About this title: The famous allegorical novel of Germany and the Second World War, first published in 1959. Oskar Matzerath, the hunchbacked narrator, grows up in Danzig during the Nazis' rise to power. Cynical and disgusted by the adults around him, Oskar decides at the age of three to stop growing and observes the world around him with the bitter distance of a freak. Made into a successful movie in 1980, THE TIN DRUM was considered the first significant literary work to come out of postwar Germany.
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Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Vintage Books USA, New York
Date Published: 1964
ISBN-13:9780394703008ISBN:0394703006
Description: Fair. No dust jacket as issued. Some underlining. Well used, but covers are intact and pages all still glued properly. Text in English, German. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. Audience: General/trade. From the cover: The most higly acclaimed novel of post-war Germany. From The Daily Express: "It has been called everything from a 'masterpiece' to a 'wilfully offensive novel. ' The Tin Drum is both of those things...and a great novel it is. " read more
Description: Fair. B0007DKE06 '67 printing. Some chipping to cover, age-toning to pages. OK for a read. Shipped promptly from Manhattan, NYC! read more
Description: Fair. Ex-Library book-will contain library markings. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Fair. Dust Cover Missing. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Edition: 7th Printing
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Fawcett Crest Book
Date Published: 1967
Description: Fair. No dust jacket as issued. Signed by previous owner. SM TB: wear, tears, creases, spine tilt, peeling spine, age discoloration/spots/stains, stmaps. 576 p. read more
Description: Acceptable. Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. 0375420576 Former library item may have library binding and show stamps, stickers or other marks. Items not meeting quality expectations may be returned. Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Fawcett, Greenwich, Conn.
Date Published: 1964
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Text in English, German. 576 p.; 18 cm. A Crest reprint. covers lightly soiled and creased. Text tight, clean and unmarked read more
This story is written as an autobiography of Oskar Matzerath, a stunted growth man who makes the use of his Tin Drum and ability to do a high piercing scream that could break glass windows. It takes place during the time of the Nazi occupation of Germany. Brutal and honest, the narrator revealed all his flaws, richly detailed that Oskar might as well be a real person. It appears to be a satire and I enjoyed greatly the ridicule of the society with the trappings of being able to belong, to behave normally, something that Oskar could not even venture with his hump, and despite his short height, he looms as a larger than life character. I had a problem with the ending. It seems much squashed in and reveals a vague murder trial and then ended with a nursery rhyme about a black as a pitch witch. I think she is a symbol of death as the great equalizer since most autobiographies go in order of birth, childhood, adulthood, and all the way to near death."
"Even though I read a translation, the language and style of this book were spectacular. The style was simultaneously responsible for keeping me going through the long 500+ pages of text, and also prolonging my reading to 5 months. I couldn't read the book unless I was in a state of mind that could minutely focus on each sentence as it deserved. It was a lot of work. The book also included quite a few images that will stay with me for a long, long time: the eels in the horse head; Maria's vanilla scent; Oskar and the Muse posing; Matzerath swallowing the pin; the scarred back of Oskar's friend and the wooden Niobe; the circus group in Normandy... this was a memorable book in all the right ways."
"The central premise of this book - Oskar's refusal to grow once he reaches three - is the sort of magic realism that one associates more with Latin America than middle Europe. However here it is one of a handful of supernatural happenings in an otherwise brutally real world, rather than permeating the universe in which the characters exist. Oskar is sympathetic, but seldom likeable: he is often selfish and it is as if his moral sense has got stuck at the same age as his body. His fascinating life history is full of incident and moves at a cracking pace. I'm sure that much of it is a commentary or satire on the state of Germany around the time of the Second World War, but - the resonance (no pun intended) of the power of Oskar's voice with Kristallnacht apart - my knowledge of the detailed history of this time is too sketchy for me to have picked it up."
"Günter Grass's 'Die Blechtrommel' is like an onion or, better said, a rose, since the onion analogy is dreadfully overused nowadays. Also, it gives a wrong impression about the mounting importance of the successive layers. Rose petals are more appropriate as they are identical, democratic. One petal covers another only in terms of its visibility. In this way, 'Die Blechtrommel' is first an adventure novel. Following the wild escapades of the self-willed three-year-old Oskar, the novel takes readers from pre-war Danzig to post-war Düsseldorf, introducing them along the way to presumptive fathers, circus dwarfs, Jazz musicians, charcoal wielding artists, countless nurses, and a fisher who uses a horse-head as his bate. This is only a small fraction of the eccentric cast that inhabits the mad world of this 800-page tome. Again and again Grass proves his boundless inventiveness.
Though fictional, bordering on magic realistic at times, 'Die Blechtrommel' is firmly grounded in its historical context: the Second World War. Written in 1959, the war was still fresh on Grass's mind. The time had come to reconcile himself with the tragic past of his fatherland through his art. Interestingly, though the war is omnipresent in 'Die Blechtrommel,' it is rarely dealt with in a direct manner. Rather, the war is trivialized, marginalized. Only by implication does the reader know what is happening. It is deeply unnerving to realize that, although Oskar light-footedly walks right through the Kristallnacht, D-Day, and the razing of Danzig to its ground by the Russians, the reader hardly takes notice of the horrendous events. Grass paradoxically makes the reader more aware and not less aware of the war by playing it down.
More than downplay, Grass makes the war seem laughable, silly, and harmless. At one point, for instance, Oskar witnesses his neighbor being raped by three Russians. Not only is Oskar unperturbed and uninterested - he rather watches a line of marching ants - but the woman seems to enjoy the sexual abuse. In this way, 'Die Blechtrommel' is a darkly comic novel in the vein of Heller's 'Catch 22.' Both novels are deceptively light and frivolous in tone. Even when Oskar murders, which he undeniably does, if indirectly, the scenes are endowed with a certain false lightness and humor. This misplaced comedy is unsettling and acts well as a critique of the war.
In creating a deliberate and mindful, yet uncaring, a childlike and innocent, yet perverse, manipulative and downright malevolent, protagonist, Grass sets himself up for a lot more than an anti-war novel. What we have here is also a schelmenroman or picaresque novel, in the tradition of Grimmelshausen. Oskar is a rascal, looking from below down upon the adult world. Already after birth he thinks their way of life to be empty and dissatisfying and tries to reenter the womb, but alas! the umbilical cord is cut. Instead, he decides to remain a three-year-old to elude the responsibilities of grownups. As such, with tin drum in hands and an ability to shatter glass with his voice, he wanders around Danzig and causes mischief. For Oskar life is a game. Seeing that life includes sex, Oskar soon lusts after women and becomes father with sixteen. Following the tradition of the schelmenroman, Oskar, the rascal, eventually comes to see the world in a more favorable light.
This sense of slow and painful growth in Oskar, which takes place over the course of thirty years, renders 'Die Blechtrommel' a bildungsroman, if not in its traditional form. Initially, the novel can be seen as the opposite, an anti-bildungsroman, as it thwarts the genre by denying development. Oskar's growth is not only complete physically, he is also mentally and spiritually fully developed since birth. In this way, 'Die Blechtrommel' declares that the bildungsroman, the epitome of German Enlightenment literature, is out-of-date and overtly idealistic. Grass sees no progress, no development in the modern world, which at his time had been ravaged by two successive world wars. He is no pessimist, however, and allows for Oskar to resume his physical growth at the end. Thus, though grudgingly, 'Die Blechtrommel' is a bildungsroman.
Given that the novel stretches itself out over so many years and pages, the designation of family saga may also apply, though obviously not in the manner of, say, a Márquez's 'One Hundred Years of Solitude.' Nonetheless, 'Die Blechtrommel' builds up its very own family trees, which grow and branch and end abruptly with the passing of four generations and a prodigious amount of funerals.
There's my fairly objective description of the highly complex, multi-layered 'Die Blechtrommel.' Do I think Grass succeeded in doing what he presumably set out to do? Yes. Do I like what he set out to do? Not particularly. The reason is simple. His name is Oskar. I've heard from many people that while reading 'Die Blechtrommel' one develops a love-hate relationship with the little guy. His actions are contemptible, but in the end one cannot help but like him. Not so for me. It's not that I hate Oskar, it's that I do not feel anything for him. I enjoyed his story, immensely so at times - the Onion Cellar was hilarious - but I could not help to feel detached. The pointlessness of his actions was frustrating and made me want to slap him in the face at times. I understand that Oskar is a 'schelm' and as such is supposed to be unlikable. But I couldn't even dislike him. My personal issues with Oskar, however, do not diminish my respect for what Grass has accomplished here. To return to my first analogy, I do not regret having pulled rose petal after rose petal from the rose that is 'Die Blechtrommel.' For a rose it is."
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