The Tin Drum
by Günter Grass
Summary
Oskar Matzerath narrates his own life from a bed in a West German mental institution in the early 1950s, working backward from 1924 in the Free City of Danzig, and the first thing he wants a reader to know is that he decided, at the age of three, to stop growing. He keeps that decision by the simple trick of throwing himself down a cellar staircase, and from that point on he stays child sized for decades while the adult world around him, his mother, her lover, a grocer named Matzerath he may or may not actually be the son of, moves through the rise of Nazism, the German invasion of Poland and the defense of the Danzig post office, all filtered through the flat, knowing perspective of a boy who looks nothing like a witness anyone would trust.
Oskar carries a tin drum everywhere and replaces it obsessively as each one wears out, using it to interrupt or narrate events he cannot otherwise control, and he discovers early that his own scream can shatter glass at will, a power he uses for mischief and, later, for something closer to sabotage. Günter Grass moves him through a traveling troupe of performers during the war, the postwar rubble of Danzig, and eventually West Germany, where Oskar becomes first a stonemason's apprentice and later, almost accidentally, a successful jazz drummer. The novel ends with him confined to the asylum after allowing himself to be convicted of a murder he insists he did not commit, writing the very memoir a reader has just finished, still refusing to grow, his fate as unresolved and as knowingly performed as everything else about him.
Grass writes history through a narrator who is unreliable by design, morally compromised and often genuinely repellent, which is the point: a country trying to move past its own recent past gets confronted instead with a witness it cannot fully trust or fully dismiss. It is a long, demanding novel that suits a reader willing to follow grotesque comedy through genuinely horrifying history without either one canceling the other out.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave Günter Grass the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature for work whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history. The Tin Drum, published in German in 1959 as Die Blechtrommel and in English in 1961 in a translation by Ralph Manheim, later retranslated in 2009 by Breon Mitchell for its fiftieth anniversary, is the novel that made Grass's name and remains the book most closely tied to that citation. Its early reception in Germany was hostile, with some critics calling it blasphemous and pornographic, before it settled by the mid 1960s into recognition as a defining novel of postwar German literature.
Grass learned of the prize during a dental appointment and said he believed Heinrich Böll, Germany's previous literature laureate in 1972, would have been thrilled for him. In 2006, in his memoir Peeling the Onion, Grass revealed he had served as a teenager in the Waffen SS, a disclosure that arrived decades after he had become a prominent public conscience for his country and prompted calls in the German press for the prize to be returned. The Nobel Foundation declined, stating that prize decisions are irreversible and that none had ever been revoked in the institution's history.