Tin Drum: One of the Danzig 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, when the Swiss Academy of Literature awarded Grass the Nobel Prize in Literature, it called The Tin Drum "one of the most important works of world literature after World War II." At the age of three, Oscar his mother and her uncle Brown were having an affair and witnessed the rampant Nazism. He decided not to grow taller and instead chose to become a dwarf. From then on, in his perspective, society and the people around him seemed strange and mad. He spent his days beating a tin drum to vent his frustration against the deformed society and the world. If his father or teacher annoyed him, he would scream loudly, shattering the windowpanes and his teacher's glasses into pieces. He also used it to "disrupt" social order, causing trouble for the Nazi rallies. Despite his short stature, he was exceptionally intelligent and sharp. Faced with his keen insights, his mother died in shame and sorrow, his father became a Nazi officer, and his uncle died in the war. The neighbor girl Maria came to take care of him, and they had a sexual relationship. After she became pregnant, she married his father and gave birth to Kurt. Oscar joined a dwarf circus troupe to entertain the German army at the front, and three years later returned home. The Soviet army had captured Berlin, and his father died by swallowing the Nazi party badge. When burying his father, Oscar lost the tin drum, and at the same time, his biological son Kurt threw stones at the back of his head, knocking him to the ground in the grave, where he bled profusely. However, from that moment on, he began to grow taller, and his special ability to shatter glass with screams also disappeared. The novel uses black humor to tell a fictional story about Germany's darkest history. The film adapted from this book won the 1980 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.