Die Blechtrommel; The Tin Drum

Die Blechtrommel; The Tin Drum (1959)

This taboo-busting epic, set in Danzig in the thirties and forties, delivered a fictional exploration of the National Socialist period at a time when public and literary debate in the Federal Republic of Germany about this period was minimal. The novel’s grotesque, distorted narrative is brilliantly suited to the nightmarish historical period which it recounts. The novel is full of memorable imagery, e.g. the opening scene with Anna, the Kaschubian grandmother sitting in a potato field and hiding the fugitive arsonist Joseph Koljaiczek under her four skirts; the infamous horse head devoured by eels in the chapter ‘Karfreitagskost’ (‘Good Friday Fare’).

John Carey's guide to the fifty most enjoyable books of the 20th century includes only two German novels. Die Blechtrommel; The Tin Drum is one (see reading list below); the other is Thomas Mann's Felix Krull.

The novel has a very unreliable first-person narrator: Oskar Matzerath, a dwarf with a piercing scream. Oskar has an adult mind and libido in the body of a child. Oskar is both distanced from and complicit in the events he recounts. In the very first sentence he admits that he is the inmate of a secure institution. Soon afterwards he tells us that he has a habit of lying. Oskar is both a character and a sophisticated narrative device. According to Anne L. Mason, Oskar is best seen as ‘a cleverly constructed collage’ (see reading list below, p. 27). Mason points out that the novel presents Oskar as an active collaborator with the Nazis, as well as their potential victim because of his growth retardation (ibid., pp. 41-42). Oskar is very explicit about his Oedpial aggression towards his two fathers Jan Bronski and Alfred Matzerath (one Polish, one German), but he barely reflects upon his own passive, knowing complicity with the Nazi regime: his martial drumming and his entertaining the troops.

Book One describes the love triangle between Oskar's three parents: Oskar's mother Agnes, her husband (and Nazi party member) Alfred Matzerath, and her cousin Jan Bronski. Oskar discovers that he can shatter glass with his scream. In the chapter entitled 'Die Tribüne' Oskar visits the circus and meets Bebra; and Oskar participates in a Nazi rally. Agnes becomes pregnant and starts eating fish obsessively; this exacerbates her morning sickness and she soons dies (of hyperemesis gravidarum). The narrative experimentation reaches a crescendo at the end of Book One, in the chapter 'Glaube Hoffnung Liebe' (Faith Hope Charity) which depicts Kristallnacht (9 November 1938). The SA trash the toy shop of Oskar's friend Sigismund Markus, who commits suicide.

In Book Two World War Two breaks out and Oskar's Polish father Jan Bronski is captured in the attack on the Polish Post Office and then shot by a firing squad. Oskar has a series of erotic adventures with Maria Truczinski who works in the family grocery. Maria gives birth to a son, Kurt. Oskar joins Bebra's 'Fronttheater', a troupe of performing dwarves. There, he meets and falls in love with Roswitha Raguna. Soon afterwards, the Allied invasion of France begins and Roswitha is killed. Oskar returns to Danzig and joins a group of Edelweiss Pirates. The Russian soldiers reach Danzig. Alfred Matzerath dies and Oskar decides to grow up. Oskar, Maria and Kurt travel to Düsseldorf.

In Book Three, Maria and Kurt trade on the black market. Oskar becomes the apprentice of a monumental mason and carves gravestones. Then Oskar becomes a model at Düsseldorf art school. He starts playing in a jazz band. Oskar stalks a nurse, sister Dorothea, and is accused of her murder.

The novel is indebted to the work of early modern writers such as Grimmelshausen. The novel was filmed by Volker Schlöndorff in 1979. The film is excellent but it leaves out Book Three of the novel.

Further Reading in English

Peter Arnds, ‘On the Awful German Fairy Tale: Breaking Taboos in Representations of Nazi Euthanasia and Holocaust in Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel, Edgar Hilsenrath’s Der Nazi & der Friseur, and Anselm Kiefer’s Visual Art’, The German Quarterly, 75:4 (2002), 422-39

Peter Arnds, Representation, Subversion and Eugenics in Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004)

H. E. Beyersdorf, ‘The Narrator as Artful Deceiver: Aspects of Narrative Perspective in Die Blechtrommel’, Germanic Review 55 (1980), 129-38

Elizabeth Boa, ‘Günter Grass and the German Gremlin’, German Life and Letters 23:2 (1970), 144-51

Lestor Norman Caltvedt, ‘Oskar’s account of himself: Narrative “guilt” and the relationship of truth to fiction’, Seminar 14 (1978), 285-95

John Carey, Pure Pleasure: A Guide to the Twentieth Century's Most Enjoyable Books (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), pp. 126-28

Antoinette T. Delaney, Metaphors in Grass’ Die Blechtrommel (New York: Peter Lang, 2004)

Elisabeth Krimmer, '“Ein Volk von Opfern?” Germans as Victims in Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel and Im Krebsgang', Seminar 44:2 (2008), 272-90

Bernhard F. Malkmus, The German Pícaro and Modernity: Between Underdog and Shape-Shifter (New York and London: Continuum, 2011), Chapter 6, pp. 161-83

Ann L. Mason, The Skeptical Muse: A Study of Günter Grass’ Conception of the Artist (Bern: Peter Lang, 1974)

Julian Preece, ‘Grass, Die Blechtrommel’, in Landmarks in the German Novel I, ed. by Peter Hutchinson (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 219-34

Monika Schafi (ed.), Approaches to Teaching Grass’s The Tin Drum (New York: MLA, 2008)

J. P. Stern, ‘Günter Grass’s Uniqueness’, in Stern, The Heart of Europe: Essays on Literature and Ideology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 166ff.; also in Critical Essays on Günter Grass, ed. by Patrick O’Neill (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 79-82

Noel L. Thomas, Grass: Die Blechtrommel (London: Grant & Cutler, 1985)

Further Reading in German

Claudia Müller-Greene, ‘Ästhetischer Eigensinn als Literaturwissenschaftliche Analysekategorie: Eine Anwendung auf Die Blechtrommel als Literarisches Gegengedächtnis’, Oxford German Studies 48:2 (2019), 261-84