Feeding the Nation: Culinary Memory, Appetite, and Guilt in Grass’s Danzig Trilogy

This article explores how Günter Grass constructs food and appetite as politically charged mechanisms for negotiating postwar German guilt in The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, and Dog Years. Drawing on food studies, psychoanalysis, trauma theory, and cultural memory discourse, it argues that Grass develops a form of gastric historiography, wherein consumption, digestion, and bodily refusal become metaphors for the ethical and psychological reckoning with Nazism. Grass’s grotesque depictions of feasting, starvation, Eucharistic parody, and regurgitation position the body as both archive and agent one that bears the imprints of ideological excess and moral resistance. The article contends that culinary imagery in the Danzig Trilogy constitutes not an ornamental grotesquerie, but an urgent symbolic language through which guilt is internalised, contested, and expelled. Through this lens, Grass reframes historical accountability not simply as a narrative task, but as a bodily ordeal of what the conscience can swallow, and what it cannot