Meet Oskar Matzerath, "the eternal three-year-old drummer." On the morning of his third birthday, dressed in a striped pullover and patent leather shoes, and clutching his drumsticks and his new tin drum, young Oskar makes an irrevocable decision: "It was then that I declared, resolved, and determined that I would never under any circumstances be a politician, much less a grocer; that I would stop right there, remain as I was--and so I did; for many years I not only stayed the same size but clung to the same attire." Here is a Peter Pan story with a vengeance. But instead of Never-Never Land, Günter Grass gives us Danzig, a contested city on the Polish-German border; instead of Captain Hook and his pirates, we have the Nazis. And in place of Peter himself is Oskar, a twisted puer aeternis with a scream that can shatter glass and a drum rather than a shadow. First published in 1959, The Tin Drum's depiction of the Nazi era created a furor in Germany, for the world of Grass's making is rife with corrupt politicians and brutal grocers in brown shirts: There was once a grocer who closed his store one day in November, because something was doing in town; taking his son Oskar by the hand, he boarded a Number 5 streetcar and rode to the Langasser Gate, because there as in Zoppot and Langfuhr the synagogue was on fire. The synagogue had almost burned down and the firemen were looking on, taking care that the flames should not spread to other buildings. Outside the wrecked synagogue, men in uniform and others in civilian clothes piled up books, ritual objects, and strange kinds of cloth. The mound was set on fire and the grocer took advantage of the opportunity to warm his fingers and his feelings over the public blaze. As Oskar grows older (though not taller), portents of war transform into the thing itself. Danzig is the first casualty when, in the summer of 1939, residents turn against each other in a pitched battle between Poles and Germans. In the years that follow, Oskar goes from one picaresque adventure to the next--he joins a troupe of traveling musicians; he becomes the leader of a group of anarchists; he falls in love; he becomes a recording artist--until some time after the war, he is convicted of murder and confined to a mental hospital.

The Tin Drum uses savage comedy and a stiff dose of magical realism to capture not only the madness of war, but also the black cancer at the heart of humanity that allows such degradations to occur. Grass wields his humor like a knife--yes, he'll make you laugh, but he'll make you bleed, as well. There have been many novels written about World War II, but only a handful can truly be called great; The Tin Drum, without a doubt, is one. --Alix Wilber


Review
"When Günter Grass published The Tin Drum in 1959, it was as if German literature had been granted a new beginning after decades of linguistic and moral destruction.  Within the pages of this, his first novel, Grass re-created the lost world from which his creativity sprang: Danzig, his home town, as he remembered it from the years of his infancy before the catastrophe of war.  Here he comes to grips with the enormous task of reviewing contemporary history by recalling the disavowed and the forgotten: the victims, losers, and lies that people wanted to forget because they had once believed in them.  The unforgettable Oskar Matzerath is an intellectual whose critical approach is childishness, a one-man carnival, dadaism in action in everyday German provincial life just when this small world becomes involved in the sanity of the great world surrounding it.  It is not too audacious to assume that The Tin Drum will become one of the enduring literary works of the twentieth century."
-- The Swedish Academy, awarding Günter Grass the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1999


From the Hardcover edition.


Review
"When Günter Grass published The Tin Drum in 1959, it was as if German literature had been granted a new beginning after decades of linguistic and moral destruction.  Within the pages of this, his first novel, Grass re-created the lost world from which his creativity sprang: Danzig, his home town, as he remembered it from the years of his infancy before the catastrophe of war.  Here he comes to grips with the enormous task of reviewing contemporary history by recalling the disavowed and the forgotten: the victims, losers, and lies that people wanted to forget because they had once believed in them.  The unforgettable Oskar Matzerath is an intellectual whose critical approach is childishness, a one-man carnival, dadaism in action in everyday German provincial life just when this small world becomes involved in the sanity of the great world surrounding it.  It is not too audacious to assume that The Tin Drum will become one of the enduring literary works of the twentieth century."
-- The Swedish Academy, awarding Günter Grass the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1999


From the Hardcover edition.


Book Description
This postwar classic offers a profound yet humorous perspective on both German history and the human condition in the modern world.


Language Notes
Text: English, German (translation)


The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
Picaresque novel by Gunter Grass, a purported autobiography of a dwarf who lives through the birth and death of Nazi Germany, published in 1959 as Die Blechtrommel. The work's protagonist, Oskar Matzerath, narrates the novel from an asylum for the insane. He claims to have consciously stopped growing at the age of three in protest against adulthood; although intellectually normal, he has the stunted body of a dwarf. Oskar's voice is shrill enough to shatter glass, and his passion is banging on his tin drum, which has properties by which he draws forth memories from the past and complains about shortcomings in the present. Detached from people and events, he comments on the horrors, injustices, and eccentricities he observes. Found guilty of a murder he did not commit, Oskar is incarcerated. This exuberant novel, written in a variety of styles, imaginatively distorts and exaggerates Grass's personal experiences--the Polish-German dualism of Danzig, the creeping Nazification of average families, the attrition of the war years, the coming of the Russians, and the complacent atmosphere of West Germany's postwar "economic miracle."


From the Inside Flap
Acclaimed as the greatest German novel written since the end of World War II, The Tin Drum is the autobiography of thirty-year-old Oskar Matzerath, who has lived through the long Nazi nightmare and who, as the novel begins, is being held in a mental institution.  Willfully stunting his growth at three feet for many years, wielding his tin drum and piercing scream as anarchistic weapons, he provides a profound yet hilarious perspective on both German history and the human condition in the modern world.

Translated from the German by Ralph Manheim.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review

Without a doubt, The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass is a classic of Western Literature. Sardonic in tone and exuberant in its condemnation of the late 20th century world and its values, The Tin Drum is a picture of a world in upheaval. Told through the eyes of dwarf, it was Grass's first novel and it catapulted him to fame.

The Tin Drum is a portrait of German society from the 1930s to the 1950s. The narrator of the story is Oskar Matzerath. He tells his story from the confines of an insane asylum where he is being held for a murder he did not commit. The fact that it is Oskar who is sane and the world that is mad is inconsequential because this is a world where values are inverted, the tragic is comic and the insane are sane. The narrative technique of the novel is based on the surrealistic style of the earlier German writer Franz Kafka and is closely related to the magic realism we find in the writings of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie. Unnatural occurrences, essentially metaphoric events, are written as natural occurrences.

Born in the free city of Danzig on the Baltic coast, it is on his third birthday that Oskar makes a momentous decision. By sheer force of will, he decides he is not going to grow any more. Already possessing the full mental faculties of an adult, Oskar is complete inside and out, free from the constraints and patterns of the rest of the world by being able to chose his own destiny. It is this assertion of Oskar's individuality over what the state or society expects him to be that makes The Tin Drum a modern classic andsucha strong statement against a German society that has in its history so blindly conformed to a state-sponsored notion of thought and decorum.

The later period of Oskar's life is crammed with absurdist details: the death of his mother from a diet of fish, a diet started after witnessing a horrible scene of eels being pulled from the head of a dead horse. Another, the death of Oskar's friend Herbert Truczinski as he attempts to make love to a wooden ship figurehead. Finally, there is the death of his father and he tries to hide his Nazi affiliation from the invading Russians by swallowing a pin that Oskar has forced into his hand: each event in this period being dramatically metaphoric. After the war, Oskar moves to Dusseldorf in West Germany. It is there that he is charged with he murder of Sister Dorothea Kongetter. Oskar submits to being found insane and atones for guilt not truly his.

The Tin Drum is a mock epic of Germany, through rise, fall, and rebirth; a chronicle of both Western Europe's, and the world's, madness as it convulses and becomes inverted, where tragedy and comedy live intertwined. It is a masterful world of surrealism, which will shock, amuse, and cause one to reflect.
— Larry Abuhoff

ANNOTATION

This postwar classic offers a profound yet hilarious perspective on both German history and the human condition in the modern world.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Acclaimed as the greatest German novel written since the end of World War II, The Tin Drum is the autobiography of thirty-year-old Oskar Matzerath, who has lived through the long Nazi nightmare and who, as the novel begins, is being held in a mental institution. Willfully stunting his growth at three feet for many years, wielding his tin drum and piercing scream as anarchistic weapons, he provides a profound yet hilarious perspective on both German history and the human condition in the modern world.

Translated from the German by Ralph Manheim.

SYNOPSIS

Acclaimed as the greatest German novel written since the end of World War II, The Tin Drum is the autobiography of thirty-year-old Oskar Matzerath, who has lived through the long Nazi nightmare and who, as the novel begins, is being held in a mental institution. Willfully stunting his growth at three feet for many years, wielding his tin drum and piercing scream as anarchistic weapons, he provides a profound yet hilarious perspective on both German history and the human condition of the modern world.

About the Author:

Günter Grass was born in 1927 in Danzig. Active as an artist, poet, and playwright, he has lived in Paris and traveled widely in Europe. At present he lives in Berlin with his wife and twin sons.

The Tin Drum, the author￯﾿ﾽs first novel, has been translated into all major European languages. A film version of the book received an Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1980. His other works include Cat and Mouse, The Flounder, Headbirths, and The Rat.

In 1999, Günter Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

FROM THE CRITICS

Frederic Morton