Dog Years

Eddi Amsel, half-Jewish and the more inventive of two Danzig boyhood friends, builds scarecrows on an industrial scale from his family's farm, elaborate, uncannily lifelike figures that unsettle everyone who sees them and that Grass treats as genuine art decades before anyone in the novel would use that word for them. Walter Matern, his gentile friend, admires and resents the scarecrows in roughly equal measure, and the novel tracks their friendship through exactly the years, the 1920s into the Nazi rise, when that mixture curdles into something violent.

The dog lineage that gives the novel its title, traced obsessively across three generations of Danzig-area breeding records, culminates in Prinz, a descendant given as a gift to Hitler and photographed at his side, and Grass uses the pedigree charts, reproduced in the text with the same bureaucratic precision the Nazis brought to their own records of ancestry, to make a mordant point about what the regime actually valued tracking: bloodlines, whether canine or human, kept with obsessive documentary care.

In one of the trilogy's most brutal single scenes, Matern, now in the SA, joins a mob that ambushes Amsel and beats him half to death, knocking out every one of his teeth with a set of ice skates used as knuckledusters, a betrayal by his oldest friend that Grass stages without any of the black comedy that softens most of the novel's violence. Amsel survives, disappears from Danzig entirely, and resurfaces after the war as the wealthy businessman Brauxel, or Goldmouth, his ruined mouth rebuilt entirely in gold, a transformation that turns the assault's literal damage into the visible proof of who he had to become to survive it.

Postwar, Matern tours occupied Germany ostensibly to settle scores with former Nazis, but the revenge he actually delivers is petty and displaced, seducing and infecting women with gonorrhea, poisoning dachshunds belonging to men he holds grudges against, gestures so disproportionate to the crimes they're meant to answer that Grass turns the whole tour into a bitter joke about postwar Germany's appetite for cheap, symbolic reckoning instead of the real kind. Matern never once confronts what he did to Amsel directly, the one debt his entire revenge tour is actually circling.