Dog Years (novel)

Dog Years, published in Germany in 1963 as Hundejahre, is a novel by Günter Grass. It is the third and last volume of his Danzig Trilogy, the other two being The Tin Drum and Cat and Mouse.

Grass's style frequently parodies Martin Heidegger's arcane philosophical diction in Being and Time, which one of the teenage protagonists likes to poke fun at. The years from the prewar to the postwar era are presented in Dog Years through the perspective of three different narrators, a team directed by Amsel—alias Brauxel—who makes scarecrows in man's image. The seemingly solid childhood friendship of Amsel and Matem evolves into the love-hate relationship between Jew and non-Jew under the impact of Nazi ideology. When the former friends from the region of the Vistula finally meet again in the West, the ominous führer dog who followed Matem on his odyssey is left behind in Brauxel's subterranean world of scarecrows. While Dog Years, like The Tin Drum, again accounts for the past through the eyes of an artist, the artist is no longer a demonic tin-drummer in the guise of a child but the ingenious maker of a world of objects reflecting the break between the creations of nature and those of men. Referring to Amsel's "keen sense of reality in all its innumerable forms,"