Novel
The Tin Drum
Die Blechtrommel
Günter Grass · 1959
Synopsis
Confined in a psychiatric institution in the early fifties, Oskar Matzerath writes the story of his life. Born in Danzig in 1924, his mind already formed, he says, he is given a tin drum for his third birthday and decides to stop growing. His voice, pushed into a shrill cry, shatters glass, and he uses it against anyone who wants to take his drum. Between his mother, her grocer husband, a member of the Nazi party, and a Polish cousin whom he also considers his possible father, he lives through the pre-war years in Danzig.
Context
Most of the novel was written in Paris, where the author had lived since 1956, after he had received the Group 47 prize for a reading of a first chapter. The book appeared in 1959 and opened the Danzig trilogy, continued with Cat and Mouse and Dog Years. Accused of pornography and blasphemy by part of the critics, it led the Bremen senate to refuse its author the literary prize that the jury had awarded him. Volker Schlöndorff made it into a film in 1979 that received the Palme d'Or and the Oscar for best foreign film. The translation by Jean Amsler, published by Seuil in 1961, was revised in 2009 with Claude Porcell.
Who it is for
A long novel in three books, told by a narrator who shifts from the first person to the third and whom one cannot wholly believe.
Prizes and reception
Retranslated into English by Breon Mitchell in 2009, for the book's fiftieth anniversary; counted among the most widely read German novels of the post-war period.