The Tin Drum: Gunter Grass

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He is best known for his first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), a key text in European magic realism. He named this style “broadened reality.” “Cat and Mouse” (1961) and Dog Years (1963) also succeeded in the period. These three novels make up his “Danzig trilogy.” 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. What makes Matzerath an even more ambiguous character is that he is also an artist figure, and part self-portrait of his original creator. When Grass published his debut novel in 1959, aged 31, The Tin Drum was perceived as an assault on the German bourgeoisie.

Oscar's is attracted alternatively to Rasputin and Goethe in R-G-R-G sequence which seems to show Germany's WWI-peace-WWII-peace sequence. In the very first chapter, I was reminded of Midnight Children because of Oscar's conversational tone of narrative - same as that of Saleem Shinai. Once MC was in my mind couldn't help locating similarities - both narrators start their stories with the first meeting of their maternal grandparents, both like talking about sex, both of them feel need to hide from the world (Oskar in grandmother's skirts, Shinai in laundry box) etc. Still there are enough differences, MC is more magical realism, Tin Drum is more about unreliable narrator When Grass received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, 50 years after the publication of The Tin Drum, the jury wrote in its statement that this book represented the rebirth of the German novel in the 20th century. It was ambivalent praise —as if Grass had not gone on to write several more novels, stories and poems.

Right from the start, however, the exultation was much greater than the criticism. Many writers, including internationally acclaimed ones, venerated Grass, among them Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nadine Gordimer, Salman Rushdie and Kenzaburo Oe. Following the publication of The Tin Drum, US magazine Time described Grass as the world's greatest living novelist. During twelve days the book has kept me thoroughly occupied. Now at home, I have finished the book and am writing my review. He has lied to his family half his life. He himself corrects lies he has told you half a book before - putting an asterisk on everything he says. He tells you he deliberately stopped growing - and faked an accident to provide the world reason for that. The fact that a lot of information comes from his drum is not too much satisfying either. He is using both first-person pronouns and his name to talk about himself - at times in the same sentence. Soon Oscar was born. Endowed with an acute perception, he always remembered his father's words: "Someday the shop will be his" and mother’s: "When little Oskar is three years old, he will get a tin drum." His first impression was the butterfly, beating in a burning light bulb. He seemed to be drumming and the narrator called him Oskar’s mentor.

Grass worked his own enmeshment with the Nazi regime, which he only started talking about much later, into the fabric of this work. That’s why this novel is such a work of genius – he answers with a work of art.” On this ship happened to be a former master of sawmill where Koljaiczek worked, who gave him up to the police. But Koljaiczek did not want to go to the police and upon arrival at the home port jumped into the water hoping to get to a nearby pier, where just launched the ship under the name "Columbus". However, on the way to the "Columbus" he had to dive under the raft which was too long, where he found his death. As his body was not found, there were rumors that he managed to escape and he sailed to America, where he became a millionaire .Maria Truczinski: Girl hired by Alfred to help run his store after Agnes dies and with whom Oskar has his first sexual experience. She becomes pregnant and marries Alfred, but both Alfred and Oskar believe that they are Maria's child's father. She remains Oskar's family throughout the post-war years.