In 2006, German writer and Nobel Laureate Gunter Grass stunned the world by announcing that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS during World War II. It was shocking mostly because Grass had written book after book, digging into Germany’s difficult Nazi past, and hid his own. But was he trying to square up to it through some of his protagonists, particularly Oskar Matzerath, the eternal three-year-old of The Tin Drum ?
Is his midget a sign of the collective cowardice that gripped a people during the Nazi years? In 1959, when The Tin Drum was first published, it was immediately recognised as another signpost of post war ‘rubble literature’ — books that were renewing the German language with words and ideas. Oskar Matzerath doesn’t want to grow beyond the age of three, and stops there, though his mind is of an adult. “I decided to do certain things and on no account to do certain others,” he says. The only way he expresses himself is by playing on his toy tin drum and by shrieking and shattering glass. “Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me... and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me,” thus begins Oskar’s narration of the first 30 years of his life. He tells us how he stopped growing by throwing himself down the stairs; how he used the drum to throw a military marching band into disarray; his life in a group of acrobats.
Danzig as backdrop
Set in Grass homeground Danzig (now Gdansk), through this telling, Oskar also gives us a history lesson, of the fall of Poland, the arrival of Soviet troops, the flight of refugees, the march to modernity, the possible end of totalitarianism, which hasn’t really happened as the misadventures in the world right now tell us.
So how reliable a narrator is Oskar? Well, as reliable as one can be in strange and surreal times. In 1999, awarding Grass the Nobel Prize for Literature, the committee said The Tin Drum accomplished the “enormous task of reviewing contemporary history by recalling the disavowed and the forgotten: talking about victims, losers and lies that people wanted to forget because they had once believed in them.”
When Volker Schlondorff decided to film it, he took the help of Grass on the screenplay. It went on to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and the Best Foreign Picture at the Oscars in 1980. If fiction has the power to inform and transform, then The Tin Drum inspired writers like Salman Rushdie who, reading it in 1967, thought it was telling him to “go for broke.” As he writes in his essay in Imaginary Homelands : “This is what Grass’ great novel said to me in its drumbeats: ...Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets.... And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things — childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves — that go on slipping, like sand, through our fingers.”
The writer looks back at one classic each fortnight.
