Cat's cradle

Günter Grass at the HFA

by Jeffrey Gantz

CAT AND MOUSE, Directed by Hansjürgen Pohland. Written by Pohland based on the novella by Günter Grass. With Lars Brandt, Peter Brandt, Wolfgang Neuss, Claudia Bremer, and Herbert Weissbach. An Evergreen Film. At the Harvard Film Archive, January 28 and 29.

Forget The Tin Drum, Dog Years, The Flounder, his plays, his poetry, his social and political writings, his artwork -- Günter Grass could go down as one of this century's signal figures just on the strength of his 1961 novella, Cat and Mouse. Like The Tin Drum (1959) and Dog Years (1963), it's set in World War II Danzig, but at 108 pages it's an intermezzo between those two epic acts, where the astonishing compactness of its structure offsets the riddling open-endedness of its narrative about two schoolboys, the recollecting narrator (and the book's "cat"), Pilenz, and his protagonist (the "mouse"), Joachim Mahlke.

Of all Grass's work, only The Tin Drum has been made into a movie (Volker Schlöndorff's ambitious 1979 effort) -- or so I thought. But the Harvard Film Archive has just unearthed from its vaults a 1966 black-and-white adaptation of Cat and Mouse directed by Hansjürgen Pohland and starring two of former German chancellor Willy Brandt's sons. It's screening at the HFA, along with The Tin Drum, next Thursday and Friday, January 28 and 29, as a prelude to February's "New German Cinema" series.

Pohland set himself a near-impossible task, even harder than the one Schlöndorff faced with the sprawling, surrealistic Tin Drum. Cat and Mouse is about not remembering, not knowing, not owning up. It's all set out on the opening page: the Conradinum schoolboys are lying about on the schlagball field when a black cat comes along and pounces on the very prominent Adam's apple of the sleeping Mahlke. Or maybe the cat was encouraged by one of the boys, Schilling or Hotten Sonntag, Pilenz can't quite recall. With that Adam's apple and his Polish-sounding name, Mahlke is different, not a good thing to be in Nazi Germany. So he's the object of the other schoolboys' adulation but also scorn (Pilenz in particular): he's the best swimmer, the one who dives down and discovers the radio shack in the Polish (of course) minesweeper that's half-submerged in the harbor, the one who fits it out for his own use. He's even the best at masturbation. And when a U-boat captain comes to address the school, it's Mahlke who lifts the man's Ritterkreuz (a neck ornament to distract attention from any neck) and, confessing à la Kierkegaard's "master thief," is expelled from school.

Eventually Mahlke volunteers, becomes a tank commander on the Russian front, and wins his own Ritterkreuz, but he's still not allowed to address his old school, to be one of "them." So he descends back into the minesweeper (or perhaps dies trying to reach it), leaving Pilenz to wait in front of the mousehole for a mouse who won't come out. Grass's dust jacket (he does his own book covers) offers a further measure of his polymathry: the cat is wearing the Ritterkreuz, and the mouse is conspicuous by its absence. Has the cat swallowed the mouse? Or is Mahlke the real cat in this game?

Grass's prestidigitory prose leaves Pohland floundering in its wake, an honest workman trying to catch lightning in a bottle. Although he's lauded by the 1968 International Film Guide as "a major talent," this appears to be Pohland's only film; even the German cinematic histories barely note him. He's extremely faithful to the text of the novella, and he doesn't shy away from Mahlke's swallowing the infamous frog's legs or the masturbation scene on the minesweeper (on the other hand the cycle of gull droppings, and therefore Grass's excremental take on Nazi Germany, eludes him). But as a '60s filmmaker, he's determined to be hip (a quality Grass has no need of), so he muddies the writer's pellucid poetry with arty cinematic concepts, not to mention a jazzy score weirdly suggestive of the ones Vince Guaraldi did for the Peanuts TV specials.

Pohland's Pilenz is shown as a grown man returning to Danzig, trying to recall; and we see him in his three-piece suit among the boys of memory -- which I suspect is confusing if you haven't read the book. The end of Grass's novella, with Pilenz's trenchant "You chose not to surface," becomes the beginning of Pohland's film; at the end of the film Pilenz speeds away in a motorboat, as if he'd laid Mahlke's ghost to rest, but of course Pilenz will never be free of Mahlke. Even envisioning Mahlke is a violation (not that Pohland had any choice) of the novel's spirit: Pilenz can't altogether recollect what his hero/victim looked like, partly out of repressed guilt, partly because not noticing, and not validating, other people is what Nazi Germany was all about.

The acting is creditable (but not credited). The stocky, squinty Pilenz comes off as a regular, ordinary guy -- which is what's most frightening about him. The barking Mahlke seems to me more Prussian than Grass intended, but that could be Pohland's (legitimate) idea of how he's trying to fit in. The novella's "girl," Tulla Pokriefke, described by Grass as "skin and bones" but displaying sexual charisma nonetheless, is played by a beefy young lady (presumably Claudia Bremer) devoid of Tulla's surly quicksilver charm. This film is a pedestrian attempt at a masterpiece, but even in shadow Cat and Mouse is a formidable creature, and this opportunity won't present itself very often. Read the book; see the movie.