Günter Grass · 1959
The Tin Drum
Die Blechtrommel · 1959
“I am an inmate of a mental hospital. My keeper watches me, scarcely ever allows me out of sight.”
Begin ReadingThe narrator is Oskar Matzerath — a dwarf who stopped growing at age three, who shatters glass with his voice, and who beats a tin drum through the rise and fall of Nazi Germany. That tin drum is his protest, his weapon, his memory, and his identity. It is the sound that refuses to be silenced. From the mental hospital where he writes his memoirs in the 1950s, Oskar tells the story of the German twentieth century: the rise of the Nazis, the war, the destruction of Danzig, and the postwar “economic miracle” that buried the past under prosperity. No novel about Nazism is more honest, more grotesque, or more essential. Günter Grass poured the guilt and rage of a generation into the body of a three-year-old with a voice that can shatter glass — and the result is one of the great novels of the twentieth century.
“I was aware that I had to provide myself with a thick skin, the better to protect myself from the flick-knives of the grown-ups.”
— Oskar Matzerath, The Tin Drum
Published in 1959 when Grass was only 32, The Tin Drum became the most important German novel of the postwar period — a reckoning with the Nazi past that no German writer had dared attempt so directly. It is the first book of the Danzig Trilogy, followed by Cat and Mouse (1961) and Dog Years(1963). Together, they are the definitive literary account of the German century. The Nobel Prize followed in 1999, with the citation praising Grass's “frolicsome black fables” that “portray the forgotten face of history.”