Tin Drum Works of Grass

Author: (German) Grass, translated by 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's affair with her cousin Bronski and witnesses the rampant Nazism, deciding not to grow taller and instead choosing to become a dwarf. 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 fury against the deformed society and the world. If his father or teacher angers him, he will scream loudly, shattering the window glass and the teacher's glasses into pieces; he also uses this to "disrupt" social order, causing trouble for the Nazi rallies. Despite his short stature, he is exceptionally intelligent and clever. Faced with his keen insight, his mother dies in shame and sorrow, his father becomes a Nazi officer, and his cousin dies in the war. The neighbor girl Maria comes to care for him, and they have sex. 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, returning home three years later. 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 uses black humor to depict a fictional story of Germany's darkest history. The film adaptation of this book won the 1980 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.