Novels, Deep-Read · Günter Grass · No.50
Die Blechtrommel · Germany · 1959 · Günter Grass
October 1899, a Kashubian potato field. The haulms are burning and the smoke crawls sideways along the ground. A short woman sits on the edge of the field in four skirts worn one over another, baking potatoes in the ash. In the distance two gendarmes are chasing an arsonist.
The man reaches her and goes under the skirts, and does not come out. The gendarmes arrive, ask their questions, walk off, circle back and ask again. She answers one sentence at a time, unhurried, saying nothing extra. The fire burns on. The potatoes are done.
By the time the figures are gone from the horizon, the man who crawls out from under the skirts is as good as her husband—and Oskar's mother has already been started in that cloth-made darkness.
Oskar tells this as though he had been squatting beside them. He insists it is where he begins.
A boy who claims he was mentally complete at birth gets a red-and-white tin drum for his third birthday, decides to stop growing, and from a height of ninety-four centimetres—with a voice that can sing glass to pieces—watches Danzig go from Free City to Nazi Germany to rubble; both of his "presumptive fathers" die in rooms he is standing in, and he insists that he killed them both; after the war he gets rich in West Germany as a drummer, then is committed to a mental institution over a severed ring finger he did not cut off—and it is from that bed that he writes this book, and refuses to leave it.
Günter Grass (1927–2015) was born in Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland) to a family that ran a grocer's shop; his mother was of Kashubian descent (a West Slavic minority of the southern Baltic coast, counted as neither quite German nor quite Polish). Both details walk into the novel untouched. Die Blechtrommel appeared in 1959, his first novel and the opening volume of the Danzig Trilogy (followed by Cat and Mouse, 1961, and Dog Years, 1963). He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999. Volker Schlöndorff's 1979 film took the Palme d'Or and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, but it stops at the end of the war—of three books, the film cuts one entirely.
Its slot in literary history is easy to name: the opening gong of postwar German literature. For a decade and a half after 1945, German writers wrote ruins, homecomings, grief, all of it pitched low. The Tin Drum dragged the subject out of the tragic register altogether and told the same history through comedy, grotesquerie and a narrator nobody can trust. The book's great invention is not Oskar. It is the height of the camera.
The arsonist the gendarmes were chasing is Joseph Koljaiczek. Under Anna Bronski's four skirts he both marries her and gets her pregnant. seed ①That is the first event of the novel and also its basic posture: the largest stretch of German history starts here with a man hiding so as not to be seen.
Koljaiczek later works a timber raft under a false name; the day he is recognised he goes under the water and never surfaces. Family legend gives him two endings: drowned, or swum to the far bank and made rich in America. Grass refuses to adjudicate—half fact, half legend, which is how he handles history everywhere.
The daughter, Agnes, marries Alfred Matzerath, a wounded Rhinelander who ends up keeping a grocer's shop, and spends her life in an affair with her cousin Jan Bronski, who works at the Polish Post Office. Two men, one woman and a three-handed game of skat: the triangle holds for twenty years. Oskar never says "my father." He says "my presumptive fathers"—a joke, and also the ledger format of every account he later settles.
Oskar is born in 1924 in Langfuhr, on the Labesweg. He says he understood everything from the first minute, and that the only thing that reconciled him to being born was his mother's promise of a tin drum on his third birthday. Two sixty-watt bulbs burned over the bed, with a moth beating against them—his first teacher, he says, and the first thing it taught him was rhythm.
On his third birthday the drum arrives: red and white lacquer, skin of taut tin. The same day he makes the only deliberate, irreversible decision of his life—he stops. He throws himself down the open cellar hatch of the shop seed ②not to die but to hand the adults an explanation they can live with. The elegance of the move: Matzerath spends the next twenty years convinced he forgot to close that trapdoor. Oskar's first work of art is a guilt assigned to somebody else.
He has a second gift: a voice that shatters glass. seed ③At first it is defensive—reach for the drum and your mirrors, lamps and watch crystals are finished. On his first day of school the teacher tries to confiscate the drum; he sings her spectacles apart and never goes back. A neighbour teaches him to read, and he tears half the pages out of two books—one on Rasputin's debauchery, one by Goethe—and spends his life reading them in alternation. The two engines of the novel are right there: half ungoverned flesh, half well-brought-up order, and neither wins.
Once the gift is fluent its use changes. He stands at shop windows at night and sings a clean round hole in the glass, just wide enough for a hand, then withdraws into the dark and waits. Respectable passers-by see the hole, hesitate, turn back, reach in, take a necklace, walk quickly away. He never steals anything. He only opens the hole. It is the most precise definition of complicity the book ever gives.
One year a circus comes to Danzig and Oskar meets Bebra, a performer who also never grew, and who claims descent from Prince Eugene. Bebra reads him instantly and gives him one piece of advice: seed ④
"You must always be on the rostrum, never standing in front of it."— Bebra to Oskar, Book One (my rendering from the German)
Among children, Oskar fares badly. The local ones cook a "soup" of crushed brick, live frogs and urine and hold him down while he swallows it. It is in those games that the nursery rhyme every German child knows takes up residence in his head: is the Black Cook there? seed ⑤At the time he only finds it ugly.
Then comes the book's most famous act of demolition. An open-air rally: uniforms, blocks of men, raised arms, the drum corps beating a flawless four. Oskar remembers Bebra's advice and gets it exactly backwards—he does not climb onto the rostrum, he crawls underneath it and, through the gaps in the planking, starts a three. payoff ④ ↑The corps wobbles, then follows him: the march collapses into a waltz and slides into a Charleston, the square pairs off and dances, and the men on the platform go on addressing a crowd that is dancing. The payoff is beautifully made: Bebra taught him how to stay forever on the side of power, and Oskar obeyed—he merely swapped "on the rostrum" for "under it." The same sentence: raise it half a metre and it is collaboration, lower it half a metre and it is sabotage, with one layer of planking in between.
The family's collapse begins on a Good Friday. They walk out to the breakwater, where a dockworker is hauling a rope out of the water; on the end of it is a bloated horse's head, and out of its ears, nostrils and mouth the eels keep coming. Agnes vomits. Matzerath buys the eels and cooks them at home. From that day the mother eats fish—not ordinarily, but grimly, tin after tin, stuffing herself towards death. She is pregnant (in all likelihood by Jan) and dead within weeks. Nobody can say whether it was illness or suicide, and that blur is exactly what Grass wants.
Oskar's drums keep wearing out; his supplier is the toy merchant Sigismund Markus, a Jew who loves Agnes and once offered to be baptised and take her to London, and was refused. On the night of November 1938 the Jewish shops of Danzig are smashed and the pavements are carpeted with plate glass; by the time Oskar reaches the shop it is empty and Markus is slumped at his desk, dead by his own hand. payoff ③ ↑This is the coldest piece of structure in the novel: breaking glass had been Oskar's private specialty, and on this one night it becomes a national public undertaking on a scale that renders his gift worthless. German has a name for that night built out of broken glass. And what Oskar registers is this: nobody will be supplying him with drums any more. History always enters this book the same way—not through the news, but through a child's supply chain going dead.
Before dawn on 1 September 1939 Oskar's drum is broken again and he goes to Jan Bronski to have it mended. Jan had not meant to go to work—nothing in the air was right, and this timid, delicate man who played such lovely cards had decided to call in sick. Oskar wheedles and drags him through the doors of the Polish Post Office. Minutes later the Germans open fire: some of the earliest shots of the war, a few dozen postal clerks holding out for a day with pistols. To get a toy drum repaired, a child locks a man who did not want to go into history.
The best scene in the building is not the firefight. In a lull, Jan, Oskar and the caretaker Kobyella—shot through and slowly dying—make up a hand of skat, because three-handed skat needs three, so the dying man is propped upright and the cards are put in his fingers. Jan wins, then starts building a house of cards, storey by storey, the walls coming down outside, his hands perfectly steady. When the Germans burst in the house collapses, and he weeps.
The survivors are marched out. Oskar gives the most accomplished performance of his life: drum clutched, tears, a three-year-old German child kidnapped by Poles. He is claimed on the spot; Jan is taken to Zaspa and shot. Oskar later writes: I killed my presumptive father Jan Bronski. Strictly, he did not. Strictly, he did do the thing that made all of it happen. The book is wedged between those two sentences from beginning to end.
After his mother's death, sixteen-year-old Maria Truczinski comes to help in the shop. Oskar's first sexual experience is written to be funny and unbearable at once: a packet of woodruff fizz powder poured into her palm, his spit on top of it, the powder hissing into foam. This is Grass at his most typical—sex, sweets and physiology stirred into one spoon, so that nobody gets to read it gracefully. Matzerath then sleeps with Maria and marries her, and she bears Kurt. Oskar insists the boy is his son and immediately makes a plan: a tin drum on his third birthday. It is his one attempt at fatherhood, and the method is to repeat what his mother did to him.
Bebra reappears, this time in uniform, running a troupe that entertains the troops. Oskar goes with him, takes up with the Neapolitan Roswitha, and plays his way to Normandy, quartered in the concrete of the Atlantic Wall. On the morning of the landings Roswitha goes to fetch him a coffee, a shell comes down, and she dies on the beach.
Back in Danzig, Oskar attaches himself to a gang of sixteen-year-olds who steal weapons and wreck offices in the last months of the war and treat him as mascot and brain. The last job is in a church: they saw the plaster infant Jesus off the Virgin's knee, and Oskar takes its place and drums. The police come; the boys are tried and sentenced heavily; Oskar weeps into his drum for the second time and is handed back to his family as a frightened small child. For the second time, "I'm only a child" buys out his share.
Spring 1945, the Red Army in Danzig. The family is down in the cellar of the shop—the same cellar Oskar threw himself into eighteen years earlier. payoff ② ↑As the soldiers come down, Matzerath remembers the Nazi party badge still on his lapel and panics.
It is Oskar who picks the badge up off the floor and puts it into his hand—with the pin open. To destroy it, Matzerath puts the whole thing in his mouth, it sticks, he starts to convulse, and a startled soldier fires. The trapdoor that made his father guilty for half a lifetime and the badge that kills him are squared off in the same cellar: Oskar's life begins with one staged accident and arrives at a second, and both times all he did was hand something over.
The funeral is at the Saspe cemetery. As the coffin goes down, Kurt picks up a stone and hits Oskar on the back of the head. He is knocked into the grave by his own son, starts bleeding from the nose, and starts growing. It is the most exact reversal in the book: he stopped growing in order not to join the adult world, and the moment he resumes is the moment that world has finished and there is nothing left worth refusing. When he is done he stands about one metre twenty, with a hump on his back. Grass does not let him grow into a normal man—refusing history costs you, and rejoining it costs you, and it is the same bill.
The shop is taken over by Fajngold, a Jew who survived Treblinka. He disinfects everything, sloshing lime water across the floors, and talks the whole time to his murdered wife and children, introducing customers to them. He is the one person in the novel who is neither mocked nor ennobled.
The family is packed into a westbound freight car and arrives in Düsseldorf.
The postwar book is the one the film left out, and the strangest in tone. Oskar apprentices at a stonecutter's, chiselling dates for the dead nobody wants to discuss in detail, then models at the art academy. Then comes the Onion Cellar: a Düsseldorf establishment where the customer pays a distinctly high price for a small board, a small knife and an onion. Chop. Chop until the tears come. What the place sells is not drink. It is permission to weep. These people have just walked out of a catastrophe they took part in—houses gone, families gone, deeds unmentionable—and they cannot cry; once they can, they tell each other the things they otherwise cannot say, and then settle up and go home. The proprietor, Schmuh, grows rich on it.
It is in that cellar that Oskar picks the drum back up. One night the onions run short, he plays a few bars, and the whole basement of adults regresses to early childhood in minutes—more efficient than any onion. That gets him famous. He forms a trio with the flautist Klepp, records, tours, and "Oskar the drummer" has the West German middle class queueing up to be three years old again. The man who once dismantled a rally with a drum now uses the same drum to herd a country that will not remember back into childhood by the hall-full—the book's most acid line on the economic miracle.
Grown prosperous, he rents a room next door to a nurse, Sister Dorothea, whom he never once sees face to face and whom he imagines exhaustively. Later, in a rye field, a severed ring finger comes into his hands—hers. He does not go to the police. He preserves it in a jar and prays to it.
What puts him in the institution is his friend Vittlar, who denounces him to the police as the murderer—not out of justice, but because he calculates that it will make them both famous. Oskar flees to Paris and is arrested on an escalator in the Métro. He does not defend himself; he confesses—he has wanted a formal charge for a long time, something to exchange for a bed and a room that will hold him. The court finds him mentally ill and commits him, which is where the first sentence of the novel is spoken from:
"Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital."— the novel's opening line (my rendering from the German)
He writes his seven hundred pages in that bed, watched through the peephole by his keeper Bruno, who buys him the paper. Near the end word arrives from outside: the case is to be reopened, the real killer is someone else, he will probably be acquitted and released. He has turned thirty. He does not want to go out.
And here the four skirts of page one finally settle up. payoff ① ↑The one wish Oskar states over and over across the whole book is to crawl back under his grandmother's skirts. What he has wanted all his life is not freedom but cover—the drum is cover, "I'm only a child" is cover, and in the end even a locked ward becomes a skirt. The novel opens with a man hiding under skirts and closes with his grandson hiding in an asylum, and the half-century in between is precisely the half-century Germans committed and then wanted covered.
Because outside, the Black Cook is standing. The rhyme he swallowed along with that "soup" as a child comes back for him twenty-seven years later: payoff ⑤ ↑
"Is the Black Cook there? Yes. Yes. Yes."— the nursery rhyme at the novel's close (my rendering from the German)
It is the finest close in the book: the first time the rhyme appears it is only children being cruel and the reader slides over it; by the last page it is the entire fear of a thirty-year-old man facing a white wall—and Grass never spends a word explaining who the Black Cook is. She is not a symbol of Nazism, nor of conscience. She is the thing that grew out of a childhood game and has been standing behind you ever since.
Incidentally, Kurt's third birthday came and went: the boy took the drum, smashed it, and beat Oskar up. The single time history refuses to repeat itself, it is the next generation doing the refusing.
Line the six acts up and the fuse is a single one, frighteningly short: on his third birthday a child throws himself down the cellar stairs and opts out of the contract of growing up. Everything after that is blast wave—because he does not grow, he can be present without being accountable; because he is present without being accountable, he goes to the Post Office, crawls under the rostrum, hands over the badge; and because he is let off as a child every time, the only way he can square his own account is the extravagant claim that he killed them. He did not dodge the twentieth century. He invented a height from which it could be dodged.
Play it again: smoke crawling sideways, potatoes in the ash, two gendarmes coming back to ask the same questions, a woman sitting perfectly still. Not one tense adjective in the whole scene, and a tempo as slow as autumn. The technique is that the information gap is handed to the reader: we know there is a man under the skirts and the gendarmes do not, so every question they ask adds a degree of comedy—and makes the thing happening underneath more absurd.
What matters more is the legitimacy of the vantage point. Oskar has not been born; his mother has not been born. On what authority does he narrate it in this detail? Grass makes page one fail to stand up on purpose—the teller lies, and you have to listen anyway, because nobody else was there. It is exactly the kind of testimony a nation uses to remember its own past.
The glory of this scene is that it is entirely auditory. Grass barely mentions flags or slogans; he writes the beat. The corps's immaculate four means everything lines up; the three Oskar taps under the planking means everything begins to wobble. Four is a column, three is a dance step—in this novel fascism is first of all a problem of rhythm.
Then there is the camera position, buried under the floor and shooting upward through gaps: shoes, trouser creases, legs beginning one pair at a time to disobey. The men above are still speaking; the people below are dancing. What power fears is not opposition. It is distraction. But Grass refuses to let the scene be a victory: the rally disperses, another is held the next day, and Oskar goes home to supper. He wrecked an event, not an institution.
The rope comes up inch by inch, the head breaks the surface, the eels keep coming—and Grass lets it go on a little past what you can take, and those extra lines are exactly what turns an image into a physical reaction. Then he does the cruellest thing available: he refuses to leave the scene at the symbolic level and lets it actually kill someone. That is what the grotesque is for here: when a history is too large to be looked at directly, it can only be written down as something the body does. You cannot write the inner state of a Danzig housewife of the late thirties, but you can write that after that horse's head she could never eat properly again.
The novel does not run on a speculative premise, but it does run on a very clearly built machine. Start with the drum: not a prop but the compositional method itself—in his bed Oskar drums first and writes afterwards, the beat fetching back a particular afternoon, and he writes down what the drumming gives him. The rule is that only what can be drummed counts: the passages of impossible density (the skirts, the eels, the house of cards) have all been claimed by the beat, and the places he skates over are usually the ones he would rather not claim. The other two parts matter more.
Ninety-four centimetres puts your eyes at an adult's belt buckle, and so in this book Nazism is never written as a demon; it is written as a mass of lower bodies: the creases of a uniform, the pin of a badge, feet hooking together under a table. Why does a grocer join the party? Not from conviction—because the neighbours had, because the uniform looks well, because there is something on at weekends. The Third Reich written at this height is harder to argue with than any denunciation.
The finest part, and the most suspect. Oskar slides inside a single sentence from "I" to "Oskar" and back—the third person puts distance between him and himself when distance is needed, the first person makes the guilt ring out when weight is needed.
Which makes the novel's central device an alibi machine: it lets a man confess profoundly and never once carry anything—so serviceable that an entire postwar German generation spoke through it. Grass built it in the open so that you would recognise it; but a machine built this well is always at risk of being used as a tool rather than looked at as an exhibit.
Take Oskar's side first, at full strength. Here is the adult world he saw at three: a mother conducting a lifelong affair with her husband's cousin while all three play cards in perfect calm; a grocer who joins the party because the neighbours did; a set of grown-ups who within a few years smash their neighbours' windows and then open for business as usual. Joining a world like that is the real disqualification from being human. His refusal is a clear-eyed assessment, and he pays for it in real currency: no school, no friends, no adult body.
Now the other side, at full strength. His refusal never cost him a single real choice. What it bought was a position available to nobody else: present at every scene, accountable for none. He went to the Post Office, he crawled under the rostrum, he handed over the badge—and each time, afterwards, he wept into his drum and somebody took him home. Ninety-four centimetres is not a sacrifice, it is a pass: see everything, never take a side. The genuine victims did not have that card. Neither did the genuine participants. Only the observer has it.
The question is not remote. A person can decline to vote, decline to comment, decline to stand anywhere, on the grounds that they are all equally dirty—a judgement that is very often entirely correct, and also entirely free. Seeing clearly and keeping your hands clean are two different things, and they are far too easy to mistake for each other. Grass does not answer for him. He simply lets the man reach thirty and then be too frightened to leave a clean white bed.
The yes has real force: a carefully staged political ritual was turned into a dance by a child under the floorboards. A ritual's power is entirely in its uniformity, and uniformity can be broken by one person's three-four time. More than that, it proves something—the people with their arms up are not entranced, they are following a beat, and they will follow a different one. Making that visible is itself a political act.
The no is colder. The rally was held again the next day, nobody changed their mind because they had danced once, and Oskar never intended anyone to. His motive was that he likes watching tidy things fall apart. That is an aesthetic act, not a political one; its cost is zero and so is its yield, except that it makes the person doing it feel good. Worse, it hands out a cheap innocence: I resisted, I turned their march into a waltz.
Bring it home: a sharp joke, a satirical image that travels everywhere—the commonest form of "resistance" now available. It genuinely lets people see that the emperor is naked, and it genuinely changes no statute. The hard part is not deciding whether it works; it is admitting it does both: it keeps people from being hypnotised by lies, and it lets them feel they have already done what was theirs to do. Where does Grass stand? He has Oskar crawl out from under the platform and go home for supper.
The Onion Cellar is the hardest diagnosis the book leaves postwar Germany: people freshly out of a catastrophe they took part in, paying to chop onions so that they can cry. Mocking it is easy, so take it at full strength first: they cannot cry not because they are cold but because nobody can grieve a loss and admit their own hand in it at the same time—grief needs an innocent place to stand, and they have none. What the onion does is separate the physiological cry from the psychological one: get the tears out first and people can finally say the unsayable things. The book is explicit that they talk afterwards. If a society has lost the capacity to mourn, then a fake, bought, mechanical mourning may be the only possible beginning.
The other side holds too, and stings more. What they are buying is not sorrow, it is absolution. Once they have wept, the matter is settled and the tears are the receipt. Real mourning requires an object—you have to say whom you are weeping for, and for which of your own acts. The onion requires no object; you just cut. That is the selling point, and the swindle: a sorrow that never has to name the dead changes nothing.
Put the two together and the question lands on everyone: if an emotion was engineered for you to have, is it yours? A film designed to make you cry, a paragraph posted on a day of remembrance—you did cry, the tears were real. What Grass will not let us off is the ending he gives them: they weep, go home, and open for business the next day.
Oskar says he killed two fathers. Pressed, he did neither: Jan was shot by the Wehrmacht, Matzerath by a Soviet soldier. What he did was pull one of them along and hand something to the other.
The defence is strong: causal responsibility is not the same as pulling a trigger. Doing the act while knowing what it will produce may not be murder in law and is entirely murder in conscience. Oskar's self-accusation shows him to be more honest than everyone around him—while postwar Germany was saying "I was only a clerk, I only signed a form," he stands up and says: I did it. In an era of universal dilution, a man willing to state his share as larger than it was is a rare thing.
Reverse it and the same confession may be the most elegant escape in the book. Claiming a great crime you did not commit is the best available method of evading the small things you did. "I killed my father" is grand, unverifiable and unprosecutable; the questions that actually need answering are far more specific. Why did you insist on dragging a man who did not want to go to work? Why did you pick up that badge? Those can only be answered in detail, and detail is humiliating. Grand confession is where detail goes to hide.
This is not only Oskar's problem. A nation settling accounts with its past can do it as a magnificent apparatus of apologies, monuments and state ceremonies, or as a series of specific, unflattering answers about my family and my neighbours. The first is often more sincere, and often more convenient. One aside: the man who built this machine sat on a certain fact about his own seventeenth year for forty-seven years. That is the next section.
Line his books up and the recurring compulsion is plain: the German past cannot be told head-on, only sideways.
In Cat and Mouse (1961) a boy mocked for an oversized Adam's apple works his way to an Iron Cross in order to cover it—a nation's heroism reduced to a boy's shame about his own body. Dog Years (1963) tells the twelve Nazi years through a dog and a group of Danzig boys as a string of jokes that get steadily blacker. Crabwalk (2002) puts the method in its title: a crab moves sideways, and that history can only be approached sideways—the book concerns the 1945 sinking of the refugee ship Wilhelm Gustloff and the thousands who died in the Baltic, a German finally able to speak of his own side's dead while taking care not to turn it into a grievance.
The other through-line is food and the body: eels, potatoes, onions, fizz powder are never background, and The Flounder (1977) hangs the whole history of the species on cooking—history grows out of the stomach and the lower body, and grand narrative is only the clothing it puts on afterwards. And one more: his protagonists are never victims and never masterminds, but the man who was present and lent a hand—because that is the position almost everybody actually occupied.
Without any boosterism, the book and its author carry several hard accounts:
1 · Not a story about a dwarf—a story about a height: ninety-four centimetres, level with an adult's belt buckle, where the Third Reich is a mass of lower bodies.
2 · He makes exactly one deliberate decision in his life, on his third birthday, at the top of the cellar stairs. Everything else is blast wave.
3 · Refusing to grow is not a sacrifice but a pass: present at every scene, accountable for none.
4 · Shattering glass was his private specialty until November 1938, when smashing it became a national public undertaking.
5 · Three-four time broke up one rally; the next was held on schedule. An aesthetic victory and a political zero can be the same event.
6 · His mother dies of a horse's head full of eels: when a history is too large to look at, it gets written down as something the body does.
7 · The Onion Cellar sells permission to weep—and a sorrow that never names the dead changes nothing.
8 · Claiming a great crime you did not commit is the best way to evade the small things you did. Grand confession is where detail goes to hide.
9 · The one time history refuses to repeat itself, it is Kurt smashing the drum and beating him up.
10 · The last page holds no judgement, only a nursery rhyme: is the Black Cook there? Yes. Anyone who fears her needs no explanation.