The Tin Drum
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 Edition of The Tin Drum. |
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| Author | Günter Grass |
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| Original title | Die Blechtrommel |
| Country | Germany |
| Language | German |
| Series | Danzig Trilogy |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Luchterhand |
| Released | 1959 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 736 pp |
| ISBN | NA |
The Tin Drum (German: Die Blechtrommel) is a 1959 novel by Günter Grass. The novel is part of Grass' Danziger Trilogie (Danzig Trilogy).
Contents |
[edit] Plot summary
The story is about the life of Oskar Matzerath, who writes his autobiography from memory while in a sanitarium during the years 1952 to 1954. However, Oskar's memories begin before those of ordinary people. The story starts with his own birth, when Oskar sees the light of "two sixty-watt bulbs" in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland). Gifted with a piercing shriek that can shatter glass or be used as a weapon, Oskar declares himself to be one of those "auditory clairvoyant babies", whose "spiritual development is complete at birth and only needs to affirm itself". At age three he receives a tin drum for his birthday and decides, after observing the obtuseness and duplicity of the adult world, to will himself not to grow up. As a result, he retains the stature of a child while living through the beginning of World War II, Hitler's holocaust, several love affairs, and the hypocritical world of postwar Europe. Through all this the tin drum remains his treasured possession, and he is willing to kill to retain it.
Oskar considers himself to have two "presumptive fathers" - his mother's husband Alfred, a member of the Nazi Party, and her secret lover Jan, a Polish citizen of Danzig who is executed for defending the Polish Post Office in Danzig during the Nazi invasion of Poland. Oskar's mother having died, Alfred marries Maria, a woman who is secretly Oskar's first mistress. After marrying Alfred, Maria gives birth to Oskar's son, Kurt. But Oskar is disappointed to find that the baby persists in growing up, and will not join him in ceasing to grow at the age of three.
During the war, Oskar joins a troupe of performing dwarfs who entertain the German troops at the front line. But when his second love, the diminutive Roswitha, is killed by Allied troops in the invasion of Normandy, Oskar returns to his family in Danzig where he becomes the leader of a criminal youth gang. The Russian army soon captures Danzig, and Alfred dies after swallowing his party pin to avoid being revealed as a Nazi.
Oskar moves with his widowed stepmother and their son to Düsseldorf, where he models in the nude with Ulla and works engraving tombstones. He falls in love with the saintly Sister Dorothea, a neighbor, but fails to seduce her. Still devoted to his little tin drum, Oskar becomes a virtuoso jazz drummer and achieves fame and riches. One day while walking through a field he finds a severed finger: the ring finger of Sister Dorothea, who has been murdered. He then meets and befriends Vittlar. Oskar allows himself to be falsely convicted of the murder and is confined to an insane asylum, where he writes his memoirs.
[edit] Film adaptation
In 1978 a film adaptation was made by Volker Schlöndorff.
[edit] See also
- The Onion Cellar, a play by The Dresden Dolls with the American Repertory Theatre based on a chapter in The Tin Drum
