ABSTRACT
Danzig is a city of fable. It is fabled in that it no longer figures on the maps of Europe. It is fabled in that it is celebrated in the fabulous novels of Günter Grass. It is fabled in that in both real life and Grass’s novels it was a place where people were ‘different’, where things happened. Grass’s massive talent often obscures the use to which he puts the city; his fabulous characters often distract the reader from the fact that, buried within the fable, Grass has created a cumulative picture of middle-class life in the city up to the end of World War II. It is a picture which is brutal and pains-
takingly honest in its dissection of the secret inner life of these people. It is a portrait that chronicles the selfishness, the wilful folly, of a people who brought destruction down upon themselves. Yet it is also a record of the richness and variety of the city’s human potential and the gravity of its destruction in 1945.
