Tin Drum: One of the Butz Trilogy

Author: (German) Grass/Hu Qideng
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-05-01
Features: The Danzig Trilogy is Grass's masterpiece, and this book is one of them. In October 1999, the Swiss Academy of Literature, when awarding Grass the Nobel Prize in Literature, called The Tin Drum "one of the most important works of world literature after World War II." At the age of three, Oscar accidentally discovers his mother and her uncle Bronski having an affair and witnesses the rampant Nazism. He decides not to grow taller and chooses to become a dwarf instead. From then on, in his perspective, society and the people around him appear strange and mad. He spends his days beating a tin drum to vent his frustration against the deformed society and the world. If his father or teacher angers him, he will scream loudly, shattering the windowpanes and his teacher's glasses into pieces. He also uses this to "disrupt" social order, causing trouble for the Nazi rallies. Despite his short stature, he possesses extraordinary intelligence and is exceptionally clever. Faced with his keen insights, his mother dies in shame and sorrow, his father becomes a Nazi officer, and his uncle dies in the war. The neighborhood girl Maria comes to care for him, and they have a sexual relationship. After she becomes pregnant, she marries his father and gives birth to Kurt. Oscar joins a dwarf circus troupe to entertain the German army at the front lines. Three years later, he returns home, the Soviet army has captured Berlin, and his father dies by swallowing the Nazi party badge. While burying his father, Oscar loses the tin drum, and at the same time, his biological son Kurt hits him on the back of the head with a stone, sending him collapsing into the grave, bleeding profusely. However, from that moment on, he begins to grow taller, and his special ability to shatter glass with screams also disappears. The novel presents a darkly humorous fictional story of Germany's darkest history. The film adapted from this book won the 1980 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.