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The Tin Drum, by Gunter Grass

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The Tin Drum, one of the great novels of the twentieth century, was published in Ralph Manheim's outstanding translation in 1959. It became a runaway bestseller and catapulted its young author to the forefront of world literature.

To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the original publication, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, along with Grass’s publishers all over the world,�is bringing�out a new translation of this classic novel. Breon Mitchell, acclaimed translator and scholar, has drawn from many sources: from a wealth of detailed scholarship; from a wide range of newly-available reference works; and from the author himself. The result is a translation that is more faithful to Grass’s style and rhythm, restores omissions, and reflects more fully the complexity of the original work.

After�fifty years, THE TIN DRUM has, if anything, gained in power and relevance. All of Grass’s amazing evocations are still there, and still amazing: Oskar Matzerath, the indomitable drummer; his grandmother, Anna Koljaiczek; his mother, Agnes; Alfred Matzerath and Jan Bronski, his presumptive fathers; Oskar’s midget friends—Bebra, the great circus master and Roswitha Raguna, the famous somnambulist; Sister Scholastica and Sister Agatha, the Right Reverend Father Wiehnke; the Greffs, the Schefflers, Herr Fajngold, all Kashubians, Poles, Germans, and Jews—waiting to be discovered and re-discovered.

• Sales Rank: #164302 in eBooks
• Published on: 2009-10-08
• Released on: 2009-10-08
• Format: Kindle eBook

Review
''At the ages of fourteen and fifteen, I had read Great Expectations twice. Dickens made me want to be a writer but it was reading The Tin Drum at nineteen and twenty that showed me how. It was Gunter Grass who demonstrated that it was possible to be a living writer who wrote with Dicken's full range of emotion and relentless outpouring of language. Grass wrote with fury, love, derision, slapstick, pathos - all with an unforgiving conscience. --John Irving, New York Times Book Review

''Grass is one of the master fabulists of our age.'' --Times

''The Tin Drum will become one of the enduring literary works of the twentieth century. --Swedish Academy, awarding Gunter Grass the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1999

''In 2005, Mitchell and nine other translators accompanied Grass on a week-long retreat in Germany, asking questions about the book and touring the locations featured in The Tin Drum...If you haven't read this modern classic, now's the time.'' --BookPage

''The story…flows smoothly, carried along by the prose and (audiobook narrator) Garcia's captivating performance. He reads with a dramatic intensity, giving Oskar (the narrator of the book) the voice of a man who seems to be talking to himself, listening, analyzing, and checking his words…Garcia's masterful performance brings unreliable, unforgettable Oskar vividly to life.'' --Booklist, audiobook review

''Together, Garcia, Grass, and Mitchell take listeners on a tour of love, war, and madness.'' --AudioFile

Grass is one of the master fabulists of our age. --Times

About the Author
G�NTER GRASS was born in Danzig, Germany, in 1927.�He is the widely acclaimed author of numerous books, including The Tin Drum, My Century, Crabwalk, and Peeling the Onion.�He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.
�

Breon Mitchell is Professor of Germanic Studies and Comparative Literature at Indiana University, where he is also Director of the Lilly Library. A Rhodes Scholar, he received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Oxford University. His areas of specialization include literary translation, Anglo-German literary relations, literature and the visual arts, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, and Samuel Beckett.

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Reviewed by Michael Dirda

This year marks the 50th anniversary of The Tin Drum, the first and best-known novel of Nobel Prize-winning author G�nter Grass. While its narrator, the 3-foot-tall Oskar Matzerath, may be small in stature, his story is epic in scale--nothing less than the history of Germany during the first half of the 20th century, told through the experiences of one family. The first two-thirds of the book portrays life in the Free City of Danzig--now Gdansk, Poland--where Grass himself grew up; the last third, which covers postwar Germany through the early 1950s, take place largely in Dusseldorf, where the future author studied sculpture and graphics.

The Tin Drum has been regarded as a modern classic almost since the moment it was published. In English its success was helped along by an excellent translation by the late Ralph Manheim, to whom the young Grass was rightly grateful, despite a few reservations. In recent years, however, Grass has grown increasingly involved in the foreign versions of his work, going so far as to organize �bersetzertreffen--short convocations of his translators--at which he fields questions about his various books. From his experience of these meetings, Grass persuaded his publishers to commission a new English version of The Tin Drum from the distinguished Germanist Breon Mitchell.

In his afterword Mitchell explains that great books demand new versions because translations, no matter how fine, eventually grow dated. "The works that are never retranslated are those we only care to read once." In this instance, he underscores his deep admiration for Manheim, who was something of a mentor, while making clear that this new version has benefited from the inestimable help of the author and that it aims to reflect as closely as possible the rhythms and intricacy of Grass's German. "Each sentence in the new Tin Drum,' " notes Mitchell, "now faithfully replicates the length of the sentence in Grass's original text, and no sentences are broken up or deliberately shortened." As Mitchell concludes, "The new version I offer is meant for our present age, one that is increasingly open to the foreignness of the text, to the provocative innovation of linguistic play, to a syntactic complexity that stretches language."

This may sound as if the novel has been made dauntingly inaccessible, which isn't at all the case. With a magic-realist brio, The Tin Drum mixes fantasy, gallows humor, several pathetic love stories, a tragic family saga, a classic bildungsroman and a powerful account of how great political events affect--usually disastrously--a small group of ordinary people. It grabs your attention from the very first words: "Granted: I'm an inmate in a mental institution. . . ."

That voice belongs to the lonely, dwarfish Oskar Matzerath, who proceeds to tell us the story of his life, starting with the day his grandmother hid a fleeing arsonist under her voluminous skirts, then later married him. Their daughter, Agnes, subsequently weds the storekeeper Alfred Matzerath, whose serious passions are cooking and the Nazi Party. A complaisant husband as well, he turns a blind eye to his wife's ongoing love affair with a pale and sensitive Pole, Jan Bronski. The Matzerath circle also includes the greengrocer Herr Greff, who prefers Boy Scouts to his slatternly but voluptuous wife; the Jewish toy-shop owner Sigismund Markus, who is in love with Agnes; and the Truczinksi family, whose museum-guard son Herbert finds himself fatefully drawn to an accursed statue of Niobe--this chapter could stand as a first-rate supernatural tale--and whose daughter Maria becomes Oskar's great love.

Because of his mother's adultery, little Oskar remains uncertain of his true paternity. But he claims that at the age of 3, he made a conscious decision to stop growing, so that he would never have "to rattle a cash register" and could spend all his time drumming. Thus, throughout the first two thirds of the novel, Oskar remains largely mute and seemingly infantile, both spoiled and pitied, obsessed with playing his little drum and prey to the cruelty of other children. Yet he's as much an evil gnome as he is a lonely, apparently autistic child: His screams can shatter glass, and frequently do; he mutilates a statue of the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus; his selfishness even causes, albeit indirectly, a whole series of deaths.

As Oskar recalls his childhood and adolescence, Grass mentions major political events as distant, almost minor matters in the family's ongoing dramas: "In January of forty-three there was a good deal of talk about the city of Stalingrad." While little Oskar rejects formal schooling, he nonetheless teaches himself to read, choosing as his personal role models Rasputin with "his world of naked women in black stockings" and "the know-it-all" Goethe, in other words, "the dark and gloomy figure who cast a spell on women and the luminous poet-prince who so happily allowed women to cast a spell on him." Oskar himself periodically uses the power of his drumming or his laser-like, glass-cutting voice to mock the pieties of those around him. For a while, he takes to waiting in the shadows until an upright citizen pauses at a jewelry store, where--amazingly--a round hole suddenly appears in the window, just big enough for a gloved hand to reach through and unobtrusively seize a ruby necklace. At another point, Oskar convinces a gang of teenage hooligans that he is, in fact, Jesus, and that they must obey his commands.

In perhaps the most famous scene in the novel, the Matzeraths and Bronski take a walk along the seashore, where they see a hideous old man, fishing with a long rope. They pause for a moment, as he hauls up the line to reveal that it is attached to a horse's severed head. He dumps the pulpy, disgusting mass on the dock and begins to pull out long black eels, which he tosses into a canvas bag of salt. Oskar writes that his mother at first wishes to look away, then finds that she cannot turn away, and finally that she vomits up her breakfast, which is soon devoured by swooping seagulls. To cap things off, the hearty Herr Matzerath buys several of the eels to take home for supper. The repercussions from this incident change everyone's life.

In the 1930s Oskar meets another midget named Bebra, and this cosmopolitan traveler (and circus clown) ominously warns his youthful admirer: "They're coming! They will take over the festival grounds. They will stage torchlight parades. They will build grandstands, they will fill grandstands, they will preach our destruction from grandstands. Watch closely, my young friend, what happens on those grandstands." As Oskar notes in the bitterly satirical chapter "Faith Hope Love," "An entire gullible nation believed faithfully in Santa Claus. But Santa Claus was really the Gasman." The war years themselves are replete with nightmarish and absurdist scenes: While the Germans lay siege to the Danzig Post Office, a coward, driven mad by fear, compels Oskar and a dying man to play game after game of cards. The afternoon before D-Day, a group of dwarves chats with a German gunner in his pillbox on the beach at Normandy, while five nuns with black umbrellas frolic at the water's edge and a gramophone plays "Sleigh Bells in St. Petersburg." In the postwar era, a desperate Oskar first becomes an assistant to a funerary stonecutter, then an artist's model and eventually a jazz percussionist at the Onion Cellar, where people pay vast sums of money so they can peel onions--and openly weep. In due course, Oskar's drumming--it possesses an Orpheus-like power to affect people's souls--brings him a great fortune, but it also leads to his incarceration in an asylum, where he gloomily celebrates his 30th birthday.

The Tin Drum has now been studied and interpreted in classrooms for half a century. Grass himself has emerged during that time not only as a major novelist but also as a cultural and political gadfly. Recently, he disclosed that at the age of 17 he was briefly a tank gunner for the Waffen-SS, an admission that adds a probably unwanted resonance to Oskar's occasional observations about wartime guilt, e.g., "I tend, like everyone else, to make allowances for my ignorance, an ignorance that was just then coming into fashion and, like a jaunty hat, still looks oh so good on many a person today." Still, however one feels about Grass's 60-year silence, The Tin Drum itself remains a very great novel, as daring and imaginative as Gabriel Garc�a M�rquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude or Toni Morrison's Beloved.

Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Most helpful customer reviews

108 of 119 people found the following review helpful.
Brave New Translation
By Richard J. Rundell
Following the generally accepted premise that great novels deserve to be re-translated every generation or so, Breon Mitchell has tackled the most important postwar German novel, and one which had already been translated by Ralph Manheim brilliantly into English not long after it appeared in German in 1959.

But now a half-century has passed, and Mitchell's skills are awesome, indeed. He has leapt courageously into the deep end of Guenter Grass' linguistic inventiveness, some of which looks at first as if it will defy translation at all. But Mitchell has succeeded beyond any bilingual reader's expectations. THE TIN DRUM is still far richer in its original German, but Mitchell has rendered its wealth anew, and those readers who have yet to discover this masterpiece in English will be rewarded.

Dr. Richard J. Rundell
Professor of German
New Mexico State University

77 of 88 people found the following review helpful.
The strangest coming-of-age novel
By Guillermo Maynez
Western literature is full of what Germans call "bildungsroman", that is, the story of a young man's (or woman's)intellectual and emotional growth, often told from the main character's own voice. This kind of novel has adopted innumerable shapes and styles through history, and certainly this one is, so far for me, the strangest and one of the best.
It is hard to summarize the plot, as it is mainly the diverse and extreme experiences of Oskar Matzerath's life. Born in 1924 in Danzig, itself a unique and troubled city, Oskar decides at age three not to grow up anymore. Or does he simply has an illness of the tyroid gland, as he hints at some point? It doesn't matter, precisely because that moment starts the style of the whole book: all the time, terrible things are happening to Oskar, to his family, to his city, to his nation and to his century, but we see everything only through the distorted glass of this unique character's view.
First he tells us about his ancestors and the life they led in pre-war German Poland. Then we know the story of his parents, the infidelity of his mother and other disturbing and often sordid events. His community starts to fall apart as the Nazis rise to power. Then the Nazis come and destroy the city, phisically and spiritually. Oskar spends the whole war in Danzig as well as wandering through France and Belgium as part of a grotesque midget-troup�e. After the war, they flee Poland for D�sseldorf, where he is employed in very different jobs: as a tomb engraver, painters' model, jazz drum player. The chapter which describes the journey by train is simply horrible and scaring, as the chapter on his emotional disappointing is sad. The end is strange, confusing but full of hope.
There is abundant abnormal sex, vomit, dirt, misery, but also struggle, success, and much love. Oskar is not always nice, but he remains loyal to those he loves, and that is a great strength of a character you sometimes hate, but in the end you come to love. The book is full of metaphors, obscure symbolisms, grotesque and sordid events, and, above all, the human misery of our century, especially in Europe. It is a bittersweet book, often repulsive, just because that is how life is. It has moments of joy, of glorious triumph, of utter defeat. It is very very sad, because it is the story of a distorted but extremely sane person in an equally destorted but horribly insane world, but it is also a book about the joy of life, about how we have to keep going on even in the midst of tragedy and misery. If it has a message, it should be: fight on.
It is said that great works of literature depend on character development, not so much on the plot and the story itself. Well, this is a case in point. The whole book is sustained by the central character of Oskar, a wicked, depressed, desperate man seeing how his world crumbles apart and he has to build a life for himslef. As another reviewer aptly put it, he is the lonely voice crying in the wilderness. Oskar is a very solitary man with a great disadvantage, one that by sheer willpower he turns every time into an advantage, a means for surviving in a careless, cold world. Oskar never gives up, never surrenders, he finds a way to survive after every setback, and terrifying setbacks he experiences.
I think this book had to be written in the form of magical realism, because the pure realism would have been insufferable: the tragedies that occur are beyond telling them.
Not an easy read, it is most rewarding, for it paints a wide picture of the human experience, precisely what great literature is about.

98 of 114 people found the following review helpful.
The Banality of Evil and Its Consequences
By Donald Mitchell
I have been meaning to read this book since it came out in 1959, but only did so now. My reason for delaying was that the reviews I had read of the book made it sound unappealing to me. Why did I want to read the unrealistic ramblings of an insane dwarf?
Having been impressed with Mr. Grass's recent work, Crabwalk, I finally decided to give The Tin Drum a try. I'm glad I did. Let me explain why.
In my studies of the Nazi era, I was always struck by comments that observers from that time made about how banal the evil of it all was. Yet much of the propaganda from that period (such as The Triumph of the Will) that we can see today makes the Nazis seem like mythic figures. What were the observers trying to say? I finally felt like I understood the point through reading The Tin Drum. Reading about distant battles while living in Germany before the bombing became great seems a lot like reading about attacks on coalition troops in Iraq now. Going to party meetings seems a lot like how people here go to lodge meetings now.
In the first 100 pages, I kept wondering why Mr. Grass had chosen to write the novel in the form of an autobiography of an insane dwarf pretending to have a mental age of 3 who had been convicted of a murder he did not commit. Eventually, it hit me. He needed a narrator who could not be considered complicit in what the Nazis did, or we could not trust his voice. In addition, how can you portray banal evils as insane unless you see them through the eyes of an "insane" person who makes all too much sense? Once I accepted the brilliance (perhaps even the inevitability of his choice), I settled back and really began to enjoy the story. Then I began to realize that it is our childish instincts to want to control everything in our lives that leads to our separation from the richness that we can provide one another. So Mr. Grass was also sharing an important psychological point in choosing Oskar as his narrator.
What made the book special for me was Mr. Grass's ability to continually show how our connections to one another are the potential for goodness, while our instincts to take advantage of one another are the evil we must overcome. Oskar Matzareth, the narrator, is a thinker . . . yet ultimately his point is that we must carefully examine what we think about. Otherwise, false ideas will lead to fatal consequences.
I was very impressed by the way that the plot was constructed so that each time society acted in divided ways Oskar himself or someone close to him was harmed.
What will stay with me the longest are the amazing descriptions of fictional people and events: His grandmother's skirts, the horse's head with the eels emerging from it, his "father's" death during the Soviet invasion, Jan Bronski's obsessive search for skat cards during the attack on the Polish post office and Oskar's reaction to the statue of Jesus coming to life will always be with me.
I found myself wishing that I could read German like a native. The satirical humor is usually savage and quick to kill its object. I fully absorbed the lesson before the blood could even begin to emerge from the butt of the satire. As I read the book, I wondered how many times I missed compelling humor because it didn't translate well into English.
At the end of the book, I found myself searching for a novel to compare The Tin Drum to . . . in order to help other readers decide if this book is for them. In the end I could find no one book. Instead, The Tin Drum can best be described as a combination of reverse sort of Gulliver's Travels, Candide and Don Quixote set in the context of German/Polish Danzig through the end of World War II and in West Germany thereafter. So there's a fundamental darkness to the book that is missing from the other three.
I came away wondering how I can stay connected with others now while retaining the ability to see and act on the events around me as a detached, objective observer. Mr. Grass has raised quite a challenge for us all.

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