In the fall of 1959, the debut novel by a hitherto largely unknown author attracted attention at the Frankfurt Book Fair:the story of a short monster named Oskar Matzerath, which, with a mixture of childish naivety and perfidious maliciousness, with expression bursting with power and a love of detail free of taboos, defined literary Germany jumbled up. "The Tin Drum" by Günter Grass had appeared - a novel so outrageous that it would provoke "screams of joy and indignation" from Germany's critics, predicted Hans Magnus Enzensberger in November 1959, but with which Germany once again achieved the "class goal of world literature" reached.
"The Tin Drum" divides the nation
Enzensberger was to be right:The Tin Drum catapulted Grass into the ranks of the most important German-language authors of the 20th century, alongside Alfred Döblin and Thomas Mann. At the same time, however, it caused a political scandal:Churches and soldiers went on the barricades against the book, calling it "blasphemous" and "endangering to young people". When Grass was to receive the City of Bremen's literature prize, the Bremen Senate vetoed it. According to the Education Senator at the time, it was impossible to give this prize to an author whose book could soon be indexed. The storm of protest against this decision was great. The writers Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan also wrote indignant letters to the Bremen Senate. "The Tin Drum" had become a political issue.
A drummer against silence
Volker Schlöndorff (left) filmed the novel in 1979 with David Bennent (middle) as Oskar Matzerath.But what about the story of Oskar Matzerath, who at the age of three decides not to grow any more, whose voice shatters glass and who is able to impose his will on people with his tin drum? A story that begins in a potato field in Kashubia in 1899 and ends in a closed nursing home in Düsseldorf in 1955? In between there are more than five decades of German history.
It is set in the First World War and in the Weimar Republic, tells of the National Socialist era and the founding of the Federal Republic, which for a long time resisted coming to terms with its Nazi past. Günter Grass wrote against this suppression, and he had his Oskar drummed against the concealment. With feigned childlike innocence, the gnome from the sanatorium not only exposes the hypocrisy of many former NSDAP members after the war - he slips his father Alfred Matzerath his party badge just at the moment when they are being checked by Russian soldiers - he becomes himself to the symbol of the German petty bourgeois of the post-war period:the exact opposite of the heroic giant Hercules, with which the Germans previously so readily identified. An intelligent adult decides to remain a child in order to avoid any responsibility, even though he himself becomes a murderer on several occasions. Oskar only begins to grow again after the war, but he remains deformed. The time of refusing to face reality has left its mark.
In the pillory of hypocrisy
At the same time, Oskar is the magnifying glass, from whose supposedly childlike perspective Grass mercilessly shows the susceptibility and inadequacy of the people in Weimar and under the National Socialists. He dissects her weaknesses in close-up, with every disgusting detail - such as the death of Oskar's mother Agnes or the unbridled sexuality of his stepmother Maria. At the same time, however, Grass also addresses the all-too-rapid reintegration of officials and war criminals from the Nazi era:the head of the showmen's troupe, Bebra, remains in business well after the end of the war, Corporal Lankes, who commanded the murder of several nuns in Normandy, succeeds in becoming an established painter - of nun pictures.
These escalations to the limit of the perverse were bound to shock. On the one hand, there had never been such a taboo-breaking use of language in German-language post-war literature, and on the other hand its message was addressed to every individual. With his tin drum, Grass called for an examination of the individual guilt of German citizens. Not a few, no, the German people as a whole supported National Socialism with all its terrible effects, that was Oskar's message. It had become impossible to avoid this reappraisal with a drumbeat.
Nobel Prize in Literature for "The Tin Drum"
On December 10, 1999, Günter Grass received the Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm.The works of other great German writers of 1959 did not receive such attention - Heinrich Böll published one of his main works in that year with "Billard at half past nine" and the young Uwe Johnson made his first public debut with a novel with "Conjectures about Jakob". But the sound of the tin drum could be heard far beyond the German borders and thus made German literature credible again internationally. "The Tin Drum" was the "rebirth of the German novel in the twentieth century", the Swedish Academy recognized Grass' first work 40 years after the book was published - and awarded him the highest literary award of all for this book:the Nobel Prize.
And it is also "The Tin Drum" that strengthened his reputation with his international fellow writers:Salman Rushdie, John Irving, Nadine Gordimer, Kenzaburo Oe - they all confirmed that it was little Oskar Matzerath with his children's drum that made them in their Writing motivated and inspired. "'The Tin Drum' is the greatest novel by a living author," Irving judged in 1982. But, Irving continues:Even Grass himself did not surpass this first work.
"The Tin Drum":fame and curse for Günter Grass
Grass himself repeatedly took offense at this frequent reduction of his complete works to "The Tin Drum". After all, there is no shortage of other great or much-discussed works by the author:the completion of his Danzig trilogy - with "Cat and Mouse" and "Dog Years" -, "The Flounder", or his semi-autobiographical work "When Skinning the Onion", which made headlines in 2006 because of Grass' confession that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS. But despite everything:The name of Günter Grass remains inextricably linked to his first work, The Tin Drum and Oskar Matzerath.