Story of a boy who refuses to grow
The story revolves around the life of Oskar Matzerath, as narrated by himself when confined in a mental hospital during the years 1952–1954. Born in 1924 in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland), with an adult's capacity for thought and perception, he decides never to grow up when he hears his father declare that he would become a grocer. Gifted with a piercing shriek that can shatter glass or be used as a weapon, Oskar declares himself to be one of those "clairaudient infants", whose "spiritual development is complete at birth and only needs to affirm itself". He retains the stature of a child while living through the beginning of World War II, several love affairs, and the world of postwar Europe. Through all this, a toy tin drum, the first of which he received as a present on his third birthday, followed by many replacement drums each time he wears one out from over-vigorous drumming, remains his treasured possession; he is willing to commit violence to retain it.
Oskar considers himself to have two "presumptive fathers"—his mother's husband Alfred Matzerath, a member of the Nazi Party, and her cousin and lover Jan Bronski, a Danzig Pole who is executed for defending the Polish Post Office in Danzig during the German invasion of Poland.
The historical account!
Following the Treaty of Versailles, the predominantly German city of Gdansk was made into a Free City, commonly referred to as the Free City of Danzig (the German name). The Free City was an autonomous city-state protected by the ill-fated League of Nations, with Poland retaining rather complex rights to Danzig, based mostly on economic cooperation. Though the population of Danzig was 95% German, Poland represented the Free City abroad, operated the railway system connecting it to Poland, and was given ward over Westerplatte, the small military outpost in the city harbor.
The Free City of Danzig had two post offices: one municipal and one Polish run. The Polish post office was considered an extraterritorial property of Poland, meaning it was exempt from local law in much the same way embassies or UN buildings are. As such, it became a sort of Polish headquarters within the Free City. As the situation between Poland and Germany worsened, the Polish military made the rather paltry effort of securing the post office by sending reservist sublieutenant Konrad Guderski to the post in April, 1939 to organize and train a security unit composed of official post office employees and civilian volunteers.
In mid-August, as hostilities were beginning to seem imminent, 10 more employees were sent from Gdynia and Budgoszcz, bringing the staff of the Polish post office to somewhere near 100 people. On September 1, 1939, however, there were exactly 57 people in the building: Konrad Guderski (the only non-civilian), 42 local Polish employees, the 10 employees from Gdynia and Budgoszcz, and the building keeper, his wife and ten-year-old daughter who all lived in the building.
At 04:00 on September 1, 1939, the Germans began the first military action of the Second World War cut the power from the building and at 04:45, in sync with the battleship Schleswig-Holstein's shelling of the small Polish garrison on Westerplatte, they began their assault on the Polish post office in Danzig. Armed with a small cache of mostly pistols, some machine guns and hand-grenades, the Polish defenders were able to repel the first German attack of the front of the building (though the Germans did enter the front door of the building briefly). At 11:00, the Germans were reinforced with 75mm artillery guns, but despite the extra firepower, the second German attack - through a wall in the side of the building - was also repulsed. Konrad Guderski, the Polish commander was killed during this second exchange.
This episode in the film
In the novel The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel) by Günter Grass, on 1 September 1939, Oskar and Jan go looking for Kobyella, who can repair his drum. Jan slips into the Polish Post Office, despite a Nazi cordon, and participates in an armed standoff against the Nazis. During the ensuing battle, Kobyella is fatally shot and Jan is wounded. They play Skat until Kobyella dies and the Germans capture the building. Oskar is taken home, while Jan is arrested and later executed.
Whether it's the greatest is open to debate, but one could argue that Günter Grass's The Tin Drum is the great novel of the 20th century. By that I mean it most completely defines the era in all its glories and catastrophes – the moods, atmospheres, manias, streams, currents, histories and under-histories.
First published 50 years ago this week (on 6 October 1959), it is, technically, an incredible piece of art, a melange of bildungsroman, memoir, allegory, grotesquerie and pure reverie. On a superficial level it tells the story of Oskar Matzerath: incarcerated maniac, self-created dwarf, paranoiac, possessor of supernatural gifts, vindictive genius, fallen angel, miniature tyrant, obsessive beater of the titular drum. Oskar is all of these things and none of them; the ultimate unreliable narrator.
The book charts his progress, and that of the independent port city of Danzig/Gdansk, and greater Germany, and the world as a whole. It is odd, profound, sprawling, poetic, often unnerving. But more than this, never have I read something that so exquisitely and lucidly captures the dazed, eerie strangeness of our misfortunate times.
To paraphrase Francis Ford Coppola's line about Apocalypse Now, The Tin Drum is not about the 20th century; it is the 20th century. We begin, after an introductory preamble, with Oskar's grandmother Anna in a Polish potato field, working by hand. (Throughout the novel, Grass uses the leitmotif of how she smelled, not unpleasantly, of "slightly rancid butter"; a reminder, a link back, a sociological memory-trace.) We end after the second world war, when the planet is exhausted, cynical, indifferent, blood-crazed (and Oskar still remembers how his grandmother smelled).
Through the eyes and words of the anti-hero, Grass delineates and gives life to the evolution of the century: from agricultural to industrial, traditional to cosmopolitan, feudal to postmodern. Like Oskar and his family and associates, the reader accelerates toward modernity. The mechanical quickening of industrialisation. Mass production. Science awakened. Commerce invigorated. The world shrinking. The spread of democracy and virus of totalitarianism. Sleek beauty of the machine. Global conflict and conflagration. Hate made productive. Death and automation. Anxiety and modernity. And what we mistakenly believe to be the end of history.
We can take this further, reduce it to a harder point of truth. The most significant influence on the 20th century was totalitarian ideologies, and Oskar both reflects it and pushes against it. Writers from Philip Dick to George Orwell have written of how these ideologies, whether fascist or communist, wanted to step outside of history, leap from the normal current of human affairs, impose their subjective selves on the objective world. They wrote of how unnatural this was, how against life and reason.
Oskar steps "outside" time and history and nature from the moment of birth. The precocious infant decides in his cot to spend his life drumming, as a way of spiting his father's bourgeois ambitions. At the age of three he chooses to stop physically growing "in order not… to be driven… into the grocery business… I remained the precocious three-year-old, towered over by grown-ups but superior to all grown-ups, who refused to measure his shadow with theirs, who was complete both inside and outside." Like the political death-cult that shamed his country, he too is unnatural (Oskar later learns he can break or even inscribe glass by screaming at a high pitch). Yet he also rebels against the Nazi "family": at a party rally, he surreptitiously drums out his own beat, competing with the fascist marching band, confusing and disrupting, and transforms the inhuman rigour of Nazism into a joyful dance of life.
And let us reduce it further: "Chapter 27 – Inspection of Concrete, or Barbaric, Mystical, Bored." A title which says, for me, all that needs to be said about the modern world. Here, Oskar and a troupe of midget acrobats and entertainers visit the German "pillbox" defence posts in northern France, late on in the war, as his country's doom looms large. They meet corporal Lankes, a former artist who now views these brutally efficient standards of war and hatred as genuine, profound artworks.
The pillboxes marked with his graffiti and carvings will last forever, he believes; and archaeologists of the future will marvel at them, describing them thus: "Magic, menacing, and yet shot through with spirituality… In these works a genius, perhaps the only genius of the 20th century, has expressed himself clearly, resolutely and for all time." Lankes names his "installation" piece Structural Oblique Formations, with a subtitle: Barbaric, Mystical, Bored. To which Bebra, leader of the acrobatic troupe, replies: "You have given our century its name."
Barbaric, mystical, bored: here is the last century in summation. A schizophrenic, self-mutilating era in which man flew higher than was dreamed possible and plumbed depths unimaginable; slaughter beyond measure coupled with advances beyond comprehension; collective insanity and individual rationality; atavistic passions and detached irony; terror and humour. The black pall of mechanistic wickedness and the struggling but still-lit spark of humanity: as visceral and concrete as viscera and concrete, but as surreal as can be expected from the 10-decade fever-dream we all shared.
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