SOURCE: "The Danzig Trilogy I: The Tin Drum," in Günter Grass: The Writer in a Pluralist Society, Marion Boyars, 1980, pp. 20-50.

In the following excerpt, Hollington discusses Grass's portrayal of bourgeois values in Nazi Germany.

Since 1964 Grass has repeatedly asked that the three novels on which his fame and reputation as a writer chiefly rest—The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse and Dog Years—be considered as components of a 'Danzig trilogy'; the arrangement has now been formalized by the Luchterhand reissue of the novels under that title. It is not easy to assess the significance to be attached to this grouping. That the novels have important features in common—Danzig as a subject, overlapping characters, events, themes—is self-evident; but it is my view that the search for closer thematic or metaphoric links between them can be misleading. They embody a conception of art that is...