It was in a suburb of the Free City of Danzig that Grass grew up, in a circumscribed world of grocery store, bakery, and vegetable shop -- reared "between the Holy Ghost and Hitler's photograph."

In The Danzig Trilogy Grass recreates that fearful, distorted world with unsurpassed originality, earthiness, and poetry. Whether it is Oscar Matzerath, the screaming dwarf of The Tin Drum, or the Great Mahlke, the precociously virile schoolboy of Cat and Mouse, or Walter Matern, avenger of Nazi misdeeds in the company of the Führer's own German Shepherd in Dog Years, they all have Danzig in common.

Danzig, a port city on the Baltic sea, with its dockyards and Gothic spires, its wartime streets filled with the smell of onions and corpses -- that is the heartbeat of Grass's creative genius.