Authors and Genres

In 1959, a drum beat put post-war German writing again in the focus of world literature. Fifty years ago Günter Grass published his novel “The Tin Drum“. Eckhard Fuhr, feature page editor of the newspaper “Die Welt“, talks with Goethe.de about why the novel abruptly made the then 32 year-old author famous, and about the influence that it still exercises over German literature.

Mr Fuhr, what was the reason for the success of “The Tin Drum“ in Germany?

The Tin Drum struck a tone that had not yet been heard in German post-war literature. A tone oriented very strongly to historical models, to Grimmelshausen, for example, and to Rabelais. The figure of the drummer who drums up truth also appears in Heinrich Heine. Going beyond these models, and in his very own and independent way, Grass achieved a distinctive narrative style.

Added to this was the earthiness of the style. It’s not about language scepticism, it doesn’t seek after new forms of expression or formal principles of construction, it simply starts narrating away, at least at first glance.

Here a big fat novel takes up the German past with directness, and at the same time brings the whole German literary and narrative tradition back to life again.

Grass isn’t a one-work author

Was this also the reason for the novel’s success abroad?

It was noticed perhaps even sooner abroad than in Germany that German post-war writing had, with The Tin Drum, found again a link to world literature. Abroad, by the way, this estimate still stands, whereas in Germany Günter Grass’s stocks as an author have fluctuated considerably, especially among literary critics.

We don’t connect Grass’s literary companions such as Uwe Johnson, Heinrich Böll or Martin Walser so strongly with a single work. In most people’s minds, the first association with the name “Grass” is “The Tin Drum“…

The picture of Grass as a one-work writer is, I think, a false one. All his novels have triggered big literary controversies, and those who pulled his books to pieces have afterwards said that he produced one great work and all the others are by comparison a decline. There’s simply no getting round The Tin Drum. I don’t quite see it that way. Grass has written books of very different quality. Each is independent, and he himself thinks Dog Years, for example, is much better than The Tin Drum.

What is true, however, is that Volker Schlöndorff’s filming of the novel, which was the first German film to be awarded an Oscar, brought about an incredible popularisation of The Tin Drum. Many people who say they know The Tin Drum really mean they know only the film, and they automatically connect the book, if they read it, with images from the film.

The Tin Drum is blasphemous

When "The Tin Drum" appeared, there was some stir about certain passages that were criticised as blasphemous or obscene. Did this scandal contribute to the success of the book?

Naturally it made the journalistic resonance louder. Perhaps people then picked up the book out of curiosity. Today these passages – the criticisms concerned the famous effervescent powder in the navel scene and Agnes’s procreation in the potato field – would most certainly not be called pornographic. But the novel is in fact blasphemous. In the 1950s that was a big problem and may have had a deterrent rather than a promotional effect.

A big impression made on Group 47

What is your assessment of “The Tin Drum’s“ influence on Group 47?

Group 47 was very impressed by The Tin Drum. In 1958 at their meeting in Großholzleute in the Allgäu, Grass gave a reading from a chapter of the book and was awarded the Group 47 Prize. His colleagues noticed then that something quite new and independent had appeared on the scene.

Otherwise the novel itself didn’t have much influence on Group 47, though Günter Grass and other members of his generation did – those born between 1926 and 1926, one of whom, for instance, was Hans Magnus Enzensberger. They gained the upper hand in the Group against the founding generation, many of whose literary experiences occurred before or during the war.

Favourite passage: the potato field

Do you think a novel of such scope could be written today?

Hard to say. There are certainly authors of the younger generation who have written books that, though not directly oriented to The Tin Drum, take up older styles of narrative and deliberately play on their positioning in literary history.

For example, Uwe Tellkamp’s Der Turm [i.e., The Tower]. In my view, this is a novel that contains many elements of The Tin Drum. Not so much the fantastical, though that too is there, but the fact that it’s finally about a place. In Der Turm as in The Tin Drum, literature again brings to life the atmosphere, the smells, the language and the dialect of a place, in this case a district of Dresden.

Do you have a favourite passage in “The Tin Drum“?

My favourite passage is the scene in the potato field. It’s simply consummately well described and a marvellous composition of images and manners of speech and intonations.