In the background one of his students, Phillipp Scherbaum, is planning to set fire to his dog Max on the Kurfurstendamm as a protest against the US involvement in the Vietnam War.

[2] Grass had been deeply moved after learning about the Hübener Group, three teenage Mormons who distributed anti-Nazi material inspired by BBC London radio broadcasts and were arrested by the Gestapo in Hamburg.

When interviewed for the documentary Truth & Conviction (see external link below), Grass said it continually tore at him that he and other Germans could not somehow have dug deeper, seen through the Nazi deception sooner and found the courage to stand up.

Broyard wrote that the author "unmercifully satirizes the impotence, the masochism, the desperate expedients, that make the lot of the liberal such a hard one".

About the technical aspects, he wrote that "Grass has possessed himself of everything fiction has learned in the past two decades- and he uses that knowledge so well that the book is a brilliant tour de force.