Katz und Maus

Cat and Mouse

Gdansk during World War II. Joachim Mahlke has a physical abnormity: a strikingly large Adam′s apple. Seen as a symbol of prematurely developed masculinity it isolates Joachim from his peers. But all of a sudden he manages to achieve admiration. On a flooded Polish minesweeper where the pupils play their pubertal games, Mahlke becomes the best swimmer and diver. Admiration goes so far that the boys even copy the fashion whimsies with which he tries to conceal his disfigurement. One day Mahlke hangs an Iron Cross around his neck which he stole from an officer. He is suspended from school and voluntarily enlists for the tank division. There he himself gets decorated with the coveted medal. When he wants to show it around at his old school he is rejected by the principal. Mahlke becomes pensive, finally dismisses himself from the army and returns to the old minesweeper. Since then he is considered missing. - After a novella of Günther Grass.

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Almost no other film of the "young German cinema" era was as controversial as this loose adaptation of a novella by Günter Grass. The political right alleged "desecration" of the Knight’s Cross and it was the subject of a parliamentary inquiry and ministerial attempts to censure it. The scandal was exacerbated by the fact that two of Willy Brandt’s sons acted in the film and, undeservedly, the contretemps drew far more attention than the film’s innovative "nouvelle vague" aspects, which included an ironic attitude and modern creative techniques such as the narrative interweave of past and present.

Source: 66. Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin (Catalogue)