Poets are usually lovers and their lost loves make the best poetry, and if the novelist is often someone who bears witness to his or her homeland, then lost homelands inform the best novels. This is certainly the case of Günter Grass, the most critically and popularly successful German novelist of the postwar world.

The lost homeland is Danzig, a port city on the Baltic today Polish and called Gdansk but which was an important German city from the middle ages to 1918. For Grass it is lost in three senses; the more usual one of being the city of childhood and adolescence, then because much of its historic fabric, the tall old Hanseatic houses and fine public buildings were destroyed in fighting and bombing 1944-5, and finally because it was ethnically cleansed of Germans at the end of the war and resettled by Poles, some of them themselves resettled from Eastern Poland which had been taken over by the Soviet Union.

This loss of place and the need to somehow recapture it to feel whole is one of Grass’ great themes and Cat and Mouse is his most poignant and achieved work on it. On the one hand there is a sustained recreation of the world and sights of prewar Danzig; a workaday world of little suburbs and their gardens with ‘glazed garden ornaments; frogs, mushrooms or dwarfs’, church halls with tarred tarpaulin roofs, rusting ships in the port, neighbourhood stores with potato cellars and herring barrels. A workaday, petty-bourgeois youth’s eye view of the city but also with a certain exotic tinge — this is a city where Poles, Germans and Kashubians (a Slav minority) mingle and clash, sometimes in the same family. It’s also a political oddity, an independent Free City State under a League of Nations (forerunner of the UN) commissioner and its own governing senate which eventually, to the Danzig Germans undying shame, elected a Nazi majority.

All this is also just the background to an evocation of the book’s central figure, the unforgettable Mahlke, a kind of awkward and gangling German James Dean. With his screwdriver hung permanently around his neck and the stuffed owl left to him by his absent father he is a hero to his boyish contemporaries he seems to possess the secret of style and individuality and the courage to be daring and different.

He must be one of the most sympathetic portrayals of an adolescent in world literature. Mahlke is a kind of oddball saint, with his own cast-iron sense of ethics which stays untainted by the degenerate behaviour and ideology of the Nazis.

Written with immense nostalgia, or as the Portuguese say, saudade, Cat and Mouse is one of the great unmissable books, a wartime German (and hence somewhat terrifying) Catcher in the Rye or Le Grand Meaulnes (see French Babel Guide).

‘The principal’s speech went on and on. Boredom spread from the lush green plants to the oil painting on the rear auditorium, a portrait of Baron von Conradi the founder of our school... In this lofty hall Klohse’s cool peppermint breath, which suffused all his mathematics classes, substituting for the odour of pure science, wasn’t much of a help. From up front his words barely carried to the middle of the auditorium: «Thosewhocomeafterus Andinthishourwhenthetravellerreturnsbuthistimethehomelandand letusneverpureofheartasIsaidbeforepureofheart andifanyonedisagreesletandinthishourkeepcleantoconclude withthewordsofSchillerif yourlifeyoudonotstakethelaurelneverwillyoutake Andnowbacktowork!»’ p72-3