The Tin Drum

The Tin Drum, published in German in 1959 as Die Blechtrommel, is a novel by the German writer Günter Grass. Its narrator, Oskar Matzerath, born in the free city of Danzig in 1924, decides as a small child to stop growing after hearing his father declare he will one day take over the family grocery, and he narrates the novel's events, spanning his childhood, the Second World War and its aftermath, from a mental hospital as an adult with a child's body and an adult's intellect, refusing throughout to be parted from the tin drum he carries and beats obsessively. Blending grotesque, often surreal invention with a close, satirical eye on Danzig and German society across Nazism and the postwar period, the novel became one of the defining works of magic realism in postwar European fiction, and its frank treatment of German complicity and self-deception provoked controversy on publication. Volker Schlondorff's 1979 film adaptation shared the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1980, and by the mid-1960s the novel itself was already recognized as a classic of postwar German literature.