Title: The Tin Drum Author: Günter Grass Creation Date: 1959 Location: Darmstadt, West Germany Collection: One Book Per Country
Brief
Die Blechtrommel was published by Luchterhand Verlag in September 1959, when Günter Grass was thirty-one and almost unknown. The first volume of the Danzig Trilogy — with Cat and Mouse (1961) and Dog Years (1963) — it established Grass overnight as the central figure of postwar German literature. Ralph Manheim's English translation appeared in 1962. In 1999, on receiving the Nobel Prize, Grass saw The Tin Drum voted among the hundred best German-language novels of the century.
Its narrator is Oskar Matzerath, who on his third birthday throws himself down the cellar stairs and stops growing by an act of will. He remains three feet tall for twenty-eight years, never parting with the red-and-white tin drum he was given. When his drum is threatened he screams, shattering glass — windows, the monocles of Nazi officials. He narrates from a mental asylum outside Düsseldorf, confined for a murder he may or may not have committed. The novel runs from the 1890s in Danzig — now Gdańsk — through the postwar Wirtschaftswunder of 1950s Düsseldorf.
What makes The Tin Drum a national book is timing and form. Fourteen years after the collapse of the Third Reich, West German literature was still largely unable to name what had happened. The generation that lived through the war had settled into professional silence; the rubble literature of the 1940s had exhausted its register. Grass arrived with a baroque, obscene, comic novel that treated the whole period as a madman's drumming material and broke the silence.
The Country
The Germany The Tin Drum speaks to is not the Germany of maps. Grass's Germany is Danzig, the Free City on the Baltic that existed as a League of Nations fiction between 1919 and 1939 — a German-speaking port placed outside the Weimar Republic by the Treaty of Versailles to give Poland access to the sea. Its German majority voted heavily for the Nazi Party from 1933; its Polish minority ran the Post Office; its Jewish community was stripped of rights. On 1 September 1939, the battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Polish garrison at Westerplatte and the Second World War began. Grass was twelve.
The Nazi period in Danzig was compressed and local: rallies on the Maiwiese, the Kristallnacht burning of the Great Synagogue, the Polish Post Office besieged for fifteen hours with its defenders shot as francs-tireurs. Then five years of war, the Red Army from the east in winter 1944–45, the burning of the inner city in March 1945, and the expulsion of the German population westward — between twelve and fourteen million people — the largest forced displacement in European history.
The Germany they arrived in was the Federal Republic of the Wirtschaftswunder: the Adenauer years, the Marshall Plan, the Economic Miracle. The unspoken contract was to leave the past alone while the country rebuilt. Former Nazis returned to their desks as civil servants, judges, professors. The word was Vergangenheitsbewältigung — the mastering of the past, accomplished mostly by silence. The Tin Drum refused that agreement.
The Writer
Günter Grass was born on 16 October 1927 in the Free City of Danzig, in the suburb of Langfuhr, above a small grocer's shop. His father was a German Protestant grocer; his mother was Kashubian, from the Slavic-speaking minority native to the region. Both reappear in The Tin Drum. He joined the Jungvolk at ten and the Hitler Youth at fourteen. At fifteen he volunteered for submarine service, was turned down as too young, and was drafted in late 1944 into the Waffen-SS — the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg. He saw three months of combat on the collapsing Eastern Front, was wounded at Cottbus, and was taken prisoner in Bavaria in April 1945.
He concealed this service for sixty-one years. Until 2006, the publicly known version was that he had been an anti-aircraft auxiliary and then a prisoner of war. He let this version stand through his entire career as the moral conscience of the Federal Republic, the Nobel Prize, and his interventions against Helmut Kohl and the historians' quarrel of the 1980s.
After the war he worked as a farm labourer, stonemason, and jazz drummer before studying sculpture and graphic art in Düsseldorf and Berlin. He began The Tin Drum in Paris in 1956 and finished it in 1959. When he read the first two chapters aloud at a Gruppe 47 meeting, the room understood that something new had arrived. He received the Nobel Prize in 1999. He died at Lübeck on 13 April 2015, aged eighty-seven.
The Reckoning
The Tin Drum did something no previous West German book had managed: it made literature equal to what had to be said. The rubble literature of Böll and Borchert had been honest but exhausted; Thomas Mann had written Doctor Faustus from Californian exile in a register too elevated for a grocery-shop war. Grass came in at street level, in the voice of a dwarf, and gave Germany a comic-baroque language capacious enough to contain its own recent past. Every major German novelist of the following generations — Walser, Wolf, Johnson, Sebald, Schlink — worked in a country whose literary language The Tin Drum had unlocked.
Volker Schlöndorff's 1979 film, starring David Bennent as Oskar, shared the Palme d'Or at Cannes with Apocalypse Now and won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film — fixing the glass-shattering scream and the small figure drumming a waltz beneath the podium into international memory.
In August 2006, Grass revealed — timed to his memoir Peeling the Onion — that at seventeen he had been a member of the Waffen-SS. Critics demanded he return the Nobel Prize. Joachim Fest accused him of fraud. Christopher Hitchens wrote that the concealment corrupted everything Grass had said about memory. What the revelation could not do was remove The Tin Drum from literary history. Its work was done in 1959 — showing that the truth about the Nazi period would always come out sideways, from unreliable narrators, after long silences. Grass's own service illustrated, unkindly, the novel's argument.
The Reading
Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.
The Potato Field
I begin, as all things here begin, with my grandmother. Under four skirts she sat in a potato field outside Bissau, in the year 1899, in October, in the afternoon, with the wind coming off the Baltic and the smoke from her potato fire rising straight before it bent. The field was Kashubian — which is to say neither German nor Polish but the thing that existed between those two certainties, the border itself made into a people, a language, a way of being that the coming century would find intolerable. She was broad and large and her skirts were capacious. Beneath them a fugitive could hide.
Joseph Koljaiczek came running across the fields with the constabulary behind him — a short, broad man, an arsonist, a Pole of the kind the German authorities found convenient to pursue. He saw the skirts. He dove beneath them. What happened under those four skirts while the police searched the surrounding fields — what was conceived there, in the warm dark between potato fire and Kashubian earth — was the beginning of everything that follows. A family made in hiding. A lineage founded on concealment and the knowledge that to be caught is to be destroyed, so one must always have skirts to dive beneath, always a warm dark place where the authorities cannot see.
My grandmother's skirts are the first sanctuary. They will not be the last. Every hiding place in this story — the cellar where I chose my smallness, the church pew where I conducted my theology, the cupboard where I concealed my drum — descends from those four skirts in that field. The act of concealment is the foundational act of my family, passed down through generations along with uncertain blood and the Kashubian refusal to be classified.
The Decision
On my third birthday I received my drum. Red and white lacquer, two drumsticks, a sound that could organise the chaos of the adult world into rhythms I controlled. I also received, that day, the knowledge that the adults intended me to grow — to become one of them, to inherit the grocery shop, to join their political parties and attend their rallies and participate in whatever they were becoming. I watched them. I saw what they were becoming. I decided not to join them.
The cellar stairs provided the occasion. I threw myself down them — or I fell, or I was pushed by the half-dark and my own need for a credible explanation that the adults could accept. The doctor diagnosed the fall as the cause of my arrested growth. The adults believed the diagnosis because they needed to believe it, because the alternative — that a three-year-old had looked at the world they were building and refused it, had made his body into a protest against their future — was more than they could accommodate. They preferred a medical explanation. I gave them one. I gave them the cellar stairs and the bump on the head and the diagnosis, and in return they gave me what I needed: invisibility. A child of three is beneath notice. A child of three can sit in any room and hear anything because the adults have forgotten he is present, have forgotten that small eyes see and small ears hear and that the tin drum can record everything and play it back later, when the adults would prefer that certain afternoons had never happened.
My drum was my instrument and my archive. I beat out the rhythms of what I witnessed: the gradual conversion of my father's grocery shop into a space where party membership was discussed with the same casual inevitability as the weather, the way Matzerath put on his brown shirt the way other men put on a raincoat — because it was raining politics and one needed protection, because everyone else was wearing one, because the question of whether to wear it had already been answered by the collective before any individual was asked. The drum recorded the meetings and the marches and the songs and the flags and the slow, ordinary process by which a city of mixed peoples decided to become a city of one people, and what that decision cost the peoples who were not the one chosen.
The Eels
My mother died of fish. This requires explanation, though explanation is precisely what her death resists.
On the beach at Neufahrwasser, outside Danzig, a longshoreman dropped a horse's head on a rope into the brackish water of the harbour mouth and pulled it up crawling with eels. Fat, black, glistening eels, feeding on the horse's dead flesh, emerging from the nostrils and the eye sockets and the open mouth like a demonstration of what the sea does to everything we give it — converts it, populates it with blind feeding organisms, makes death into a nursery. The longshoreman pulled eels from the horse's skull and dropped them into a sack and my mother watched. She watched with a fascination that was already revulsion and already prophecy. Matzerath was disgusted. Jan Bronski was queasy and turned his beautiful, ineffectual face away from the spectacle. I drummed. My mother watched.
Something broke in her that afternoon on the beach, or something that had been breaking for years finally completed its fracture in the presence of those eels emerging from that skull. She began eating fish afterward — enormous quantities, raw and cooked, far beyond what any body can process. The fish went in and the fish came back and she ate more fish and her body rejected what her will insisted upon and the doctors could not explain it and I could not explain it and Matzerath could not explain it because there was no explanation available in the vocabulary of medicine or domesticity. She was destroyed by the conditions of her existence rather than by any single identifiable cause. She was destroyed by the borderland and by the two men she loved and could not choose between and by the eels in the horse's skull and by the coming war that everyone could smell in the air the way one smells the harbour — salt and rot and the promise of storms. She died. She left me alone with my drum and my voice that could shatter glass and my two possible fathers and the city that was about to be contested unto destruction.
The Post Office
The war began in our city on the first day of September 1939. It began specifically at the Polish Post Office on the Heveliusplatz, where Jan Bronski — my possible father, my mother's true love, a postal employee of no military conviction whatsoever — happened to be at his desk when the Wehrmacht decided that the seizure of the Free City of Danzig began with the seizure of the building in which Poles sorted letters.
I was there. I had come to return a pack of skat cards that Jan had left in our apartment — a domestic errand, the kind of trivial occasion on which catastrophe insists upon arriving. A handful of postal workers with a few weapons held the building against the German army for most of the day. Jan was among them not because he was brave but because he was present, because he had gone to work that morning, because the question of whether to defend the building had been answered by the building's encirclement before anyone inside was consulted. He played skat in the corridor while the walls shook. He played cards because cards were the one activity that could impose order on an afternoon that had lost all other forms of order. He was captured and he was shot. I watched them drag my possible father from the rubble and I knew what would happen to him and I could do nothing, which is the posture this narrative takes toward all of the war's large crimes: witnessed, drummed, preserved in a rhythm that offers neither consolation nor judgement because neither consolation nor judgement is within my gift.
The Atlantic Wall
Bebra found me — or I found Bebra, or we recognised each other with the instant comprehension of the small. Bebra was a dwarf, a performer, an entertainer who had made his accommodation with the regime by being useful to it. He worked for the propaganda apparatus. He took me to occupied France, where my glass-shattering voice had theatrical applications, and we performed for Wehrmacht soldiers along the Atlantic Wall — the concrete fortifications facing England, facing the invasion everyone expected and no one discussed.
I drummed on the beaches of Normandy for men who would shortly be dying there. The entertainment apparatus of fascism functioned right up to the moment of its own annihilation, and I was inside it — travelling with it, eating its food, sleeping in its barracks. I was not quite complicit. I was Bebra's instrument, a performing dwarf in a circus funded by the Ministry of Propaganda. But I was inside the machine. I cannot claim I stood entirely outside it. No one who ate the food and slept in the barracks and performed the entertainment and accepted the travel orders can claim to have stood outside it. The drum recorded this too.
The Pin
The war ended in our apartment with a piece of metal the size of a thumbnail.
Soviet troops entered Danzig, and the city's German population learned what defeated populations learn in the immediate aftermath of conquest. Matzerath — my possible father, the grocer, the man who had put on the party badge with the same thoughtlessness with which he put on his apron — faced soldiers searching his home and understood, in the compressed panic of a single moment, that the thing he had worn so casually for twelve years could now kill him. He tried to swallow his Nazi party pin. The small metal badge that he had put on to join and was now trying to hide — the emblem of the collective he had entered without deliberation and could not exit without choking — lodged in his throat. He choked. A soldier shot him. The pin that had cost nothing to acquire cost everything to conceal. The man who had refused to think died on the physical evidence of his own thoughtlessness.
I watched. I decided, with the characteristic ambiguity this narrative grants all my decisions, to start growing again. I buried my drum in Matzerath's grave. The child who had refused to grow buried his instrument of refusal alongside the man who had refused to think. Both refusals were over. Both had extracted their price. The war was finished and the hiding was finished and the cellar stairs had served their purpose and now there was nothing left but to grow — to become what I had spent two decades refusing to become — and to see what the adults would make of the rubble, and whether the thing they built on it would be more honest than the thing that had preceded it.
The Onion Cellar
It was not more honest. West Germany rebuilt itself on amnesia. The Wirtschaftswunder proceeded by collective agreement not to examine the recent past, not to ask what the neighbour did during the war, not to look beneath the new prosperity for the bones it was built on.
I worked as a tombstone carver's assistant, fitting work for someone who had spent a lifetime commemorating the dead. I worked as an artist's model, my hunchbacked stunted body converted into form and composition by students who drew the product of the century's catastrophe with the aesthetic detachment that art requires and that ethics should perhaps forbid. And I worked as a jazz drummer in the Onion Cellar — a nightclub where the proprietor's act consisted of giving well-dressed patrons sliced onions and sharp knives so that they could finally weep. Tears produced by chemical stimulus, because authentic grief remained unavailable to a generation that had agreed, tacitly and comprehensively, not to feel what it had done. They wept over onions because they could not weep over Danzig, over the post office, over the eels and the pin and the wide skirts and the bodies in the rubble and the trains heading east with human cargo.
I drummed accompaniment to this ritual. The observer who enables without endorsing. The small man who provides the rhythm the dance requires without believing in the dance.
The Institution
And now I am here. In this room, with this bed, with this drum that is not the same drum but is always the same drum, with Bruno watching through his peephole and the paper before me and the story told — or a version of the story, or the version I have chosen to tell today, which may differ from the version I would tell tomorrow, because memory is not a fixed archive but a drum that plays different rhythms depending on who is listening and what they need to hear.
The Black Witch pursues me through my dreams. She has always been there — the Kashubian darkness, the figure from childhood terror, the devouring thing that comes for everyone when the drumming stops. She cannot be outrun. She cannot be outdrummed. She is the knowledge that the story, however long and however detailed and however grotesquely ornamented, ends in the same place for everyone: in a room, with a keeper, with the sound of drumsticks going still.
I have told what I have seen. I have beaten it out on tin — the century, the city, the skirts and the eels and the post office and the pin and the onions and the tears that were never adequate to what provoked them. Whether I have told the truth is a question I leave to my keeper. He watches. I drum. Between us, in the space the peephole allows, the story exists — neither fully believed nor fully dismissed, the way all stories of that time exist now: told by unreliable narrators to uncertain listeners, in a country that has agreed to remember without agreeing on what it remembers.
This post is part of Books They Tried to Destroy, a series on the Banned, Burned & Dangerous canon — works that frightened states and survived them.
Grass's novel demands a translation that can sustain its baroque sentences and earthy humour across 600 pages. Breon Mitchell's 2009 translation for Houghton Mifflin is the definitive English edition — the first to work from the original manuscript rather than the published German text.
This post is part of One Book Per Country, a literary atlas selecting one defining book for every nation on earth. See the full collection →
Breon Mitchell's 2009 translation is now the standard English Tin Drum. Commissioned by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for the novel's fiftieth anniversary and prepared in close consultation with Grass himself at his translator gatherings, it restores passages the older Ralph Manheim version softened or cut, and catches the baroque rhythm and the obscene comedy of the German more fully than any earlier rendering.
Translated by Breon Mitchell. The 50th-anniversary hardcover — the new standard English text.
Translated by Breon Mitchell. The Mariner paperback reissue of the same translation.
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