Customer Reviews

The Tin Drum

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I have been meaning to read this book since it came out in 1959, but only did so now. My reason for delaying was that the reviews I had read of the book made it sound unappealing to me. Why did I want to read the unrealistic ramblings of an insane dwarf?

Having been impressed with Mr. Grass's recent work, Crabwalk, I finally decided to give The Tin Drum a try. I'm glad I did. Let me explain why.

In my studies of the Nazi era, I was always struck by comments that observers from that time made about how banal the evil of it all was. Yet much of the propaganda from that period (such as The Triumph of the Will) that we can see today makes the Nazis seem like mythic figures. What were the observers trying to say? I finally felt like I understood the point through reading The Tin Drum. Reading about distant battles while living in Germany before the bombing became great seems a lot like reading about attacks on coalition troops in Iraq now. Going to party meetings seems a lot like how people here go to lodge meetings now.

In the first 100 pages, I kept wondering why Mr. Grass had chosen to write the novel in the form of an autobiography of an insane dwarf pretending to have a mental age of 3 who had been convicted of a murder he did not commit. Eventually, it hit me. He needed a narrator who could not be considered complicit in what the Nazis did, or we could not trust his voice. In addition, how can you portray banal evils as insane unless you see them through the eyes of an "insane" person who makes all too much sense? Once I accepted the brilliance (perhaps even the inevitability of his choice), I settled back and really began to enjoy the story. Then I began to realize that it is our childish instincts to want to control everything in our lives that leads to our separation from the richness that we can provide one another. So Mr. Grass was also sharing an important psychological point in choosing Oskar as his narrator.

What made the book special for me was Mr. Grass's ability to continually show how our connections to one another are the potential for goodness, while our instincts to take advantage of one another are the evil we must overcome. Oskar Matzareth, the narrator, is a thinker . . . yet ultimately his point is that we must carefully examine what we think about. Otherwise, false ideas will lead to fatal consequences.

I was very impressed by the way that the plot was constructed so that each time society acted in divided ways Oskar himself or someone close to him was harmed.

What will stay with me the longest are the amazing descriptions of fictional people and events: His grandmother's skirts, the horse's head with the eels emerging from it, his "father's" death during the Soviet invasion, Jan Bronski's obsessive search for skat cards during the attack on the Polish post office and Oskar's reaction to the statue of Jesus coming to life will always be with me.

I found myself wishing that I could read German like a native. The satirical humor is usually savage and quick to kill its object. I fully absorbed the lesson before the blood could even begin to emerge from the butt of the satire. As I read the book, I wondered how many times I missed compelling humor because it didn't translate well into English.

At the end of the book, I found myself searching for a novel to compare The Tin Drum to . . . in order to help other readers decide if this book is for them. In the end I could find no one book. Instead, The Tin Drum can best be described as a combination of reverse sort of Gulliver's Travels, Candide and Don Quixote set in the context of German/Polish Danzig through the end of World War II and in West Germany thereafter. So there's a fundamental darkness to the book that is missing from the other three.

I came away wondering how I can stay connected with others now while retaining the ability to see and act on the events around me as a detached, objective observer. Mr. Grass has raised quite a challenge for us all.

Western literature is full of what Germans call "bildungsroman", that is, the story of a young man's (or woman's)intellectual and emotional growth, often told from the main character's own voice. This kind of novel has adopted innumerable shapes and styles through history, and certainly this one is, so far for me, the strangest and one of the best.

It is hard to summarize the plot, as it is mainly the diverse and extreme experiences of Oskar Matzerath's life. Born in 1924 in Danzig, itself a unique and troubled city, Oskar decides at age three not to grow up anymore. Or does he simply has an illness of the tyroid gland, as he hints at some point? It doesn't matter, precisely because that moment starts the style of the whole book: all the time, terrible things are happening to Oskar, to his family, to his city, to his nation and to his century, but we see everything only through the distorted glass of this unique character's view.

First he tells us about his ancestors and the life they led in pre-war German Poland. Then we know the story of his parents, the infidelity of his mother and other disturbing and often sordid events. His community starts to fall apart as the Nazis rise to power. Then the Nazis come and destroy the city, phisically and spiritually. Oskar spends the whole war in Danzig as well as wandering through France and Belgium as part of a grotesque midget-troupée. After the war, they flee Poland for Düsseldorf, where he is employed in very different jobs: as a tomb engraver, painters' model, jazz drum player. The chapter which describes the journey by train is simply horrible and scaring, as the chapter on his emotional disappointing is sad. The end is strange, confusing but full of hope.

There is abundant abnormal sex, vomit, dirt, misery, but also struggle, success, and much love. Oskar is not always nice, but he remains loyal to those he loves, and that is a great strength of a character you sometimes hate, but in the end you come to love. The book is full of metaphors, obscure symbolisms, grotesque and sordid events, and, above all, the human misery of our century, especially in Europe. It is a bittersweet book, often repulsive, just because that is how life is. It has moments of joy, of glorious triumph, of utter defeat. It is very very sad, because it is the story of a distorted but extremely sane person in an equally destorted but horribly insane world, but it is also a book about the joy of life, about how we have to keep going on even in the midst of tragedy and misery. If it has a message, it should be: fight on.

It is said that great works of literature depend on character development, not so much on the plot and the story itself. Well, this is a case in point. The whole book is sustained by the central character of Oskar, a wicked, depressed, desperate man seeing how his world crumbles apart and he has to build a life for himslef. As another reviewer aptly put it, he is the lonely voice crying in the wilderness. Oskar is a very solitary man with a great disadvantage, one that by sheer willpower he turns every time into an advantage, a means for surviving in a careless, cold world. Oskar never gives up, never surrenders, he finds a way to survive after every setback, and terrifying setbacks he experiences.

I think this book had to be written in the form of magical realism, because the pure realism would have been insufferable: the tragedies that occur are beyond telling them.

Not an easy read, it is most rewarding, for it paints a wide picture of the human experience, precisely what great literature is about.

Echoing the rise and fall of the Third Reich through the eyes of the Peter Pan like Oskar Matzerath, Günter Grass' highly acclaimed novel, The Tin Drum paints a surreal and disturbing portrait of people in a time of great uncertainty. The story begins with Oskar's grandmother, Anna Koljaiczek, a woman who conceives Oskar's mother, Agnes, in a potato field encounter that can only be described as "bizarre." Agnes, herself, grows into a woman out-of-the-ordinary and in time, forms the hypotenuse of a strange love triangle that encompasses two men who love her equally: her husband, Alfred Matzerath and Jan Bronski, the biological father of young Oskar. Oskar, himself, is, from the very beginning, an extraordinary child. Even as a fetus, he refuses to be born until Agnes entices him out of her womb with the promise of a tin drum on his third birthday.

Oskar is born and Agnes keeps her promise. On the day he receives his red and white lacquered tin drum, Oskar makes a promise that rules his life for the next eighteen years: Observing the hypocritical nature of his German-Polish family, Oskar decides to stop growing and forever remain three years old. In an effort to accomplish this, he throws himself down the cellar stairs, an act that comes to haunt Alfred (he had left the door open). Oskar does manage to freeze himself in time and his tin drum becomes the symbol of his extreme youth as well as his weapon against adult intervention. It is when Alfred tries to take the drum away that Oskar discovers another unique talent: he can scream at such a high register that glass around the world shatters. At three years old, Oskar has learned the art of manipulation and control.

At the time Oskar makes his decision not to grow, the Nazis are recognizing the politically strategic importance of the city of Danzig. Technically a Polish city since the end of World War I, the Germans begin to clamor for its return. Discord and disharmony erupt within Oskar's family. Alfred, a German, gravitates toward the SA while the Polish Jan, Agnes and Anna remain fiercely loyal to their Slavic homeland. Trouble is obviously brewing, yet the only "ordinary" resident of Danzig who seems to notice is Oskar. It is he who disrupts a Fascist rally with the overwhelming sound of his drum--an aural punishment able to drive anyone to the edge of insanity.

The Tin Drum is an impressive, but complicated and complex book, as is the character of Oskar. Although Oskar and his tin drum are meant to represent childhood innocence, at times he can seem perverse, manipulative and downright malevolent. The problem is, Oskar beats his drum to literally anything and everything that upsets him, be it his mother's infidelity or the German invasion. Although we ultimately come to love him, there are times when we simply want to slap him in the face as well. Nevertheless, it is clear from the outset that the small Oskar Matzerath is the lone voice crying in the wilderness.

Grass acknowledges and draws well from his Continental European intellectual history and influence, showing us the connections between Oskar and Dostoyevsky's Prince Mishkin, France's Napoleon, Goethe's Faust, Dickens' Tiny Tim and Shakespeare's Hamlet. Embracing the complexities of modern culture, Grass forms dichotomies, posing theses and antitheses. (Goethe and Rasputin, Man and Angel, Realism and Romanticism, Reason and Passion.) Wisely, he does not always find synthesis.

The narrative structure of The Tin Drum, told as it is "through the mouths of babes," allows Grass to distort an already-distorted reality, thereby seeing it "face-to-face." Through Oskar, metonym for a maturing Germany, and through his "childish ways," we see his innocence or ignorance not so much as a tool for evaluation, but rather as a looking glass through which we clearly view our century and western world. Although the extensive symbolism can be a little obscure at times, and Grass' prose is both surrealistic and baroque, The Tin Drum is definitely one of the masterpieces of the twentieth century and, as a condemnation of apathy it remains unsurpassed.

The Tin Drum is a crazy, anecdotal novel that chronicles the adventures of Oskar, who is a cross between Rumplestiltskin and Peter Pan. He identifies himself sometimes as Jesus, sometimes as Satan. At thirty, Oskar is an inmate of a mental hospital (as noted in the first sentence of the book) and is still pounding on the same model of drum he received when he was three. Through his perceptive eyes, we get an image of Germany in the 30s and 40s, its dissidents, its criminals, and its entertainers.

Oskar is selective in what he tells us. For example, we know his alleged father can "turn feelings into soup", but we don't know his function in the Nazi party. We know about every nurse Oskar meets, but his encounters with the military are kept to a minimum. The pre and post-war situation is almost just a background, and Oskar rarely comes upfront and comments about the horror of the times. He expresses his feelings through his drum, interrupting party speeches and causing mayhem on the streets by breaking windows with his voice. The insanity of the world is not seen on a grand scale, but through the demise of individual characters.

He has a great eye for catching all the little nuances of humanity, and the characters Oskar describes are unforgettable in their quirks. After reading the first paragraph about the saving grace of the four potato colored skirts, you won't be able to put it down. My favorite chapter is "On the Fibre Rug," but you'll have to make it to the end for that one.

This book is a thoroughly enjoyable and witty read. No book has ever made me laugh so much, or writhe so much in discomfort. It's magical, it's real, it's perceptive, it's a must read.

I read "The Tin Drum" while spending my second of eight years in Berlin (then West Berlin), and felt as though the book transported me back in time to a more dangerous place for adults and children alike. To see World War II and its aftermath through the eyes of an adult revisiting his childhood (wherein he vowed to never grow up) while actually living in the city that had been the heart of it all was an overwhelming experience, and as such, I suspect others picking this book up for the first time may not glean the same enjoyment from it as I did.

By now, most are already aware that the story focuses on the narrator, Oskar, who decides to stop growing in order to keep his drum and his child-like innocence untainted forever. The drum quickly requires replacing, as Oskar constantly bangs on it to the point that the tin is worn thin and eventually punctured. While the drum can be replaced easily, the innocence that also is worn thin and punctured by the horrors of the impending war cannot be so easily replaced. As the book (and war) progresses, Oskar matures cerebrally, but not emotionally or physically. In one of the book's subplots, when his hormones catch up to his true age during a bittersweet attempt at a love affair with his nanny, in spite of himself, Oskar discovers that quite possibly he has made a mistake in causing himself to stop growing.

The drum itself reaches out metaphorically on many levels; does Oskar represent Germany after World War I, with the drum being the Treaty of Versailles? Or is the drum itself Germany, damaged and repaired (or replaced) throughout history? There are many puzzles and questions left up to the reader's imagination throughout this book. I highly encourage anyone with a taste for literature, albeit at times disturbing, to pick up this book and not put it down until you have read every page therein. It is one of the ten best ever written, no kidding.

While I was reading this book, Günter Grass confessed in an interview that, during the last year of the War, he had served in the Waffen SS. He has always admitted to the fascination that the Nazi party held for young Germans like himself. But even though he was a draftee and, it seems, far from the horrors, he found it impossible to reconcile himself to the fact that he was a member of the same organization that, among other things, ran the death camps, and so he kept this hidden for sixty years.

The outcry has been considerable, as though this invalidates Grass' entire literary oeuvre as Germany's preeminent postwar novelist, his Nobel Prize, and his advocacy for democracy and conscience. This would be true if he had ever portrayed himself as whiter than white. But the major theme of his work has been that Germans must come to terms with their Nazi past, not as something that happened to somebody else, but as a home-grown horror rooted within themselves. THE TIN DRUM, his first and some say his greatest book, is riddled with just such internal conflict. Grass exonerates nobody, least of all himself.

In order to write about the Nazi period and the years immediately before and after, Grass has to invent a fantastic character, like a Velasquez dwarf. Oskar Matzerath stopped growing at the age of three, and remains trapped within a child's body. Almost autistic, he functions by beating on a toy drum, from which he is inseperable. Since others take him for a toddler and he has a tantrum voice that can literally shatter glass, he manages to get his own way, remaining as an anarchic commentator on the fringes while civilization crumbles around him.

Oskar, the dwarf jester, has a fine sense of humor; much of this book is very funny. As Joseph Heller did with CATCH 22, Günter Grass finds comedy the only tolerable means of dealing with the unspeakable, providing the distance necessary to be able to write at all. He uses other distancing devices also: there is doubt about Oskar's nationality, whether German or Polish; he refers to himself interchangeably in the first and third persons, often in the same sentence; and it is unclear at the end whether he is mad or sane.

Oskar may be interesting, but Grass does not make him admirable. He manipulates others shamelessly, betrays his friends, and even aids or abets their deaths. In my view, THIS is the Grass who was seduced by the Nazis and served with the SS. You can see his conflict in every chapter of this long book. For some, Oskar's amorality may be repulsive; for me, it validates this first round in the author's lifetime's struggle to understand the capacity for evil within his countrymen, within humanity, and within himself.

[I should add that this may not be an easy book to read. Most of the major events of the Nazi era take place offstage, and one needs to have a good sense of the chronology of those seismic upheavals to pick up the tremors in Oskar's world. Well-known happenings such as Kristallnacht and D-Day can be located relatively clearly, but much of the story plays against more obscure histories such as the fall of Danzig and the vicissitudes of the postwar German economy. There are even a couple of chapters which are almost unintelligible without a knowledge of the rules and terminology of Skat, a three-handed German card game similar to bridge. But the brief glossary helps, and the flavor of the book comes through even if some of its historical ironies might be missed.]

This incredible first novel is the story of Oskar, who, at three years of age, decides never to grow past his current height of three feet because the world is such a horrible place. To give it justice, this is as much of a summary as I can give this novel.

Oskar tells us his life story, starting with the histories of his grandparents and parents and continuing on through his own thirtieth birthday, on which he decides to write this autobiography. On his third birthday, he is given the titular instrument, which he uses to communicate instead of speaking. He becomes quite proficient at this. He also discovers that his voice, when used properly, can shatter glass. Through practice he is able to aim over long distances toward the glass he wishes to break. However, he does not do this just for fun, but only when upset (usually when someone tries to take his drum away).

Grass makes Oskar a whole character. Since the story is told through his voice, we really get to know Oskar thoroughly. We follow him through nearly every detail of his life--how he is loved, then ignored; claimed, then disowned; himself claims one man as his father, then another. And through all this he remains his static three feet. We do not know how his family feels about Oskar's decision, we only know what Oskar tells us they say, which isn't much. His family, in fact, as most people would, seem to believe that it was caused by a fall down the cellar stairs, exhibiting "man's understandable desire to find physical justification for all alleged miracles"(p. 410).

Oskar is one of the most interesting characters I have come across. At almost six hundred pages, this book takes a long time to read, as it is not written in such a way to be read quickly. One must take care to read every word, lest one miss an important nuance.

This is an excellent novel, and one that, if you are interested in great literature, I would highly recommend. (Not only will you be treated to one of the great works of German post-war literature, but you will also be introduced to the many wonderful uses for fizz powder.)

This book is not for the casual reader, fans of Grisham and Steel should stay away because it is not driven by events, but by character. Great books are as such, and this is one of them. I guarantee that, once you finish this book, you will never forget the time you spent with Oskar Matzerath.

The Tin Drum is an amazing novel, the kind you won't often come across in your life. It is epic in scope, biblical in intention, and peerless in its imagination.

There can be no plot summary -- the novel is Dickensian in structure, following the adventures and exploits of its hero with a minute attention to detail. It is ambitious, its purpose to explore the fundamental absurdity of modern civilization with the keenest of observation, the most tragic of wit.

The novel is set in Germany during the time of both World Wars. Our protagonist is Oskar, one of the most original and memorable characters in literature. Here is a personality born fully formed, every bit as rational and self-reflective at the moment of his birth as he is at the moment of his narration; he never changes, his consciousness steady and self-preserving through all the years of his life. He stops his growth at the age of three, so that he may never enter into the world of adults, which he immediately perceives as self-destructive and spiritually deprived, unworthy of his patronage.

How does he accomplish this suspension of the aging process? Through the power of his will, but also through the rhythm of the Tin Drum, a gift from his mother on his third birthday. Completely indifferent to the travails of the twentieth century which seize Germany all around him, he drums our century's beat and recognizes its folly with all the detached interest of an alien visitor to our planet. This turbulent age, caught between ancient superstition and modern technologies of large-scale annihilation, is succinctly, and with painful accuracy, summed at the center of the book -- "Barbaric, mystical, bored."

The events -- too numerous to elaborate here, and after all better read first-hand than described -- proceed endlessly, each piling on the mountain of its predecessors, each more absurd and inspired and subversive than the last, each compounding the level of this breathtaking achievement, until the reader is left at book's close with the irrefutable knowledge that he or she is holding a masterpiece.

A movie version was made in 1979, and it won the Oscar (no pun intended!) for best foriegn film. It is an amazing movie, true to the novel, and a must-see. And if you see it, you will surely want to read the book, which you will discover to be one of the most delightful reading experiences of your life.

How do you define a book that begins with a chapter called 'The Wide Skirt'? What do you make of the narrator justifying this nomenclature by "...if indeed I have gone so far as to call this chapter 'The Wide Skirt', it is because I know how much I owe to this article of apparel." What do you call a novel which opens with "Granted. I am an inmate of a mental hospital..."

Outrageous? Inscrutable? A classic?

I call it a work of genius. There have been numerous literary attempts at depicting the Holocaust. The Nazi atrocities have been written about and read many times over. But who could've thought that the era could be chronicled through the scathing eyes of a mentally retarded midget who's refused to grow up after the age of three? Well, Grass does exactly that here, but no, this is not your regular portrayal of SS brutality. Instead, Grass focuses on the degradation of values, on the way humanity caricatures itself during troubled times.

John Reddick, in the introduction, reveals an interesting fact: "It was not always Grass's intention to have a quasi-child as his narrator--or even to use the form of a novel. His original plan--so he has said--was to write a long poem-cycle, recounted from the vantage-point of a stylite, a pillar dweller. The limitations of this soon became clear; in particular the stylite figure proved much too static. He therefore moved to the opposite extreme:in place of a fixed observer from above, he switched to a mobile observer from beneath."

This "mobile observer from beneath" is Oskar Matzerath--the central character, the narrator, and the perpetual enigma in the novel. He goes about the business of life with a philosophy of his own, never hesitating to modify it if the situation so demands. Hidden behind the mask of physical and mental abnormality, this protagonist is capable of any kind of action--making love, carving tombstones, or cold-blooded murder. What he does best, however, is playing his tin drum. He can drum up almost any incident to the minutest of detail on his white and red lacquered instrument; he can even hypnotize people into doing what he'll have them do. It is through his eyes that we see a strife-torn world that leaves humans less human. It is through Oskar's prurient eyes that we peep into the life of a young nurse. It is through his perspective that we see Eiffel Tower as a shelter-providing maternal skirt. Oskar takes us on a roller-coaster ride through time, sometimes making us proud of him, and sometimes making us wish that he never existed.

Oskar oscillates between first and third persons, sometimes in the same sentence. "I was beginning to fear that Oskar would never see what Leo had in his fist..." As you would've guessed, "I" and "Oskar" are the same person, at least physically. The dividing line between the first and the third personae is very thin and sometimes they tend to merge into each other.

This book has had a profound effect on me. Never had I expected to read anything like this. However, this is by no means light reading. Start reading it only if you have have the time and patience to soak in the pleasure of reading a masterpiece, word by word, image by image. And any review would be incomplete without acknowledging the sheer brilliance of the translation. Hats off to the late Ralph Manheim.

I have just completed this masterpiece of literary fiction - of all the great works I have read, Grass's is a tour de force of imagination surpassed by few. It is a grotesque and pathetic but brilliant portrait of humanity - like Oskar and all of of the characters who become unforgettable. I could not put it down. True, the book is lacking in plot - but that is not its genius. Its genius is portraying the human condition -- and human behavior. ...I agree that it is not the ultimate testiony about the horrors of Nazi Germany that it is billed to be. This was confusing to me -- I think much of the retrospective critisicm of this novel credits Grass too much with portraying the horrors of the Third Reich. It is a more generic portrait of the evils of humanity. Two hundred years from now, a reader will not learn of the German atrocities from the Tin Drum; however it will still be a great work of literature with universal truths. I also want to strongly disagree with the reader who commented that the message is that humans are not good or evil - just a product of their situation. If we learn anything from this novel, we must learn the horrible truth that human beings have an incredible capacity for callousness, dispassionateness and, yes, pure evil. Take the Alfred Maskereth's warming his hands over the burning remains of the synogogue; the children of Danzig; the Polish looters on the train ride West; the "innocents" Oskar converts to petty thieves, to name a few. All of the characters in Tin Drum have knowledge of right and wrong - most seem to choose wrong - a sad commentary on humanity, but appropriate considering the period and circumstances which gave bith to this book. END