by Günter Grass
Who will supply me with a good ending? For what began with cat and mouse torments me today in the form of crested terns on ponds bordered with rushes. Though I avoid nature, educational films show me these clever aquatic birds. Or the newsreels make me watch attempts to raise sunken freight barges in the Rhine or underwater operations in Hamburg harbor: it seems they are blasting the fortifications near the Howald Shipyard and salvaging aerial mines. Men go down with flashing, slightly battered helmets, men rise to the surface. Arms are held out toward them, the helmet is unscrewed, removed: but never does the Great Mahlke light a cigarette on the flickering screen; it’s always somebody else who lights up.
When a circus comes to town, it can count on me as a customer. I know them all, or just about; I’ve spoken with any number of clowns in private, out behind the trailers; but usually they have no sense of humor, and if they’ve ever heard of a colleague named Mahlke, they won’t admit it.
I may as well add that in October 1959 I went to Regensburg to a meeting of those survivors of the war who, like you, had made Knight’s Cross. They wouldn’t admit me to the hall. Inside, a Bundeswehr band was playing, or resting between pieces. During one such intermission, I had the lieutenant in charge of the order squad page you from the music platform: “Sergeant Mahlke is wanted at the entrance.” But you didn’t show up. You didn’t surface.
Back Cover
Cat and Mouse was the book Günter Grass wrote immediately after The Tin Drum, and it shares its setting with that earlier novel: Danzig during World War II. But while The Tin Drum achieves its extraordinary cumulative effect through the sprawling and picaresque, Cat and Mouse depends on brevity and compactness.
The provocative story centers on the narrator’s vivid recollection of a boyhood scene in which a black cat is provoked to pounce on his friend Mahlke’s “mouse”—his prominent Adam’s apple. This incident sets off a wild series of utterly Grassian events that ultimately leads to Mahlke’s becoming a national hero. Because of Grass’s singular storytelling virtuosity, Cat and Mouse is marvelously entertaining, powerful, and full of funny episodes—yet it also has a serious undercurrent “at the deepest level, [about] the survival of individual human qualities in this age of wars and state-directed politics” (The New York Times Book Review).
Günter Grass—novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, and graphic artist—is considered Germany’s greatest contemporary writer. He lives in Berlin.
Scan Notes, v3.0: Proofed carefully against DT, italics and special characters intact. The run-on words that appear in various places (youknowtheonesthatlooklikethis) seem to be on purpose, or at least they appear in the DT that way.
Converted to ePUB by antimist on 17/05/2015