Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act 1913 was viewed as violating basic human rights, not only of the suffragettes but of other prisoners. The Act's nickname of "Cat and Mouse Act", referring to the way the government seemed to play with prisoners as a cat may with a captured mouse, underlined how the cruelty of repeated releases and re-imprisonments turned the suffragettes from targets of scorn to objects of sympathy. The Asquith government's implementation of the Act caused the militant WSPU and the suffragettes to perceive Asquith as the enemy — an enemy to be vanquished in what the organisation saw as an all-out war. A related
Cat and Mouse (novella) showed it Mahlke's mouse; and Joachim Mahlke let out a yell, but suffered only slight scratches. (p. 6) The anthropomorphism and metaphorical embodiment of gross social forces is common in Grass's work; here the sentence "It was a young cat, but no kitten" describes the German state in the 1940s — young but by no means innocent (p. 5). The narrative style — the evasion, self-justification, and eventual, chatty disclosure of the truth — is also characteristic. Oskar Matzerath, protagonist of "The Tin Drum", makes an appearance as "a little brat, who must have been about three, pound[ing] monotonously on