[Billthedrill]

I thought The Tin Drum was extremely interesting, actually, and this makes it even more so. Oskar's "voluntary" dwarfism kept him out of the war and it was supposedly his own volition that kept him from growing up. And so the little guy unfit for military service spent the war misbehaving and beating his tin drum. I always thought that was a not-so-subtle allusion to the author himself; Grass certainly does act like that frequently.

Now it appears not quite to be the case, and that's even more interesting. Was it a cover-up, wishful thinking, or merely Grass's means of excusing himself? Or was it simply a distasteful situation he'd just as soon forget? In any case it certainly colors a generation of literary analysis. IMHO, of course.

[x]

The book wasn't primarily anti-Nazi. You could get that from the idea of Oskar not growing for so long, but I didn't get the idea that it was essentially a political book. It was more like a collection of strange, sometimes horrible things that you could read different things into.

Germans seized on the book as an artistic representation of what they'd lived through, and there was a tendency to see it as more politically engaged as it in fact was. Volker Schlöndorff's film of the book certainly did have a more pronounced anti-Nazi political spin. He emphasized those elements that put Nazism in a bad light.

At the same time, I don't think this makes Grass a Nazi or a Jew-hater. People latch on to such things about people that they disagree with while they're more understanding of those whose opinions they share. It would be better to judge by one standard, and recognize that Grass was in the same position as millions of Germans, and no worse than others who've also moved beyond the attitudes they had in the 1940s.

[AnnaZ]

I read The Tin Drum twice and consider it to be some of the most absolutely brilliant prose I have ever read. It is rich and poetic, though, yes, perhaps at times disturbing. Regardless, I consider it a masterpiece.

[Pietro]

"I thought The Tin Drum was extremely interesting, actually, and this makes it even more so."

I agree w/ you, I think "Tin Drum" is one of the most important books of the 20th century because of the picture it provides of the German mind at that time.

You may be interested to know that "Tin Drum" is part of a Danzig trilogy of sorts that includes "Dog Years" and "Cat & Mouse".