Günter Grass (1927), Die Blechtrommel
Oscar Matzerath, the now world-famous tin drummer who relates his life in this novel, was eight months old at Whitsun in 1925, according to his own account. This makes him a good three years older than his equally famous creator. He certainly needs this head start, since the times he is reporting about turn out to be difficult, requiring a fully matured mind in order to comprehend everything properly. But apart from that he obviously enjoys having time at his disposal, thanks to his magic drum, and being able to make anything else happen which seems to him, as an accomplished storyteller, to be right for the moment.
Günter Grass is always ready to make use of narrative literature's time- honoured bag of tricks, and he delves deep inside, giving free rein to his imagination - and yet his manufactured reality is of course closely and significantly related to historical reality. It is not just that actual history becomes visible in the background of the novel's plot (like Grass, Oscar comes from Danzig and, a real 'dwarf of his time', experiences the German attack on Poland and its consequences). Despite all the caution with which Grass uses the symbolic level, his characters and mythical constructs also have openly symbolic attributes, which brings the explicators and expert interpreters onto the scene. The fact that Oscar is a dwarf and wants to remain so (at the age of three he refuses to progress to the next stages of development, given the condition of the world he is forced to face he struggles desperately to return to the safety of his mother's womb) has been recognised as a powerfully expressive technique by the author, and Oscar's aggressive drumming, his fits of anarcho-nihilism, and his dubious morality have given all the more cause for deep analysis. This was particularly so since Grass maintained a high profile in German public life during the years following the publication of The Tin Drum (1959), and frequently invited comparison with the narrative 'I' suggested by the novel. One clear difference which became evident irritated his left-wing and conservative readers particularly: this prominent author was, and has remained, a democratic Socialist.
