly how it got there.What I found most striking about the book on first glance was the descriptions of the places and characters that the novella is centered on. At the same time, you have a feeling that it's merely a part of a greater whole. It fits in with the other two books in the so-called Danzig Trilogy seamlessly, yet still sets itself apart.I have another confession to make: I attend a German high school, and so I read it in German. In my opinion, though what I've read of the excerpts seems like a decent translation, Günter Grass is an author who uses the German language to its full extent, emplying every manner of grammatical and syntactical tricks to underline the story. These, unfotunately, are completely lost in the translation. If you understand German decently, I would strongly encourage you to seek out an original language text.