The Tin Drum: Gunter Grass

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Gottfried Vittlar: Becomes friends with and then testifies against Oskar in the Ring Finger Case at Oskar's bidding. Oscar doesn't much like Hitler, but he has a love-hate relationship with Jesus (Hitler's title 'Fuhrer' literally means guardian; so does the word 'Christ') - depending upon his mood he doesn't believe in Jesus, believes in Jesus, is a messenger of Jesus, is Jesus himself, is father of Jesus etc. In another scene, our dwarf hero is seen leading his street gangs to invade church (Hitler brought down synagogues). Danzig, caught between Germany and Poland, is Oskar’s tragic playground. The story is dense, a rollercoaster; Oskar is both monster and tragic hero. Above all he is a witness, angry and despairing. Near the close of the novel Oskar says: “I’ve run out of words now, but still have to think over what Oskar’s going to do after his inevitable discharge from the mental institution. Marry? Stay single? Emigrate? Model? Buy a stone quarry? Gather disciples? Found a sect?” Voyage Au Bout De La Nuit is well established among my favorite masterpieces. As for The Tin Drum, I was hoping that a new reading, from a different angle, albeit in an abridged form, would make me discover new attractions, moments to love in the book. The idiom, “to beat a drum”, is to bring attention to a cause, and that is what the book does /did. It won the Noble Prize for Literature in 1999. Oskar, it is he who is the dwarf, the midget, who through his drumming protests against the era as well as the middle-class mentality of his family. Gunter Grass, a German, delivers a sharp critique of Germany and the mindset that prevailed. When the book first came out in 1959, it was banned. It was dubbed as blasphemous.

Why would you consider a narrator unreliable ? He is out of mind or delusional, he is a habitual liar, he is full of inferiority or superiority complexes, he had lied to you before, he is full of guilt. Oscar fulfills all these conditions. The book begins with lines:

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Es innegable hablar de la Segunda Guerra Mundial y del nazismo, ya que la posición, tanto de Oscar y de los personajes secundarios que lo rodean tanto del autor es más bien ambivalente ya que los aberrantes sucesos protagonizados por los nazis (especialmente el relato de la violenta, fatídica y horrorosa “Noche de los cristales rotos” o “Kristallnacht”) son vistas por un ingenuo Oscar y más bien puesto a consideración del lector el juzgamiento de los hechos de esa noche del 9 al 10 de noviembre de 1938. Mismo caso para la defensa de la oficina de correos polaca en Danzig (Gdansk) que los nazis atacaron con toda su furia el 1° de septiembre de 1939. It was adapted into a 1979 film, which won both the Palme d'Or, in the same year, and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film the following year. It all adds up to a fairly unique experience in literature, a historical novel narrated by someone who may or may not be actively crazy but in some way that seems to be the point, that there's no real way to process these events as rational unless you're a little touched in the head. 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.

The story revolves around the life of Oskar Matzerath, as narrated by himself, when confined in a mental hospital, during the years 1952–1954. In Oskar, Grass has a witness whose story begins in childhood. As a baby he was already advanced. “I was one of those clairaudient infants whose mental development is complete at birth and there after simply confirmed.” He could hear his mother softening her disappointment in his not being “a little lass” with a remark which would prove ironic: “When little Oskar is three years old, we’ll give him a tin drum.” Il senso di colpa è proprio uno di quegli elementi che rende Oskar il riflesso del suo stesso popolo: And let us reduce it further: "Chapter 27 – Inspection of Concrete, or Barbaric, Mystical, Bored." A title which says, for me, all that needs to be said about the modern world. Here, Oskar and a troupe of midget acrobats and entertainers visit the German "pillbox" defence posts in northern France, late on in the war, as his country's doom looms large. They meet corporal Lankes, a former artist who now views these brutally efficient standards of war and hatred as genuine, profound artworks.bildungsroman الألمانية العريق، وفيها تقنية "محيط القصص" التي جاءت في ملحمة الشاهنامة وألف ليلة وليلة، وفيها أسلوب المذكرات، والقصص الأخلاقية، وفيها يهرب الراوي ويتنصل من ما يرويه، لأنه يعكس حالات عقلية ونفسية متناقضة، فهو: عنصري ومتسامح، وهو مجنون ومختل عقلياً ولكنه واقعي وعقلاني، وهو حساس للغاية ولكنه عنيف ودموي، وهو متأمل في حركة الزمن والتاريخ ولكنه مندفع ونزق. Turns out he's playing the long game as things become more focused in the second part, which is a series of letters from someone on the periphery of events to his cousin, further describing not only the changing friendship between Walter and Edward but the world of ballet dancing and the changing emotions of the times as Germany starts to go off the rails into fairly scary territory. The nod to an epistolary style is much easier to digest and feels like a breath of fresh air compared to the denser earlier part. There is Bruno, Oskar's attendant in the loony bin. There is the elegant Jan Bronski, Oskar's mother's lover. (She is married to Matzerath). There is Oskar's beloved mother herself, and his Kashubian grandmother, who grows potatoes and always wears four skirts. And so on...there are many minor characters too. Through all this, a toy tin drum, the first of which he received as a present on his third birthday, followed by many replacement drums each time he wears one out from over-vigorous drumming, remains his treasured possession; he is willing to commit violence to retain it. This indifference attracts an equal indifference from us. It is really difficult to sympathize with this guy. At times he seems to be trying to make it difficult for us to relate to him - this book can be a thousand things, but it is definitively not a melodrama.