2 - Katz und Maus: Empty Words and Dangerous Rhetoric

Summary

IN KATZ UND MAUS (1961), power relationships arise in the everyday interactions between schoolboys during the Second World War. Polish-German Joachim Mahlke attempts to compensate for ostracism by striving to improve his status, which he hopes to achieve by speaking on his high school's stage. He has remained an outsider despite having repeatedly impressed his classmates with his feats in sports. In the novella, truths are seldom directly addressed, as both Mahlke and Pilenz, who survives to tell the tale, strategically ignore brutal wartime realities through evasive communication styles. In the end, Pilenz's more stable social standing enables him to betray his friend—first verbally, then physically. Katz und Maus evolved from a section of Grass's project “Kartoffelschalen,” which eventually became Hundejahre after he had extracted the material for the novella.

Like Die Blechtrommel, the novella was at once admired and reviled due to its inclusion of explicit sexuality and criticism of the Catholic Church. Grass leaves behind stories of family entanglements and instead examines youth in Nazi Germany in the tradition of schoolboy literature. In war-era Danzig, young Pilenz admires Joachim Mahlke yet joins his friends in ostracizing the ungainly overachiever, who stands out by being both more mature and more self-conscious than his peers. Pilenz and his classmates spend their summers on the wreck of the Polish minesweeper Rybitwa in the Bay of Danzig, where Mahlke impresses the others by retrieving various spoils from the wreck and even saving the life of a younger boy who had become trapped inside the Rybitwa. These heroic feats are attempts to draw attention away from his role as an outsider, due primarily to his Polish ethnicity and exemplified by his prominent Adam's apple (KM, 29, 69–70). Only when others applaud his underwater feats can Mahlke relax and temporarily forget that he is different: “Beifall tat ihm gut und besänftigte seinen Hüpfer am Hals” (KM, 29; Applause did him good and quieted the jumping mouse on his neck, CM, 32). However, his quest for acceptance through outstanding performance will ultimately prove deadly for the adolescent.