Danzig Trilogy

The Danzig Trilogy (German: Danziger Trilogie) is a series of novels and novellas by German author Günter Grass.^[1] The trilogy focuses on the interwar and wartime period in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland).

The three books in the trilogy are:

• The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel), published in 1959
• Cat and Mouse (Katz und Maus), published in 1961
• Dog Years (Hundejahre), published in 1963

John Reddick was the first person to explicitly identify the three books as a trilogy and to refer to it as the Danzig Trilogy.^[2][3] German publisher Luchterhand re-issued the three novels under the overall heading Danziger Trilogie in 1980. In 1987, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich published the first US edition of the entire trilogy under this name.^[2]

The trilogy is sometimes seen as part of a larger pentology that includes the later works Der Butt (1977) and Die Rättin (1986). An alternative interpretation extends the trilogy to a sextet by the addition of Der Butt, Unkenrufe (1992), and Im Krebsgang (2002). Publisher Steidl advertised these six books as Das Danzig-Sextett in 2006.^[2]