Study Guide to The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645421771
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Studienhilfen
• Subtopic: Studienführer

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, the most widely read postwar German novel. As a novel, The Tin Drum is a memoir of a man living in an insane asylum with supernatural powers who grew up in Nazi Germany. Moreover, Grass uses allusion and metaphor to comment on modern society, history, the individual, and the government. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Grass’s classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO GUNTER GRASS

NOTE TO THE STUDENT

Why does Oskar decide to remain three feet tall and to conceal his precocity? How does The Tin Drum serve as a parody of a classic work by Goethe? Why does Grass draw attention to the Virgin Mary’s thigh? Why does he use a “wavering perspective” instead of a traditional “point of view”?

These are some of the many fascinating questions discussed in this Critical Commentary. It is designed to aid you in your study and appreciation of Grass’ novel. But it will make little sense to you unless you are already familiar with the full text of The Tin Drum either in the original German or in the English translation. The author of this Critical Commentary assumes throughout his discussion that it will prompt you frequently to refer back to your original text.

The Editors

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Gunter Wilhelm Grass, born October 16, 1927, in Danzig, is the son of middle-class merchants who spent his early years like most children attending school, playing in the streets, and going to the beach. Later in life Grass was to regard those early years of his life as the most formative because during that time he acquired the impressions, fears, and other sensations that determined the basis of his writing.

During the war he was a member of the Hitler Jugend (a Nazi youth organization), served with the military, and participated in the apocalyptic, final months of the war. Wounded in April, 1945, he was sent to a military hospital in Czechoslovakia arriving there a few days ahead of the American Army.

When he was released a year later with a full stomach and an empty pocket, he was confronted with the uncertain prospect of finding a way to support himself. Following a dissatisfying experience as a farm laborer, he was taken on at the potash mine near the town of Hildesheim. A belated effort to finish high school was quickly abandoned because the subject matter reminded him of feeding mentally on sawdust.

Grass decided to move to Dusseldorf where he could live with his sister while studying drawing and modeling at the art academy. While waiting for the school to open, he worked as an apprentice stonecutter in the firm Gobel und Moog. Later he joined two other impecunious friends to form a jazz band. In an early issue of Der Spiegel, Grass is shown accompanying his two friends on a washboard. The trio performed chiefly in potato cellars converted into night clubs.

The young man continued his studies in art and sculpture until his literary career began quite by accident in 1955. To be sure, he had always written poetry, but he never considered his efforts of sufficient quality to merit attention. The story goes that one day his wife Anna (whom he had married in 1954) took a poem from his desk and submitted it to a poetry contest sponsored by the South German Broadcasting Company. When his poem won third prize, Grass was introduced into influential literary circles and to new friends. About this time he managed to interest the publishing firm Luchterhand Verlag in his first book Die Vorzuge der Windhuhner (1956). Though the volume showed promise, it remained largely unnoticed.

With 300 Marks a month income from his publisher, Grass moved to Paris in 1956. While his wife studied dance, he worked on his first novel The Tin Drum. Two years later he was invited to read excerpts from his novel at the annual Gruppe ‘47 convention and so impressed the judges that he was awarded the 5000 Mark first prize. This event and the publication of the completed novel the following year brought the thirty-two year old author instant fame and financial independence. After the enormous success of The Tin Drum there followed in quick succession Cat and Mouse (1961), Dog Years (1963), a volume of lyrics, dramas, and short prose pieces. In 1969 the novel Local Anaesthetic appeared. His latest work, Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke (1972) - roughly, The Diary of a Snail, has not yet been translated into English.

When the now-famous author received the Berlin Critics Prize in 1960, he left Paris for Berlin where he lives today with his wife and four children. To date, he has refused to buy not only a car, but even a television set and a telephone.

A liberal-minded intellectual, Grass feels he is dwelling in the land of the Philistines. He not only condemns present-day society as too materialistic but accuses his countrymen of being more occupied with the problems of buying a new car than with human rights. He never tires of portraying the average German as an overweight, undereducated bore perched upon a sturdy chair at a sidewalk cafe gobbling pastry and thinking about the evening’s television programs. In an effort to awaken a sense of responsibility in his countrymen, he has devoted a great deal of his time to campaigning for Willy Brandt and his socialist party, the SPD (Sozialistische Partei Deutschlands). He has become a familiar sight during elections either making speeches for the SPD or handing out newspapers on the street. The party organizers at first discouraged him as much as possible, fearing his unorthodox methods would alienate more voters than he would attract. In the 1965 elections, for example, he designed his own campaign poster depicting a cock crowing Es-Pe-De (SPD). He then invited his audience to imagine the cock perched atop a dung heap rather than on the traditional church steeple.

Between campaigns Grass writes. Usually he works standing or leaning on a specially -built inclined writing-board affixed to the wall of his study. The author once described his manner of writing. It consists, he says, of three stages. In the first stage he writes down everything he wants to say in a roughly coherent fashion. This rough draft is made up of bits of experience, ideas, and personal sensations. In the second stage he expands the story with documentary material. Before writing Local Anaesthetic, for instance, he spent a good deal of time visiting mines and quarries to provide him with authentic background material. The third stage consists of polishing this material until the two parts fit smoothly together.

Grass’ Themes And Techniques

The Tin Drum must be placed among the most complex and intricately designed novels in world literature. As the book progresses, its complex structure, themes, and character development are revealed through several literary techniques. The novel’s interrelated themes, its variety of characters, and especially the author’s unique approach impress the reader that his work is another of those great artistic statements on man’s situation in a complex world.

Grass’ novel explores from many different angles what we may identify as:

Ten Major Themes

1. Materialistic modern society has dehumanized the individual.
2. Our government, politics, and institutions are corrupt.
3. The individual as well as society has little if any effect on the course of history. Men are victims of an indifferent historical process used solely to achieve its ends.
4. The individual cannot avoid involvement in politics and history; nor can he deny personal responsibility for such involvement.
5. Objects possess an almost magical power that plays a significant role in determining man’s thoughts, actions, and life.
6. Grass views the world in the manner of the Theater of the Absurd. Life is an activity without purpose, meaning, or unifying principle.
7. Both the rational and Christian interpretations of things are irrelevant to the true course of events.
8. The unconscious mind is dominated by an all-consuming fear of the unknown.
9. God is dead.
10. All these conditions mean that there is a critical need for a New Messiah.

Structure

Grass uses the technique of free association to arrange his material. In the chapter “The Clothes Cupboard,” for instance, we hear about a shiny patent-leather belt. Then the narrative spirals off on a series of related objects such as Oskar’s experience on the breakwater with the eels, only to return a few pages later to the belt. Information and motifs introduced in the first two chapters may not reappear for several hundred pages while other motifs recur throughout the novel. Some symbols - such as white for innocence and crimson for transgression - will intrude upon our awareness again and again.

Another important structural element is time. The novel is not written chronologically, but actually begins in the present, reverts to the past, and then again to the present in constant, uncertain juxtaposition as Oskar narrates the events of his life.

Extended Metaphor: Although the traditional metaphor establishes a relationship between two unrelated objects, Grass treats the metaphor as an actual fact with no explanation as to its cause or meaning. In this way the dividing line between subject and object is erased. Such metaphors, highly imaginative, nonetheless influence the world of everyday reality. Thus Oskar’s voice does, in reality, break windows, Niobe actually causes deaths, and the crowd on the parade ground really dances to Oskar’s drum.

Parody: Grass is not a satirist, for he lacks the true satirist’s optimistic belief that things can be put right in the world if we only set our minds to it. He is primarily a parodist. The Tin Drum, for example, is an extended parody of the Bildungsroman (Novel of Education) in which the development of the hero during his early years of immaturity and uncertainty to the maturation of his personality and capabilities is chronologically developed. During the course of the narrative, the hero is exposed to a wide spectrum of cultural influences, the theater, and especially to the influence of a spiritual mentor. It is through the pessimism of parody that Grass negates the optimistic view of life characteristic of this genre. Oskar’s contact with the theater is limited to entertaining soldiers at the front with a troupe of touring midgets, his cultural influences are limited to those offered the proletarian milieu in Danzig-Langfuhr, and his spiritual mentor is the grotesque dwarf Bebra. In addition to the Bildungsroman, Grass parodies history, the picaresque novel, and contemporary events.

Point Of View: An author may choose to tell his story in either the first or third person. Although the first-person narrative allows the reader to empathize with the hero and move about inside his mind, it limits the reader’s perspective strictly to one person. Third-person narrative, on the other hand, allows the storyteller to be everywhere at once, so the reader sees both the hero and other protagonists from many points of view. The versatile use of both techniques, however, creates yet a third device called wavering perspective. For instance, the reader is introduced to this last technique in the first chapter when Oskar insists that he is “in front of” the peephole while Bruno, his attendant, is “behind it.” At other times he claims the opposite. This uncertainty of viewpoint is compounded by Oskar’s frequent references to himself in the first person, then sometimes in the second. Frequently, the shifts occur in the same sentence. For instance, in the chapter, “Fizz Powder,” Oskar says during his self-analysis: “Who was doing all this: Oskar, he, or I?” Such devices serve yet another purpose: alienation.

Narration As An Alienation Technique: The reader’s uncertainty is created by this wavering perspective and the frequent shifts of narrative that inhibit the reader from empathizing with the hero. As a result, we are constantly held at arm’s length and forced to look critically at both Oskar and the events he describes.

Literary, Cultural, Historical Parallels And Allusions: Grass uses many allus...