The Tin Drum
by Gunter Grass

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Book Reviews of The Tin Drum

Book Review: A Lone Voice Crying in the Wilderness
Summary: 5 Stars

Oskar is born and Agnes keeps her promise. On the day he receives his red and white lacquered tin drum, Oskar makes a promise that rules his life for the next eighteen years: Observing the hypocritical nature of his German-Polish family, Oskar decides to stop growing and forever remain three years old. In an effort to accomplish this, he throws himself down the cellar stairs, an act that comes to haunt Alfred (he had left the door open). Oskar does manage to freeze himself in time and his tin drum becomes the symbol of his extreme youth as well as his weapon against adult intervention. It is when Alfred tries to take the drum away that Oskar discovers another unique talent: he can scream at such a high register that glass around the world shatters. At three years old, Oskar has learned the art of manipulation and control.

At the time Oskar makes his decision not to grow, the Nazis are recognizing the politically strategic importance of the city of Danzig. Technically a Polish city since the end of World War I, the Germans begin to clamor for its return. Discord and disharmony erupt within Oskar's family. Alfred, a German, gravitates toward the SA while the Polish Jan, Agnes and Anna remain fiercely loyal to their Slavic homeland. Trouble is obviously brewing, yet the only "ordinary" resident of Danzig who seems to notice is Oskar. It is he who disrupts a Fascist rally with the overwhelming sound of his drum--an aural punishment able to drive anyone to the edge of insanity.

The Tin Drum is an impressive, but complicated and complex book, as is the character of Oskar. Although Oskar and his tin drum are meant to represent childhood innocence, at times he can seem perverse, manipulative and downright malevolent. The problem is, Oskar beats his drum to literally anything and everything that upsets him, be it his mother's infidelity or the German invasion. Although we ultimately come to love him, there are times when we simply want to slap him in the face as well. Nevertheless, it is clear from the outset that the small Oskar Matzerath is the lone voice crying in the wilderness.

Grass acknowledges and draws well from his Continental European intellectual history and influence, showing us the connections between Oskar and Dostoyevsky's Prince Mishkin, France's Napoleon, Goethe's Faust, Dickens' Tiny Tim and Shakespeare's Hamlet. Embracing the complexities of modern culture, Grass forms dichotomies, posing theses and antitheses. (Goethe and Rasputin, Man and Angel, Realism and Romanticism, Reason and Passion.) Wisely, he does not always find synthesis.

The narrative structure of The Tin Drum, told as it is "through the mouths of babes," allows Grass to distort an already-distorted reality, thereby seeing it "face-to-face." Through Oskar, metonym for a maturing Germany, and through his "childish ways," we see his innocence or ignorance not so much as a tool for evaluation, but rather as a looking glass through which we clearly view our century and western world. Although the extensive symbolism can be a little obscure at times, and Grass' prose is both surrealistic and baroque, The Tin Drum is definitely one of the masterpieces of the twentieth century and, as a condemnation of apathy it remains unsurpassed.

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