The Tin Drum: Gunter Grass

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Jeffrey Hart. "Response to "How the Right Went Wrong" ". Dartmouth Alumni Magazine. Archived from the original on 28 December 2006. It all adds up to a fairly unique experience in literature, a historical novel narrated by someone who may or may not be actively crazy but in some way that seems to be the point, that there's no real way to process these events as rational unless you're a little touched in the head. The Tin Drum is a strange, big novel, an epic satire and farce; it is also a provincial, magical realist, picaresque tale. This is the story of Oskar Matzerath, who tells his life story from a German mental hospital in 1954. Having deliberately stunted his growth at the age of 3 and capable of shattering glass with his voice, Oskar is a force of chaos, torn between the teachings of the mad faith healer Rasputin and the poet-prince Goethe, and between Satan and Jesus, both of whom Oskar impersonates. In 1946 and 1947, he worked in a mine and received an education of a stonemason. For many years, he studied sculpture and graphics, first at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and then at the Universität der Künste Berlin. He also worked as an author and traveled frequently. He married in 1954 and from 1960 lived in Berlin as well as part-time in Schleswig-Holstein. Divorced in 1978, he remarried in 1979. From 1983 to 1986 he held the presidency of the Berlin Akademie der Künste (Berlin Academy of Arts). In the novel’s first half, its protagonist uses his artistic talent to sabotage the National Socialist war machine, at one point literally forcing the marchers at a Nazi rally to dance to the beat of his tin drum. The anarchic energy and tuneless protest of Grass’s character found admirers across the globe, especially among other artists.

At the time ofits publication, in 1959, Adenauer's West Germany was still struggling with its Nazi past. The perpetrators and followers of the regime were given quiet absolution and even placed in high positions in politics and the administration.Little Oskar looks at life from down below. And comments both perceptively and maliciously on life going on around him —about the growing influence ofNational Socialism;about his father joiningthe party. Or abouthis mother leadinga double life from the very start and regularly meetingwith her lover —which will later become her doom. And abouthis own first sexual experiences, about how he sees the beginning of the Second World War, how he then stirs things up in a theater on the war front —and finally ends up in a closed treatment facility. Armed with the titular drum, Oskar, an incorrigible aesthete understood by no one but loved, at various times, by many, uses his instrument to drum up memories of his perfectly remembered life, beginning with his birth in 1924. It is through this compulsive devotion to rhythm that Oskar is able to produce his personal image of German history. And through his telling, we learn about the first days of WWII, when Oskar’s presumptive father reluctantly joined in the defense of the Danzig post office and became equal parts martyr and coward. Ma, come accadrebbe a chiunque, nei giorni in cui un senso di colpa sgarbato e impossibile da scacciare mi abbatte sui guanciali del mio letto di manicomio, cerco di appigliarmi alla mia ignoranza, che allora venne di moda, e che ancora oggi molti si portano in giro. Still, to this day, no postwar German-speaking writer has had as much influence on the literary world as Günter Grass with his Blechtrommel, or The Tin Drum. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia.

He has lied to his family half his life. He himself corrects lies he has told you half a book before - putting an asterisk on everything he says. He tells you he deliberately stopped growing - and faked an accident to provide the world reason for that. The fact that a lot of information comes from his drum is not too much satisfying either. He is using both first-person pronouns and his name to talk about himself - at times in the same sentence. The audiobook is narrated by Robert Gladwell. He speaks clearly, although I did reduce the speed. The prose is meant to be savored and thought about. I have given the narration four stars. The pronunciation of some names are a bit off. This is not of much importance. Perhaps I should have given the narration five stars--it was easy to follow all the way through. This is helpful in those parts that are confusing when your mind is whirling, grasping to understand the author’s implied message. Jan Bronski: Agnes's cousin and lover. Oskar's presumptive father. Politically sided with the Poles. Oskar, pertanto, gestisce il suo stesso sdoppiamento e mentre spezza se stesso fa altrettanto con la dovuta concentrazione della lettura. Alfred Matzerath: Agnes's husband. Oskar's other presumptive father. Politically sided with the Nazi Party.On this ship happened to be a former master of sawmill where Koljaiczek worked, who gave him up to the police. But Koljaiczek did not want to go to the police and upon arrival at the home port jumped into the water hoping to get to a nearby pier, where just launched the ship under the name "Columbus". However, on the way to the "Columbus" he had to dive under the raft which was too long, where he found his death. As his body was not found, there were rumors that he managed to escape and he sailed to America, where he became a millionaire . I've read somewhere that Oskar symbolizes Nazism. Maybe, but I think Fascism would be closer to the mark. Germany falls through and so he wants to go to America. So America will become the new Fascist state? The tin drum is featured in Season 2 of the Starz TV series Counterpart. Emily Silk is seen carrying it around as she attempts to recover her memory following an attempted assassination. La historia comprende el período que va desde el año 1920 hasta 1950, o sea, desde que Oscar narra cómo fue engendrada su madre hasta que cumple los 30 años de edad y además comienza contando su historia desde el hospital psiquiátrico en el que se encuentra internado con Bruno, el enfermero devenido casi en su asistente personal. Through all this, a toy tin drum, the first of which he received as a present on his third birthday, followed by many replacement drums each time he wears one out from over-vigorous drumming, remains his treasured possession; he is willing to commit violence to retain it.

During the war, Oscar gain popularity as an artist who could break glasses through his voice (showing how much Germans loved being shouted at) while after war it is his drumming (the creative art) that gets prominence. An entire credulous nation believed, there's faith for you, in Santa Claus. But Santa Claus was really the gas man. Volviendo a la novela, el pequeño Oscar vive al principio con su madre, su padre biológico y el amante de su madre. De esta manera, ese triángulo entre Oscar, Alfred Matzerath y el polaco Jan Bronski llevarán a cabo gran parte de los episodios y sucesos que aparecerán a lo largo de la novela. Con la aparición de María mucho más adelante que se transformará en su novia y en la madre de su hijo Kurt, Oscar decidirá girar en 180° para buscar un destino que lo lleve donde él quiera, eso sí: siempre acompañado por su tambor de hojalata. Bebra: Runs the theatrical troupe of dwarfs which Oskar joins to escape Danzig. He is later the paraplegic owner of Oskar's record company. Oskar's lifelong mentor and role model. He is a musical clown. Update: I recently found out that Gunter Grass was a member of the Nazi party in Hitler's Germany.. He hid and denied this most of his life and in fact spent much of his later life denouncing the Nazis. So the author's real life story resembles that of Oskar in a way. Like Oskar, he was an opportunist.Hence you must take everything he says with a pinch, correction a bowl full of salt. It is funny to see how whenever you find a reason to doubt a declaration he wants to maintain, he would run to explanations - as if he was telling you his story face-to-face and had seen you rise your eye-brow in doubt.

In fact, I have not been so keen on anything German, except for their cars and the business our company does with a German firm. Nolens volens, I have a life- line and strong connection with a country of what I consider to be cold people. But I may be wrong. And I am not the warmest of creatures- I have a nephew staying over for a month and, instead of being pleasant and compassionate, I am irritated and displeased. There are some allegorical elements - Oscar's mother (the source of harmony in his world) dies at onset of war, Oscar polish uncle (whom he calls his biological father) dies when Poland falls to Russians and his German father dies with fall of Germany trying to swallow Nazi party pin. Wartime madness mostly shows up in sexual madness. Helene Grass (née Knoff, 1898 - 1954), a Roman Catholic of Kashubian-Polish origin, bore Günter Grass to Willy Grass (1899 - 1979), a Protestant ethnic German. Parents reared Grass as a Catholic. The family lived in an apartment, attached to its grocery store in Danzig-Langfuhr (now Gdańsk-Wrzeszcz). He has one sister, born in 1930. Gunter Grass, the Nobel Prize winner is a personage that has created some scandal. Rather noisy, since it reached my ears, which are at all attuned to what happens in Germany’s literary life. Satan hopped up and down and whispered, "Did you see those church windows, Oskar? All glass, all glass!"They are coming," he whispered. "They will take over the meadows where we pitch our tents. They will organize torchlight parades. They will build rostrums and fill them, and down from the rostrums, they will preach our destruction. Take care, young man. Always take care to be sitting on the rostrum and never to be standing out in front of it."