The Tin Drum (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "GRANTED : I AM an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a..." (more)
Key Phrases: fizz powder, great somnambulist, onion cellar, Jan Bronski, Sister Dorothea, Mother Truczinski (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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 --This text refers to the Paperback 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 -- Review

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 592 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon (November 10, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375420576
• ISBN-13: 978-0375420573
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (91 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #924,146 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

57 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Banality of Evil and Its Consequences, December 19, 2003

By	Professor Donald Mitchell "Jesus Makes Me a P... (Boston) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)

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.

55 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The strangest coming-of-age novel, February 6, 2003

By	Guillermo Maynez (Mexico, Distrito Federal Mexico) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Tin Drum (Paperback)

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.

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Lone Voice Crying in the Wilderness, October 21, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Tin Drum (Paperback)

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.