In the aftermath of World War II, Oskar Matzerath—the diminutive protagonist of Günter Grass's The Tin Drum —embarks on an intense program of self-improvement. "I educated myself at almost no cost in the company of thousands determined to learn, to make up for the education they'd missed, took courses in night school, …discussed collective guilt with Catholics and Protestants, shared that guilt with all who thought: Let’s get it over with now, be done with it, and later, when things get better, there'll be no need to feel guilty."
Alas, novelist Grass might have done better to follow this same approach. Instead Grass waited until 2006 before revealing that, more than a half-century earlier, he had been a member of the Waffen-SS, a military branch under the direct control of the Nazi Party. Shockwaves reverberated throughout the literary world in response to Grass's admission—previously readers had assumed that Grass, only 17 when the war ended, had been too young to serve as an active participant. Yet the novelist now explained that he had attempted unsuccessfully to enlist in the U-boat fleet at age 15, was drafted into the Waffen-SS in 1944, and served as an assistant tank gunner in a panzer division.
Some influential supporters rushed to the novelist’s defense, asserting that a teenager's misjudgment should not invalidate the achievements of a long and illustrious career. "The man (and the writer) is a model of soul-searching and national conscience," John Irving wrote at the time. "Grass is a daring writer, and he has always been a daring man. Was he not putting himself at risk—first at 15, then at 17? And now, once again, at age 79? And, once again, the cowardly small dogs are snapping at his heels." Yet many others were deeply disturbed by the revelations. After all, Grass was not just an illustrious writer, but one whose reputation was built, in large part, on his zeal in berating and holding up to derision those who refused to take full ownership for Germany's Nazi past.
In the words of journalist Joachim Fest, Grass had "set himself up as a moral authority, a rather smug one"—a stance that not only sold books, and gained him renown, but earned Grass a Nobel Prize for literature in 1999. In granting the award, the Swedish Academy specifically cited Grass’s courage in "recalling the disavowed and the forgotten: the victims, losers and lies that people wanted to forget because they had once believed in them." After the revelations of 2006, these words became imbued with unintentional irony.
How does Grass’s complicity impact our interpretation of The Tin Drum , the caustic 1959 novel that serves as the cornerstone of his oeuvre? If anything, our understanding of Grass past intensifies the reading experience. The distance between author Günter and protagonist Oskar is diminished, and the rapier wit of the writer takes on the added edge—whether deliberately or unwittingly, who can tell?—of self-criticism. A novel that bravely bridged the gap between personal responsibility and collective responsibility, takes on the overtones of a forced confession.
If Grass had been looking for a protagonist to cast shame and derision on the German mindset of the first half of the 20th century, he could have hardly chosen a more fitting symbol than his tin drummer Oskar. Was Oskar manly and proudly Aryan, a fitting exponent of the master race? No, not in the least. Oskar is a dwarf, but a peculiar one—his 37- inch stature is the result of his own decision, at age three, to stop growing. Moreover, Oskar's intelligence is fully developed, but he pretends to be an idiot, blabbering like a child and avoiding all adult responsibility.
His own ethnic origins are uncertain—Oskar’s prefers to accept his mother's Polish lover as his 'presumptive father', rather than her husband, a staunch Nazi party member. But this, like much of Oskar's worldview, based as much on personal whim rather than actual evidence. The youngster's one authentic passion is for his tin drum, given as a gift on his third birthday and his inseparable companion for most of the novel. Oskar has little direct involvement in the war—although he eventually joins a troupe of entertainers who perform for the troops. In truth, he avoids complicity of all kinds. And yet…
Bad things happen again and again to the people surrounding little Oskar—mother, father and 'presumptive' father, friends, accomplices, lovers. Often Oskar's responsibility is unclear, at best indirect, yet he invariably plays some contributory role in the downfall of those around him. Usually Grass leaves it up to the reader to trace the connection between cause and effect; Oskar himself has little interest in probing his possible culpability—a strange reticence given the analytical zeal he applies in so many other aspects of his life.
After the end of World War II, Oskar decides that it is time to grow up—but the way he does so is, again, filled with symbolic resonance. When he escapes as a refugee to West Germany, he puts on additional height and bulk, and transforms himself from a three-foot high dwarf to…a four-foot high hunchback. Instead of true maturity, Oskar has settled for a different kind of deformity. Around this same time, he discovers that he can make a good living performing on his tin drum—an instrument that evokes intense memories among his audience, and allows them to weep and shed the pent-up tears that they have kept inside so long.
As this thumbnail summary makes clear, The Tin Drum lacks a plot, at least in the familiar sense of an unfolding drama with clear resolution. Grass doesn't actually avoid grand historical events, but he deliberately places them at the periphery of our field of view—his novel is like a movie in which key scenes take place in the background, while the foreground is filled with banality and Felliniesque excesses. It is all too fitting that, when Oskar is finally held responsible for a despicable act, it is one he probably didn't commit. The world of The Tin Drum is, thus, not without its moralizing and staunch defense of virtue—but these are invariably sham, applied at the wrong time and in the wrong place.
Grass compensates for the deliberate withholding of dramatic incidents through the sheer audacity of his imagination. The novel includes a number of bizarre scenes, cinematic in approach, that will stick in readers’ heads—although I wouldn't be surprised if many of them would prefer, like the characters in The Tin Drum , to forget such painful, unsettling images. I call attention to: the crude fisherman who uses a severed horse's head to catch eels; the resulting self-abasement of Oskar's mother, who commits suicide by eating the most disgusting fish she can find; the conspiracy between Oskar and a gang of hoodlums to conduct a parody of a Catholic mass, with the dwarf playing the role of the baby Jesus; the wounded Polish postal worker forced to play cards as the blood is draining out of his body. These rank among the most disturbing and unforgettable scenes in modern German literature, and have contributed not only to the novel's fame, but also the outrage with which this book was initially met.
I will leave it to others to judge Grass's degree of culpability in the events of 1944 and 1945. I can’t even begin to balance the personal role of the teenager against the larger global influence of the author. Does the latter mitigate the former? Does the former invalidate the latter? But I do know that any indictment others lay at the feet of Günter Grass could hardly be as savage and unforgettable as the one he has served up himself in this intense, brilliant and deeply chilling novel.
Ted Gioia writes on music, books and popular culture. His most recent book is The Birth (and Death) of the Cool .