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Harry Liebenau, the narrator, a writer employed by video producer Oskar Matzerath. Liebenau, obviously representing the author himself, is a writer from Danzig who was a character in Grass's Dog Years (1963).

Katharina Blum (ka-tah-REE-nah blewm), a twenty-seven-year-old certified housekeeper who has been in charge of the Blorna household for four years. Katharina is a very private and proper person and an almost compulsive worker bent on improving herself. When she meets a fugitive, Ludwig Götten, at a party, she immediately falls in love with him. After he spends the night with her in her condominium apartment, Katharina tells him how to avoid the police by crawling through the heating ducts, which, along with the whole complex, had been designed by her employer, Trude Blorna. She subsequently expresses no regret over her murder of the sensationalist reporter Werner Tötges and looks forward to life with Götten at the end of their eight-year prison terms.

Eberhard Starusch (AY-behr-hahrt SHTAH-rewsh), nicknamed Hardy. He is the grown-up Störtebeker, a character from The Tin Drum (1961) who had been the wartime leader of a Danzig youth gang, the Dusters. Starusch, at the time of this story, is a forty-year-old teacher of German and history. Despite the aggressive look of his forcefully protruding chin, Starusch, who describes himself as a liberal Marxist, is inclined to compromise. His life is boring and uncommitted. He even avoids the painful consequences of dental work through frequent doses of anesthetic. While having bridgework done, he daydreams about his life and carries on a discussion with his dentist. Starusch claims to have been an engineer, who, when rejected by his fiancée, returned to school with money she gave him in compensation and earned a teacher's certificate. He discusses with the dentist his attempt to dissuade his student, Philipp Scherbaum, from acting on his values in a provocative way.

Madame Raquin (rah-KAN), a plump, sixty-year-old, doting mother who centers her life on her son, Camille, and gratifies his every whim. When he decides to go to Paris to look for a new position, she leaves her comfortable country retirement at Vernon and uses a portion of her savings to rent a miserable little haberdashery on a wretched Left Bank alley. Camille, his mother, and his wife, Thérèse, live a life of unbroken plainness and regularity until they are enlivened by Camille's vivacious coworker and friend, Laurent. After the seemingly accidental death of Camille, Madame Raquin's sorrow eventually is tempered by her apparently devoted daughter-in-law, Thérèse, and the thoughtful Laurent. She is maneuvered into suggesting their marriage. At first, they guard the secret of their culpability for Camille's death and hide their psychological torment from her. After Madame Raquin suffers a progressively debilitating paralysis, which leaves her unable to move or speak, Laurent, in one of his regular anguished and angry bouts with Thérèse, lets the truth slip out in front of the invalid. Unable to communicate the awful truth to the members of the Thursday night gatherings, Madame Raquin festers in her hatred, relishing the destructive behavior of Thérèse and Laurent. She has the ultimate satisfaction of witnessing their double suicide.

The narrator, unnamed, a none-too-diligent young university student in Dublin who is writing a novel about another author, Dermot Trellis. The narrator tells about his carping uncle, his fellow students, and his drinking and wasting of time. He reads from and comments on his developing novel.

Fritz Tolm (tohlm), a wealthy newspaper owner in his mid-sixties who has just been elected president of the Association. As president of this organization, which represents the conservative interests of the West German business establishment, Tolm is catapulted into public prominence and is more vulnerable than ever as a symbolic target for the terrorists wishing to strike a blow at the West German system. Tolm, who experienced poverty in his youth, inherited a newspaper from his godfather toward the end of World War II. Although Tolm had a Ph.D. in art history and had no interest in newspapers, his paper, under the direction of its financial manager, Amplanger, consumed competing papers and became an empire. Reluctantly maneuvered into accepting the presidency of the Association because of his positive public image as a cultured and kindly gentleman, Tolm is mentally and physically weary. He lacks true independence and does not even control his own paper. He is surrounded by elaborate police protection and has no privacy. With the support of his wife, Käthe, he repudiates his public position to bury the dead terrorist, Heinrich Beverloh, whom he loved as a son. He and Käthe decide to leave their mansion, Tolmshoven, and to move into an empty vicarage to be accessible to their children.

The author, who introduces, comments on, and ties together developments in Germany at the end of World War I and afterward. Berlin is the focal point, but events in Strasbourg, Paris, the German military headquarters in Kassel, and elsewhere are woven into the intricate story. The story traces the thoughts and actions of political figures, revolutionaries, military officers, financial opportunists, and ordinary individuals in the tense period following the establishment of a shaky, moderately left-wing republic and the armistice through the crushing of the Spartacists. The frustration of President Woodrow Wilson and his hope for a just peace without victors is also described. Finally, through Friedrich Becker, the author berates the postwar Weimar Republic. According to him, there was no real attempt to come to grips with the causes of war, and he predicts the rise of a new paganism, characterized by strength and cunning.

The narrator, a writer. He has lived many lives in the past, in particular as the husbands or lovers of a series of cooks, whose lives mirror important points in human history. The relationships between the narrator and these women illustrate the relationship between the sexes, in which men strive for dominance but remain subject to the will and cooking skill of women. The narrator, in his present life, is the weak and philandering husband of the pregnant harridan Ilsebill. He attempts to gratify himself sexually with the members of the Feminist Revolutionary Tribunal and the last two cooks, Sibylle Miehlau and Maria Kucorra, but in actuality he is used by them.

Walter Matern (VAHL-tehr MAH-tehrn), the stocky son of a miller. Walter, known as the “grinder” for constantly grinding his teeth, is the protector, friend, and blood brother to Eddi Amsel. Their lives, along with the changes in Germany, are traced from their boyhood in the mid-1920's through the early post-World War II period. Walter is expelled from the Young Prussia Athletic Club for distributing Communist leaflets, and his career as an aspiring actor is cut short by his excessive drinking. He joins the brown-shirted Nazi Sturm Abteilung (SA) on the urging of Amsel, who wants a source of uniforms for scarecrows. Walter, however, eventually reports Amsel for making animated SA dummies. In times of exasperation or anger, Walter reviles his friend as “sheeny.” He and his fellow thugs beat Amsel, and Walter personally knocks out all of Amsel's teeth. Walter is later kicked out of the SA and joins the army to escape punishment for his political opinions. He commands an antiaircraft unit in which Harry Liebenau serves, but eventually he is condemned to a penal battalion for anti-Nazi statements. Released from an English prison camp as an anti-Fascist, he eventually becomes a radio star because of the dynamism of his voice. Subjected to a brutal and accusatory review of his life on a live radio program directed by Harry, Walter in disgust decides to leave the capitalistic West. In Berlin, however, he meets Amsel, whom he does not at first recognize, and is taken on a tour of his fantastic scarecrow production center.

The narrator, who as a child was sent to a fine boarding school after both of his parents died. At the age of sixteen, he becomes obsessed with the thought of a fictional charlatan, de Selby, who believes that most human experiences are illusory. After the narrator leaves school, he loses his left leg in an accident and returns home interested only in continuing his study of de Selby. He joins his dishonest caretaker, John Divney, in a crime to finance the publication of his definitive collation of all the interpretations of de Selby's thought. After Divney murders him, the narrator, not realizing that he is dead, goes to a strange police barracks in search of the lockbox that contains their loot. Amid strange dialogues and disorienting experiences, he is accused by Sergeant Pluck of murder. He narrowly avoids being hanged and escapes on Pluck's animate and gynecomorphic bicycle, toward which he develops amorous feelings. When he reaches his house, the narrator finds Divney and discovers that not three days but sixteen years have passed since he began his search for the box.