The Tin Drum
by Günter Grass
At three, he stops growing and drums at adult lies.
you want Germany's Nazi past processed through surrealism because realism was inadequate to the horror
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Oskar Matzerath decides at age three that the adult world is so corrupt he will refuse to grow up. He beats his tin drum and screams at a frequency that shatters glass. Grass uses this impossible narrator to dispatch from inside German history — Danzig under the Nazis, the war, the aftermath — with the freedom that only a surrealist can achieve. The Nobel committee called it one of the great literary achievements of the 20th century. The most formally radical German reckoning with what Germany did and what Germany told itself about what it did.
WHERE THIS BOOK LIVES
- Setting
- Germany • Europe
- Voice
- Written by a German author
- Themes
- Authoritarian Playbook
