Die Blechtrommel 

The Tin Drum by Günter Grass holds a special place in my life. It has history. Growing up in Germany, I am reading it for the first time in 1966, at the tender age of thirteen. Later I keep returning, to the English translation as well. Published in 1959, the novel is part of early post World War Two literature engaging in the necessary work of collective re-membering via literature – Erinnerungsliteratur. There is no walking forward without doing the work of “re-collecting” as an act of repairing, bringing light and insight. Artists often know how to do this well. Shame, guilt, denial. The novel’s broader historical setting is familiar to me already, thanks to my unique parents. Both looking to new ways of dealing personally and collectively with the nation’s horrific past.

Political satire, subtle and grotesque humor, poetic imagery, all embodied by the voice of the ‘untrustworthy’ narrator named Oskar. For my young teenage spirit, the style of magic realism is easily accessible, liberating and fresh. Having already read Albert Camus and Thomas Mann, I am wide open, devouring the novel. It is meant to provoke. The rhythms, sounds, and eruptions of Oskar’s tin drum are to wake us up – interrupt. Early, Oskar discovers that he can use his voice to shatter glass, like lightbulbs, eyeglasses, medical vessels filled with hearts, kidneys, and even a fetus. How fabulous is that? Intimate stories twist and turn through pre-war, war, and post-war society, inevitably including incest, war, birthday celebrations, suicides, rape, denunciations, death, love, bombings, displacement, adventures. Thirteen years old, Die Blechtrommel inspires me to meet life with courage. I am enthralled.

 

Oskar is a slippery guide, keeping us on the edge. At age three, he decides to stop growing physically – the ultimate refusal to become like the grown-ups. He keeps minutely observing with his inscrutable blue eyes.  In the Third Reich, deformed or other-looking, other-behaving people were taken to institutions, and mostly killed. Oskar miraculously survives in the chaos. Like my own Papa. The baroque opulence of the writing, Oskar’s imagination, as well as his interpretations of an insane world of upheaval and hypocrisy, the surreal details – all entrances and shocks. Yet we see ourselves reflected in it. Social critique, politics, and art, are seamlessly fused together.

Jacket illustration by Günter Grass

Zugegeben: ich bin Insasse einer Heil- und Pflegeanstalt, mein Pfleger beobachtet mich…. Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my caretaker is watching me… through a peephole in the door… What an intriguing first sentence. In post-war times, Oskar writes his memoirs from an insane asylum where he ends up by both accident and choice. Chronicling his family and life, including the extremely turbulent and surreal post-war years. At the time of me reading The TIn Drum, our family is still living very close to an old mental institution, eine Nervenanstalt. I am fascinated by the inmates who are periodically allowed to sweep the streets in our neighborhood, often catatonically mumbling to themselves. Trying to imagine their hidden lives behind the walls, I am inspired to paint a snowy winter scene. Ein Baum, eine Mauer, und eine Leiter.  The stone wall with a lonely ladder leaning against it. Evoking mystery. Longing.

 

My upbringing is the opposite of prudish. Traditionally, German culture is open to the body. Americans would say, I am too young for the erotic content, but my parents have zero concerns. In my enthusiasm, I suggest that the book should be read in our literature class. The teacher is outraged and vehemently claims that the book is pornography. This emboldens me to contradict him. With arguments like: why should we be deprived of great art? Defending the book as a master piece of literature, full of history. So much to be explored and learned. Up to this day, the image of his face turning red is stuck in my memory. Of course his fury at my public defiance means a win for me. My shy teenage self feels contemptuous of the old-fashioned education system here in the ancient town of Regensburg – at the time not yet, as these days, a charming and bohemian university city. Germany before 1968 is very authoritarian. He calls my mother in. But Mama admires the novel, too. Whatever the outcome, from here on I am trying to subvert this conservative teacher, and we have an unspoken “war” going on. In assigned essays, I start writing in metaphors and allegories. He manages to detect my disguised depictions of him. Angrily, with the aim to tame me, he keeps complaining to my mother. I barely escape his bad grading which could have forced me to repeat a whole school year, as was the rule in those days.

Can we escape the insanity?

 

Ten days ago, I am attending the screening of the director’s cut of The Tin Drum at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. In 1980, renowned filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff’s master piece wins the Palme d’Or in Cannes, and the Academy Award for best foreign film. When I mention it to friends, several pronounce that it might be “too heavy” for them. Despite their reluctance, a few decide to show up. The film is intense and engrossing. The novel comes in three long chapters. The movie portrays only Book One and Book Two, up till the end of the war and mass displacement. A piece of art standing powerfully on its own, just as the original does – a rare feat. To see it on the big screen is a treat, honoring the artistic scope and vision. The acting is superb, the images unforgettable, exquisitely translated from the page into a stunning piece of cinema.

 

Günter Grass is probing. His fabulating skills grip us, brilliantly exposing the hypocrisy and pain of the German petit bourgeoisie. Times of hardship, hunger, fascism, fear, increasing chaos. Masked subtle critique is punctuated with shocking scenarios, often grotesque, absurd. As seen through the eyes of Oskar, the outsider. The story is intimately grounded in the peculiar characters, the inner workings of complicated relationships and family. This brings us close without stereotyping. How else can one comprehend moral disaster, physical devastation, the incomprehensible. In 1959, when it is first published and way beyond, the novel demonstrates struggle for inner freedom – liberation. When the film version arrives in 1979, twenty years later, the world is more open to the insights of Oskar’s piercing blue eyes. The dwarf at the edge of society. Up to this day, being “other” is a problem in America, too, now more than ever.

 

My old German copy....

The provocative and penetrating storytelling gets under our skin, imperceptibly. With precision, cozy rose-colored fantasies are shattered like wine glasses. The sensuality keeps offering sweet redemption. There are plenty of funny moments making us laugh with relief. Oh, the human follies! Our willingness to be deceived. Both, novel and film, speak across continents, cultures, languages, times. Watching The Thin Drum for maybe the third time with an American audience – almost 60 years after my first encounter with the novel – I experience my young and my old self becoming one. My birth country and my chosen home fuse. German and American. The circle complete, feels bitter-sweet, like life. So many gifts, so many good-byes, so much to be learned.

 

How lovely to go home and invite my Jewish artist friend Laurie to join for tea and conversation, sharing notes on the moral quandaries and comparable situations of nowadays America, as well as Israel. The wars and devastation. Future generations will need to keep doing the work of cultural probing of history – Erinnerungsarbeit. The eerie parallels are excruciating. The traumas and cruelties perpetrated on certain populations in our country here. How we barely pay attention, our lives busy, how easily we avert the eye, shut out others’ realities. How helpless and unhelpful we really are in the face of collective history, war and tragedy. How painful. How guilty we feel, how complicit. Despite our “still good” lives, times are heavy. Can we meet them, and ourselves? Let’s keep waking up. Times of many reckonings are upon us. Defiantly we toast to life and art. Yes – new paths... ways of being....

The Tin Drum was ahead of its times. Günter Grass was one of my heroes. Many international writers, like John Updike and Salmon Rushdie, were inspired by this ground breaking novel, much of it autobiographical. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999, Grass was born in 1927, the free city of Danzig (Gdansk, now Poland), inhabited by Poles, Germans, and Kashubians, an ethnic minority. When the Nazis came, everyone inadvertently was forced to show what they are made of. Jewish individuals, as well as Germans, committed suicide when under pressure to face, or commit, unimaginable horror. So much more could be said about the novel and film. Here I stop. When I ask friends, they all felt enriched and confess it definitely was not “too heavy.” Bavo. Facing life with courage brings flow, joy and confidence.

 

A Winter Tale, painted at age eleven

https://karinalandriver.blogspot.com/2022/01/a-winter-tale-i-painted-this-scene-when.html