The Tin Drum

A boy decides to stop growing at age three, armed with a tin drum and a glass-shattering scream. From his stunted perspective, he witnesses the rise of Nazism, the war, and its aftermath. Grass’s Nobel Prize-winning debut is German literature at its most ambitious and most necessary.

Why Read This

The Tin Drum is the book that forced postwar Germany to confront its past. Oskar Matzerath, the narrator who refuses to grow, is one of the great unreliable narrators in fiction: his smallness gives him a child’s-eye view of atrocity, and his drumming is both protest and complicity. Grass writes with a Rabelaisian excess that is the polar opposite of Kafka’s restraint, and the combination of grotesque comedy with historical horror created a new kind of novel.

After Kafka’s modernist parable and Hesse’s spiritual quest, Grass shows German literature’s third register: the confrontation with history, the refusal to look away from what happened and why.

What to Expect

A long, wildly inventive novel. The prose is dense and the imagery surreal. The narrative voice is unreliable and provocative. Demanding but deeply rewarding.