1

The Tin Drum opens with the line, Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital, thus setting the stage for its
unreliable narrator, Oskar Matzerath, who tells varying versions of his story throughout the book. Oskar begins
his life story with his Kashubian grandmother Anna Bronski and her improbable impregnation by Joseph
Koljaiczek, who eludes police by hiding under Annas four skirts as she sits in a potato field. This fantastic
conception is only one of the miraculous events that occur in the novel. The importance of history is evident
in Oskars concern with the ancestry details.
Annas daughter Agnes grows up into a lovely woman, falls in love with her beautiful cousin Jan Bronski, but
marries the German Alfred Matzerath, whom she nurses during the war. Throughout the first part of the novel,
Agnes is torn between these two men, just as the Poles are torn between Germany and Poland, and Oskar
continually speculates on the true nature of his parentage, unable to decide which of the two men is his real
father. When Oskar is born, clairaudient and with his mental development completed at birth, Alfred Matzerath
promises that Oskar shall inherit the grocery when he grows up. Preferring his mothers promise of a tin drum
on his third birthday, and entranced by the sound of a moth beating its wings against a sixty-watt light bulb,
Oskar decides to stay: Besides, the midwife had already cut my umbilical cord. That is a pattern with Oskar:
Whenever possible, Oskar chooses childhood pursuits over adult responsibilities; whenever possible, he claims
responsibility for actions that have already occurred or that he could not have controlled.
On his third birthday, Oskar does indeed receive his drum, and, disgusted with the world of adults, with its
deception and sordidness, including his mothers ongoing affair with her cousin Jan, Oskar decides that he will
not become an adult: He throws himself down the cellar stairs in order to have an explanation for his having
stopped growing at the age of three. Throughout book 1, Oskar drums his way through the increasingly sordid
Danzig environs, paralleling the rise of National Socialism. Germanys increasing aggression mirrors the
deteriorating personal moral standards of the characters. Oskars tin drum serves as an extended metaphor not
only for Germanys military aggression but also for all human violence, as well as for Oskars refusal to grow
up.
Book 2 parallels World War II. The attack on the Polish post office makes a partisan martyr out of Oskars
presumptive father Jan Bronski. In this book, Oskars association with violence and immorality increases,
though he does not actually commit the crimes himself (a defense that, historically, has often been claimed by
accused Nazi war criminals). Oskar travels with the dwarf Bebra, whom he met in book 1, who is now part of
Joseph Goebbelss Nazi propaganda machine. In Nazi uniform, Oskar tours Paris and other occupied territories,
playing his drum and breaking glass for the German soldiers with his voice. Oskars disillusionment with the
church in general, and with Catholicism in particular, which began in book 1, continues until Oskar decides that
he himself is Jesus. Oskar/Jesus leads a gang of juvenile delinquents, called the Dusters, inspiring them to
commit ever greater crimes. After the gang is betrayed, Oskar/Jesus is put on trial but found innocent because of
his age. This trial foreshadows the trial in book 3, in which Oskar is found guilty and placed in a mental
institution. The violence and destruction of book 2 increases, resulting in Alfred Matzeraths death. At
Matzeraths funeral, Oskar is hit in the head by a rock, throws himself into Matzeraths grave, and decides to
grow, to begin a responsible, adult life.
Book 3 is the reconstruction of Oskars life, just as it is the rebuilding of Poland, Germany, and Europe after the
war. Oskars fascination with women continues. In book 1, his mother was the object of his interest. In book 2
he was interested in Maria, until she was unfaithful; then he turned to the midget Roswitha. In book 3, Oskar is
fascinated with Sister Dorothea, whom he never sees and with whose murder he is charged. The details of
Grasss various postwar occupations appear here: Oskar becomes an apprentice stonemason and a jazz
drummer. Oskar also becomes a wealthy recording star by taking old people, through his drumming, back to
their childhoods. Oskar spends most of book 3 ruminating about the events in books 1 and 2. Book 3 is

considered, almost unanimously by the critics, to be less effective than the earlier parts of the novel, perhaps
because Grass tries, unsuccessfully, to show Oskars (Germanys) survival despite his having become deformed
during his growth spurt, or perhaps because Grass lacked the necessary distance to present his material
objectively. The film version of The Tin Drum did not include book 3, ending with Oskars beginning to grow
and leaving his birthplace of Danzig. The novel ends with a childrens rhyme about the Black Witch, a line to
which Oskar has repeatedly referred throughout the novel: Heres the black, wicked Witch./ Ha! ha! ha!
The Tin Drum Summary (Critical Survey of Literature for Students)
In 1899, Oskars Kashubian grandmother is sitting in a potato field, her wide skirts concealing the fugitive
Joseph Koljaiczek from pursuing constables. She thereby conceives Oskars mother, Agnes. In 1923, in the free
city of Danzig, Agnes Koljaiczek marries Alfred Matzerath, a citizen of the German Reich, and introduces him
to her Polish cousin and lover, Jan Bronski, with whom Alfred becomes fast friends. When Oskar is born, he
soon shows himself to be an infant whose mental development is complete at birth.
Oskar is promised a drum for his third birthday. That drum, in its many atavistic recurrences, allows him mutely
to voice his protest against the meaninglessness of a world that formulates its destructive nonsense in empty
language. The drum also allows him to re-create the history of his consciousness and to recall in the varied
music of the drum the rhythms of his minds apprehensions of the world around him. On his third birthday,
Oskar, by a sheer act of will, decides to stop growing and to remain with his three-year-old body and his totally
conscious mind for the rest of his life. As he later boasts, he remains from then on a precocious three-year-old in
a world of adults who tower over him but are nevertheless inferior to him. While he is complete both inside and
out, free from all necessity to grow, develop, and change as time passes, they continue to move toward old age
and the grave.
Oskars refusal to grow, to measure his shadow by that of older persons, or to compete for the things they
desire, is the assertion of his individuality against a world that, misconstruing him, tries to force him into an
alien pattern. He is pleased when he discovers his ability to shatter glass with his voice, a talent that becomes
not only a means of destruction, the venting of his hostility and outrage, but also an art whereby he can cut a
neat hole in the window of a jewelry shop, through which Bronskiupon whom he heaps the filial affection he
does not feel for his actual fathercan snatch an expensive necklace for his beloved Agnes.
The later period of Oskars recorded existence is crammed with outlandish events. His mother, after witnessing
a revolting scene of eels being extracted from the head of a dead horse submerged in water, perversely enforces
a diet of fish on herself and dies. Oskar becomes fascinated with the hieroglyphic scars on the massive back of
his friend Herbert Truczinski, but Herbert, who works as a maritime museum attendant, grows enamored of a
ships wooden figurehead called Niobe. In an attempt to make love to her, he is instead impaled to her by a
double-edged ships axe. Jan Bronski is executed after an SS raid on the Polish post office, where he had gone
with Oskar. Oskar is overwhelmed with guilt after the death of his mother and that of the man who was
probably his father.
In one of the most superbly preposterous seduction scenes in literature, Oskar becomes the lover of Herberts
youngest sister, Maria, and fathers a child with her. Maria then marries Alfred Matzerath, and Oskar, as
prodigious sexually as he is diminutive physically, turns to the ampler comforts of Lina Greff, whose closeted
gay husband, upon receiving a summons to appear in court on a morals charge, commits a fantastically
elaborate, grotesque suicide. Oskar then joins Bebras troupe of entertainers and becomes the lover of the
timeless Roswitha Raguna. When the Russians invade Danzig, Alfred Matzerath, to conceal his affiliations,
swallows a Nazi Party pin, which Oskar has shoved into his hand, and dies. Again Oskar feels responsible for
the death of a parent.

Before long, against his will, Oskar begins to grow and to develop a hump. His postwar life takes him to West
Germany, where he is at various times a black marketeer, a model, and a nightclub entertainer, and eventually to
Dsseldorf, where a destiny not his own catches up with him in the guise of the accusation that he killed Sister
Dorothea Kngetter, the woman who had been living in the room next to his. The testimony of Vittlar, meant to
save Oskar (although Vittlar earlier thought him guilty), damns him. Oskar submits to being judged insane and
atoning for a guilt not strictly his because of his own sense that he is guilty by implication, an emblem of the
modern world even in his isolation from it.
Oscar Matzerath (mat-tseh-RAHT), a deranged dwarf storyteller who willed himself to stop growing at the age
of three to protect himself from the insane society of Nazi Germany. Oscar has magical powers imparted to him
by a succession of tin drums. He encounters representatives of virtually all segments of German society and
beats his drum as these people accommodate themselves to the Nazi regime to a greater or lesser degree.
Agnes Matzerath
Agnes Matzerath, Oscars mother, who carries on a love affair with her cousin throughout the first part of the
novel. Agnes and other female characters suffer the disabilities imparted by the Nazi attitude toward women,
which relegates them to a subordinate position in family relationships and the workplace.
Alfred Matzerath
Alfred Matzerath, Agnes husband but probably not Oscars father. Alfred is a small business owner who
willingly embraced the Nazi Party long before Adolf Hitler came to power, as did many other members of his
social class. He is myopic and greedy, willing to sacrifice any principle to gain a perceived economic advantage.
He dies after the Russian invasion of Danzig by swallowing his Nazi party badge.
Jan Bronski
Jan Bronski (yahn BRON-skee), Agnes Polish cousin, her lover, and probably Oscars father. Jan is goodhearted and generous but either too dense or too indifferent to realize what the Nazi regime truly represents. Jan
is devoted to Agnes and becomes close friends with Oscar, but he never takes a stand on political or moral
issues.
Mr. Bebra
Mr. Bebra (BEH-brah), a circus midget who befriends Oscar after his mothers death. Bebra is an accomplished
artist, talented in many different fields. He is the consummate survivor, showing Oscar how to accommodate
himself to virtually any situation. He does not particularly care for the Nazis but is determined to adapt to any
situation.
Roswitha Raguna
Roswitha Raguna (rohz-VEE-tah rah-GEW-nah), an associate of Bebra who is even shorter than the midget and
capable of sleeping anyplace at any time. Although Roswitha displays enough intelligence to realize the evil
rampant in Germany, she manages to sleep through most of the Nazi horror.
Herbert Truczinski

Herbert Truczinski (trew-TSIHNS-kee), a neighbor of the Matzeraths in Danzig. As was the case with many
Germans, he remained convinced that President Paul von Hindenburg (The Wooden Titan) could control
Hitler and the Nazis after 1933. The heavily tattooed Truczinski becomes enamored of the wooden figurehead
of a ship and impales himself on it.
Maria Truczinski
Maria Truczinski, Herberts younger sister, who becomes Oscars lover in an unlikely relationship. Maria
eventually bears Oscars child and then proceeds to marry his father (despite his Nazi affiliations), who could
obviously provide for her and the infant much more readily than could Oscar.
Sister Dorothea Koengetter
Sister Dorothea Koengetter (doh-roh-TAY-ah KEHN-geht-tehr), a neighbor of Oscar in postwar West Germany
and one of the few people in the novel not implicated in any complicity with the Nazi regime. Despite, or
perhaps because of, her goodness, Sister Dorothea becomes a murder victim. Oscar is falsely accused of her
murder.
Gottfried von Vittlar
Gottfried von Vittlar (GOT-freed fon VIHT-lahr), an acquaintance of both Sister Dorothea and Oscar whose
testimony inadvertently results in Oscars conviction for murder.
The Tin Drum Characters
Oskar, the strange boy who refuses to grow and who has been called a fantasy figure in the tradition of German
folk heroes, will remain one of the most unforgettable characters in world literature. Besides willing himself not
to grow, Oskar has extraordinary powers over people around him, as well as the ability to shatter glass with his
voice. Other critics have likened Oskar to the artist. His tin drum seems like a toy to the adults around him; yet,
it has a powerful influence on events. In one major scene in the novel, Oskar disrupts a Nazi rally by hiding
under the bandstand. By beating out the rhythm to "The Blue Danube" he confuses the band and annihilates the
Nazi songs. When he shifts into a Charleston, the spectators begin dancing and the whole spectacle is ruined.
The Nazis, however, set out to find leftist saboteurs and ignore little Oskar. Although many may believe art
cannot affect anything important, Grass, to many critics, is pointing out its power. When Oskar becomes part of
a traveling show, he falls under the influence of a dwarf, Bebra, who also considers himself an artist. Grass
seems to be saying that artists, despite their being regarded as curious dwarfs, not only have power, but nearly
supernatural power. Compared to Oskar, the other characters of The Tin Drum are secondary. They are always,
however, vividly drawn and powerfully imagined, in a way reminiscent of Dickens's minor characters. Oskar's
family, particularly his mother and grandmother, and the traveling players Bebra and Roswitha are among a
panoply of characters who keep this lengthy work consistently lively.
Gnter Grasss iconoclastic novel The Tin Drum shook the moral complacency of the German people and forced
them to acknowledge their responsibility for the triumph of Nazism. Earlier, Grass had won minor acclaim for
his poetry, but in 1959 Group 47, a German association of young artists and writers, awarded him its
prepublication cash prize for The Tin Drum. When the novel appeared, it caused one of the greatest uproars in
the history of German literature. Translated into most major languages over the next few years, it won

international critical acclaim. Grass himself instantly became the best-known and most controversial figure of
postwar German literature.
In addition to Group 47s prepublication prize, The Tin Drum won three major international literary awards. In
1965, while Grass was accepting the coveted George Bchner Prize, members of a youth organization in
Dsseldorf publicly burned copies of The Tin Drum. Despite critical acclaim and many awards, Grass and The
Tin Drum became the targets of more than forty lawsuits and innumerable denunciations in the letters-to-the
editor columns of virtually every publication in Germany. People from all social strata in Germany accused
Grass of pornography, blasphemy, sacrilege, slander, defamation, and other heinous crimes. The furor over The
Tin Drum arose from one central theme, that Grass refused to exculpate himself or any other German from guilt
for the Nazi regime. In his novel, Grass identifies Nazi affinities in most of the people and in all of the
institutions of German society.
Critics have called Grasss account of the Nazi era wildly satirical, wickedly humorous, and morally chilling.
Grass presents a German religious institution only too willing to accommodate itself to Adolf Hitlers regime.
Some of his most damning barbs are directed at Grasss own Catholicism, but Protestants are not spared their
share of guilt. The picture of the acclaimed German educational institution presented in The Tin Drum suggests
that its discipline and regimentation prepared the way admirably for Hitler and his movement. In Grasss book,
the German political tradition of authoritarianism and antiliberalism almost invited a Hitler to take power. Grass
also showed how the Nazis capitalized on and institutionalized a widespread view of women that relegated them
to a subordinate status in family relationships and the workforce. In The Tin Drum, all economic classes in
Germany willingly sacrificed their personal freedom to gain the economic prosperity that Hitler promised and
delivered. In short, Grass insisted that Hitler was no accident but the logical development of German history;
therefore, all the evil of the Nazi era was the direct responsibility of all Germans living at the time.
After World War II, West Germanys new economic and military partnership with the Western bloc engendered
an attempt on the part of many Germans to disassociate themselves from their countrys Nazi past. Many
German teachers, historians, writers, and government officials argued that Hitler and his movement represented
a historical anomaly, not the logical development of German history. Hitler came to power, these apologists
maintained, because of a special set of circumstances: the German defeat in World War I and the ensuing Treaty
of Versailles, the economic dislocations in Germany during the Weimar Republic, and middle-class Germans
fear of a Communist takeover. The German nation as a whole, they concluded, should not be forced to bear the
guilt for atrocities committed by a group of madmen who illegally seized control of their government.
During the period between 1945 and 1959, a body of literature in Germany and elsewhere propounded the thesis
that most Germans had deplored Hitler and the Nazis. Accounts of various German resistance groups that had

actively sought to overthrow Hitler appeared alongside stories of individual Germans who had helped to rescue
Jews from deportation to concentration camps. German artists, writers, and scientists pointed out that many of
their number had emigrated shortly after Hitler came to power. Most of those who remained insisted that they
had been part of the so-called inner emigration, that though they had remained in Germany they had never
cooperated with the regime and had worked in subtle ways to thwart Hitlers purposes.
Grass portrayed those Germans who had engaged in active resistance to Hitlers regime as having been opposed
only to Hitler himself and not to the substance of Nazism. He also dismissed those German intellectuals
engaged in the inner emigration as being nothing more than court jesters for Nazi propaganda minister Joseph
Goebbels. Taken in total, the novel condemned all Germans and insisted that they acknowledge the moral and
spiritual shortcomings of their institutionsit was little wonder that almost every German reader found
something offensive in The Tin Drum.
Despite the controversy, The Tin Drum was widely read and discussed in Germany, especially by young people
(more than half a million copies sold there during the five years following its publication). The West German
government began insisting that students be taught the history of the Nazi era, which had been neglected in the
immediate postwar era. In the succeeding decades, The Tin Drum and Grasss other novels and poetry became
the foci for an entire nation as it reinterpreted its past and reexamined the moral foundations of its institutions.
After The Tin Drum appeared in translation in the United States in 1961, Grass was acclaimed by many critics
as Germanys greatest living writer. Literary critics in France, Denmark, and many other countries went so far
as to rank Grass as the worlds greatest living novelist, and they praised his courage in raising such
controversial issues in his own country. A few critics were perceptive enough to point out that the elements of
German society that Grass satirized so scathinglywhich, according to him, had led directly to Nazism
became present in every industrialized nation in the second half of the twentieth century. Although Grass
directed his message to Germans, many of his admirers argued that all humankind must learn from his pages or
suffer a resurgence of the tyranny that nearly engulfed the world before 1945.
From earliest infancy, the unnaturally precocious Oskar Matzerath is so appalled by the cruel absurdities of life
that he refuses to grow beyond the age of three. Choosing the perspective of infantile curiosity, he instead
proceeds to unmask the world of the adults around him: the small-mindedness of his German father, the
sensuality and guilt of his mother, and the weakness of her ineffectual Polish lover. Compensating for his own
vulnerability with sly aggressiveness, Oskar becomes at least partially responsible for their unhappy fates.
During the 1920s and 1930s, Oskars hometown of Danzig (now Gdansk) was precariously perched between
German and Polish spheres of influence. His deteriorating family life represents, therefore, not only a private

tragedy but also the historical collapse of Danzigs German-Polish symbiosis under the impact of Nazism and
the horrors of war. An amoral will to live makes Oskar survive the catastrophe by alternately practicing
strategies of accommodation and rebelliousness.
At the end of the war, possibilities of a new beginning in West Germany entice him to grow again. As these
hopes are quickly crushed, his body revolts by developing a hump. Infantile desires and fears reassert
themselves, and Oskar finally agrees to be committed to a mental institution.
Though the heros childish fascination with what is revolting, perverse, and sacrilegious scandalized many
readers, Grasss first novel was immediately recognized as a major event in postwar German literature. The
shocking absence of moral restraint in Oskars fight with adult reality is, on the one hand, an indictment of that
realitys moral pretensions; on the other hand, however, it is also meant to challenge existing morality to come
to terms with this fictional world, which offers few signposts for moral orientation and yet seems in such
desperate need of them.
the Tin Drum Gnter Grass
(Full name Gnter Wilhelm Grass) The following entry presents criticism on Grass's novel Die
Blechtrommel(1959; The Tin Drum). For further discussion of Grass's life and works, see CLC,
Volumes 1, 2, 4, 6, 11, 15, 22, and 32.
Narrated by the insane dwarf Oskar, The Tin Drum incorporates elements of German folklore and the grotesque
to explore the political, economic, and social complexities of German life from 1900 through World War II and
the beginning of the German postwar "Economic Miracle." Set in Danzig and Dsseldorf, the story chronicles
the fortunes of Oskar and his family during the rise and fall of Nazism. Since its publication, the novel has
raised profound and painful issues for contemporary Germans, including the extent to which the German public
was complicit in and remains responsible for Nazi war crimes. For these reasons, The Tin Drum is widely
regarded as Grass's most important, influential, and thought-provoking work.
Plot and Major Characters
The Tin Drum is narrated by Oskar Matzerath, a thirty-year-old inmate in an institution for the criminally
insane. Although Grass avoids a strictly linear narrative structure, allowing Oskar to alternately discuss his
present situation and reminisce about his past, the novel is divided into three chronological components. Book
One begins with Oskar's grandparents and the birth of his mother, Agnes, in 1900. Agnes marries Alfred
Matzerath, a grocer and future Nazi Party member, but continues her love affair with Polish post-office

employee Jan Bronski, thus raising questions about Oskar's paternity. When Oskar is three years old, he decides,
in an act of demonic will, not to grow any taller or to develop physically; already convinced of his intellectual
superiority and disgusted by petit-bourgeois German society, he chooses to remain the size of a child and be
perceived a freak. Oskar is given a tin drum, which he keeps with him as a talisman at all times. His drumming
and his preternatural ability to scream allow him to destroy and disrupt things, including the family's
grandfather clock, Nazi rallies, and the windows in the Danzig state theater. After Agnes kills herself by gorging
on fish and eels, Book One ends with Oskar recounting the suicide of Sigismund Markus, the Jewish toy and tin
drum merchant, who poisons himself during the ransacking of synagogues and Jewish businesses known
as Kristallnacht; the "night of broken glass,"Kristallnacht served as a prelude to Hitler's attempt to exterminate
the Jews. In Book Two, Oskar's widowed father hires a young woman, Maria, to work in his grocery store. Both
he and Oskar have sexual relations with her and she becomes pregnant. Oskar then decides to leave Danzig and
devote himself to a dissolute life of sex and thievery. He eventually returns to find Maria has given birth to
Kurt, who is either Oskar's son or half-brother. As the Russian Army enters and gains control of Danzig in 1944,
Alfred swallows his Nazi Party lapel pin to protect himself, and, in doing so, chokes to death. Book Two
concludes with Alfred's burial and Oskar's decision to stop drumming. At the funeral, Oskar throws his drum
into his father's grave, and Kurt hits Oskar in the head with a rock, causing him to grow. Book Three opens in
postwar Germany. After Maria rejects Oskar's proposal of marriage, he moves to Dsseldorf where he models at
the Arts Academy and lusts after a nurse, Sister Dorothea, who lives in his apartment building. He resumes his
drumming, playing with the clarinetist Klepp at the Onion Cellara popular Dsseldorf nightclub where
Germans go to peel onions, remember the past, and cry. Oskar becomes a widely popular performer but grows
terribly lonely. One day while out walking, his rented dog presents him with a human finger it has found. Oskar
keeps the finger, preserving it in a jar. Identified as Dorothea's, the fingerand Oskar's feelings for heris used
to convict him of her brutal murder. The novel closes with Oskar patiently awaiting his release from the asylum.
Major Themes
As Keith Miles observes, The Tin Drum illustrates Seneca's axiom, "The knowledge of sin is the beginning of
salvation." Grass depicts the sins of Nazism through Oskar's recollections of the grotesque public and personal
events that shaped his life and the lives of the people around him. Oskar's rejection of adulthood and his
drumming and screaming can be seen as metaphors of stunted development, immorality, and senseless
destruction that illuminate some of the effects of Nazism. The novel also addresses the role of the Christian
Church under the Nazis. For instance, Grass depicts a seminarian and ardent Nazi, Schugger, who is able to
easily reconcile his faith with Nazi ideology. Grass also draws explicit and ironic parallels between Oskar and
Jesus, showing how the former becomes a savior/fhrer figure for a band of boy thieves during the war. Finally,
Grass examines German alienation in the postwar era through Oskar's aimless wanderings in Book Three.

Grass's pessimism about Germany's future is reflected in the fact that although Oskar tries to cope with the
changes wrought by Germany's defeat and economic revival by returning to the old comforts of his drumming,
he repeats the sins of the past with the murderand morbid fascination with the dismembered appendageof
Sister Dorothea.
Critical Reception
The Tin Drum became a literary and commercial success soon after its publication in 1959. Many critics noted
that Grass's provocative, critical, and parodistic use of fantasy and German folklore makes explicit and subverts
the ways in which the Nazis employed the language and images of German Romanticism as a way of
legitimizing their destructive ideology. For example, Oskar frequently refers to the Black Cook or Black Witch,
a folkloric figure of evil, who seems to guide his life, appearing at such significant events as Agnes's death and
in the brooding spirit that hovers over Kristallnacht. Some critics, such as Richard H. Lawson, discuss the
picaresque characteristics of the novel, describing Oskar as a grotesque variation on the classic picaro, a rascal
and cunningly industrious individual who lives by his wits. Oskar has also been described as an epic hero with
demigod traits due to his ability to survive and even match the threats of Nazism. Critics point out, however,
that Grass's technique of moving back and forth in time and mixing fantasy and reality can be confusing to
some readers. The matter is further complicated by Oskar's unreliable narration, whichgiven that Oskar is
insanecontinually forces the reader to assess the veracity of what he is being told. Most critics agree,
however, that The Tin Drum is a literary masterpiece, arguing that its technique and its grasp of historical reality
make it utterly original.
*Danzig
*Danzig or Gdansk (DAN-zik; GEH-danshk). Major Polish port on the Baltic Sea that has a long and colorful
history dating from the tenth century. At times through the ages Germany controlled the city, and it was called
Danzig. During other periods it was a city-state known as Gdansk. In 1939, when Germany invaded Poland and
seized Gdansk, its name was again changed to Danzig. After World War II it became a part of Poland and was
again called Gdansk, which has continued to be its name.
Gnter Grass was born and grew up in this city, where his parents owned a grocery store. The opening section
of The Tin Drum outwardly recalls Grasss early years through the voice of his fictional narrator, Oskar
Matzerath. Like Grass, Oskar was born in the 1930s. His parents also operate a small grocery store, and much
of the first part of the novel takes place in the shop and the familys adjacent living quarters. Oskar succeeds in
creating the ambience of a family-run store, bringing the customers to life, as well as making the goods, their
texture and smells, tangible. He fully captures the colorful port city with its ancient buildings, narrow streets,
and cramped quarters, along with its waterfront and beach areas. He also recounts the lives of his grandparents,
who lived on a farm in the Polish province of Kashubia, a rural area that he describes in a distinctive manner.
Like his fictional Oskar, Grass lived through the German invasion of the city in 1939 and its aftermath. These
events are turned into a vivid piece of fiction that depicts how the presence of the German occupation force

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dramatically alters the citys atmosphere. Although Grass certainly drew on his early years to give this part of
the novel its rich texture and realistic tone, the narrative itself undermines the authenticity of its setting. Places
and objects take on a significance in the novel far removed from reality, as Grass converts ordinary
surroundings and objects into extended metaphors and motifsOskars tin drum being the most notable
example.
As the narrative progresses, Gdansk, which is accurately drawn in its pre-World War II condition, exemplifies
any city transformed from a peaceful state by war. Under its new name of Danzig, the city once called Gdansk
turns into a place where barbarity and fear dominate. That its identity as Gdansk and Danzig has vacillated
over the centuries adds to its metaphoric possibilities, which Grass exploits to the fullest.
*Dsseldorf
*Dsseldorf. Industrial city in west-central Germany where Oskar is writing his memoirs in a mental hospital.
After the war, Oskar and his family are forced to emigrate to Dsseldorf. Grass, who served in the German
army during World War II, also ended up in Dsseldorf after the war and had experiences there similar to those
that Oskar records in his autobiography.
Starting out as a fishing village in the seventh century at the point where the Dssel River flows into the Rhine
River, Dsseldorf gained importance during the Industrial Revolution. It became the financial center of the
surrounding industrial area known as the Ruhr, whose coal mines produced the energy and whose factories built
most of the implements for both world wars. Significantly, during the 1930s the German industrialists met with
Hitler in Dsseldorf to offer their support if they could be assured of another war. In the 1940s the Allies
bombed the city into rubble, which is what Oskar finds when he arrives there. Dsseldorfs checkered history
makes it a suitable place for Grass to carry out his satiric view of Germany during and after the war.
Oskar relates how he and his family survive among the ruins of Dsseldorf and how his mother makes a living
on the black market. At first Oskar works as a tombstone engraver, which provides the opportunity for him to
describe the cemeteries in detail; cemeteries are another recurring motif in the novel. Later he becomes a model
at the newly opened art academy, a venue he pictures with exactness.
As the city starts to rebuild, night clubs and dance halls open in bombed-out buildings, such as the Lions Den,
one of Oskars favorites. Oskars jazz trio plays in another club called the Onion Cellar, an appropriate name
considering that the owner serves raw onions to make his patrons cry, a response they desire and enjoy. This
idiosyncrasy illustrates how Grass extends the meaning of place throughout the novel.
In Dsseldorf the sense of place is remarkably concrete, including its rutted-out streets, its blocks of shattered
apartment buildings, its once grand buildings that lay in ruins. Even though this devastated postwar city, like so
many in Germany, is described in realistic detail, it is at the same time turned into a succession of metaphors
and motifs to depict the senselessness of war.
The Tin Drum Literary Techniques
Although Grass is renowned for his linguistic playfulness and his careful avoidance of simplicities of theme, W.
Gordon Cunliffe points out that Grass uses all the skills of a Realistic author. He can recreate the behavior of
shopkeepers, peasants, policemen, and waiters. His sensitivity to dialects is extraordinary. His details make skat
players, gypsies, party officials, and schoolmasters come vividly to life, even when they are the subject of satire
or direct ridicule. Much of this derives from his specific interest in the locale of Danzig. Grass is thereby part of
the tradition of modern authors like James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Cesare Pavese, whose works are

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intimately related to a particular place. He often uses the actual names of shops and people from Danzig. Much
of the vividness of The Tin Drum derives from its careful, sometimes shocking, observations of such things as
an eel-infested horse's head in the sea, a potato dumpling, or the inside of a toy shop. They create a solid
background upon which the archetypal, supernatural elements can be played out.
The Tin Drum Social Concerns
Despite Grass's assertions that his novels have no specific meanings, it is obvious that his social concerns and
themes are inextricably interwoven in all of his works. The Tin Drum covers the period from the 1920s through
the 1950s and ranges from Danzig to Germany and France. Oskar Matzerath's odyssey through the nightmare of
Nazism has been interpreted as a parable for the German experience, but it should not be seen as a precise
allegory. As do many Postmodern stylists, Grass insists that there are no "meanings" in his works, that he is
interested in language and style, not extraneous abstractions. He has said, "So many of them [critics] look for
symbols and allegories and deeper meanings, but sometimes I write of potato peels and mean potato peels."
His denials to the contrary, all his work is rich with archetypal overtones, which are simultaneously universal
and specific to the German people. Although readers certainly would not accept the events in The Tin Drum on a
literal level, they have the resonance of mythology. Oskar has been compared to Apollo, for example, in that the
sound of his drumming or his voice wreaks vengeance from afar. Incredibly, he traces his descent from a man
hiding in a potato field under a woman's large skirts. Grass converts an historic period, still within the vivid
memory of many people, into a period of legend. Supernatural feats occur. Complex interconnections are drawn
between people and events that belie the frayed fabric of common reality. One sees similar thematic qualities in
the great novels of Herman Melville, whom Grass acknowledges as an influence. Against the verifiable reality
of whaling in Moby Dick (1851), a cosmic, archetypal game is played out. Magic mingles with realistic detail,
creating a world far more evocative than a straightforward tale of whaling and obsession. In The Tin
Drum, numerous hints of a larger meaning are sprinkled through the novel, although they are never allowed to
form a simple crystal. Mystery is maintained in both novels and thereby each is enriched, yielding up varied
meanings. The "power of blackness" that Melville sought is manifest also in Grass: His fictional world,
apparently so clear, becomes more perplexing as one examines it. For example, The Tin Drum may be the
fantasy of an unreliable, perhaps insane, narrator as in so many modern novels, or Oskar may be a Christ-child
figure in a world gone mad. He simultaneously seems both, a strange combination of opposites. There are no
easy answers inThe Tin Drum, which is why it is one of those rare great novels that may be mined many times
for its themes of guilt, national identity, and the artist's role, yet never become exhausted.
The Tin Drum Literary Precedents
Besides the previously mentioned affinities of the works of Melville, Joyce, Faulkner, and Pavese, critics have
also pointed to the picaresque Simplicissimus (1669) by Johann Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen. One of
the most interesting comparisons, however, has been drawn with Laurence Sterne'sTristram Shandy (17591767). Grass admits admiring the great eighteenth-century novel and critics have pointed out several influences.
First, much of The Tin Drum, despite the many real horrors it depicts, consists of humor. Many scenes are
irreverent or silly or filled with slapstick. With the detachment and narrative distance ofTristram Shandy, Oskar
watches the world around him go through its madness, and with the cold eye of a child, reveals it for all its
ludicrousness. Like Sterne, Grass has a keen eye for absurdity, even in the midst of the ideas and events which
most people take with great seriousness. Secondly, a great deal of the humor is linguistic. Puns, as well as
unbelievable and inexplicable metaphors, are crucial parts of Grass's style. Like Sterne, he is interested in
invention for its own sake, playing of word games, and imitating dialects. When asked about the peculiar form
of his prenatal autobiography, Tristram Shandy says, "Ask my pen; it governs me; I govern not it." Grass, who
denies the necessity of thematic abstractions to fiction, is arguing a similar view. The novel creates itself in its
most suitable form. If the author attempts to force it to play philosophical parlor games, the integrity of the

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work is destroyed. Neither Uncle Toby nor Colonel Tim in Sterne's novel is the definitive symbol. Likewise,
Oskar is not, and must not be, reduced to a single symbol.
The Tin Drum Related Titles
Grass followed The Tin Drum with Cat and Mouse (1963; Katz und Maus, 1961), and Dog Years (1965;
Hundejahre, 1963), and the three have been dubbed the "Danzig Trilogy," because they share many
elements. Cat and Mouse features a deformed character, like Oskar, from Danzig, Joachim Mahlke's deformity
is an extraordinarily large Adam's apple, and he is desperate for acceptance by his peers. His solution is to
acquire an Iron Cross which will hide his bulging throat. Although a successful athlete, he does not achieve
acceptance and comes to a mysterious end. As the "mouse," Mahlke has been called the most admirable person
in Grass's fiction and the entire work a moral parable. Critics, however, have been somewhat bewildered by this
novel. The Tin Drum was a long, complex novel. By comparison. Cat and Mouse seems tiny and obvious in its
meanings. Limiting itself to the war years in Danzig is seen by some as an overcoming of the weakest parts
of The Tin Drum, those episodes that take place outside Danzig. Others think the shortness a liability as it
caused the allegorical structure to be too prominent.