Hundejahre. [Dog Years].

Dog Years (1963) is the third and final volume of Günter Grass's celebrated Danzig Trilogy — completing the sequence begun with The Tin Drum (1959) and Cat and Mouse (1961) — and by general critical consensus its most formally ambitious and most demanding work. The novel unfolds across three parts narrated by three different voices, presenting the years from the Weimar Republic through the postwar era through the lens of the complicated relationship between Eduard Amsel, the half-Jewish maker of scarecrows of increasingly uncanny artistic power, and Walter Matern, the miller's son whose love-hate friendship with Amsel is progressively poisoned by the ideological pressure of National Socialism. Grass's style throughout parodies the arcane philosophical syntax of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, which one of the teenage protagonists delights in mocking — a formal device that adds a layer of satirical intellectual critique to an already densely layered narrative. The novel sold three hundred thousand copies within three months of its September 1963 publication, owing in part to a skillful publicity campaign by Grass's publisher Luchterhand — a remarkable commercial achievement given the work's complexity and considerable length of more than seven hundred pages. Grass received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999, with the Swedish Academy citing the Danzig Trilogy as central to his achievement and Dog Years in particular as a work in which the grotesque imagination of postwar German prose reached its fullest and most formally daring expression.