Cat and Mouse
Günter Grass · 1927–2015 · Germany
Originally Katz und Maus (German)
Why it matters
A boy with an oversized Adam's apple becomes his Danzig schoolmates' obsession and, later, a desperate war hero seeking approval. The second panel of Grass's Danzig Trilogy, sharp and compact where The Tin Drum sprawls.
At a glance
Dense, symbol-laden prose compressed into a much shorter frame than The Tin Drum.
Deep dive
Why Joachim Mahlke's oversized Adam's apple, and what he straps around his throat to hide it, drives the whole plot of Grass's tightest Danzig novel.
Written for readers who have finished the book. No plot recap, and nothing here is safe to read first.
Themes & symbolism
Joachim Mahlke's Adam's apple, a huge, mobile lump his schoolmates on a sunken minesweeper wreck off Danzig nickname 'the mouse,' makes him an object of fascination and cruelty long before the war gives it a plot. Pilenz, the narrator, admits from the first page that he was one of the cats, the boys who threw things at Mahlke's throat and watched it bob, and the whole novel is his overdue, self-incriminating account of a persecution he never once stopped taking part in.
Mahlke's obsessive diving to the wreck, retrieving a phonograph, tools, and finally a screwdriver he wears on a chain as a decoy for the throat everyone stares at, escalates into theft when he steals a decorated officer's Knight's Cross from a visiting war hero giving a talk at their school and wears it himself, a criminal act Grass treats less as rebellion than as a desperate literalization of what Mahlke actually wants, something large enough hung at his throat to make people look anywhere but at the mouse.
Mahlke's genuine wartime heroism as a tank commander, earning his own Knight's Cross legitimately after the theft gets him expelled, only repeats the pattern at greater cost: he needs the medal to be readmitted to the school and allowed to speak, and when the headmaster Klohse refuses him that platform on a technicality, the refusal reads as the same schoolboy cruelty from years earlier now enacted by an adult with institutional authority instead of a handful of gravel.
The Virgin Mary as the One Audience Mahlke Trusts
Mahlke's private devotion to a shrine of the Virgin Mary, which he visits obsessively and eventually loots the wreck's parts to decorate, is the one relationship in the book not organized around being watched and mocked, and Grass uses it to suggest what Mahlke is actually chasing underneath the medals and the screwdriver: not approval from the cats who tormented him, but a form of attention that doesn't require performance. It is also the site of his final act, breaking into a locked school auditorium at night to steal back a symbol of belonging he was denied.
The last seal: what actually happens, and why it lands the way it does.
The ending, explained
Barred from speaking at his old school despite his medal, Mahlke breaks in that night, and Pilenz, the only friend he still has, meets him afterward at the harbor and helps him back down to the sunken minesweeper for what both of them understand is not a normal dive. Grass never confirms a body: Mahlke goes under and Pilenz, guilty and relieved in a mixture he spends the rest of the book trying to untangle, does not wait long enough or dive deep enough to find out what happened to him. The uncertainty is deliberate, Grass denies both Mahlke and the reader the clean death a war novel usually supplies, replacing it with an absence Pilenz has to carry, and confess to, instead.
