The Tin Drum Read online

  The Tin Drum

  Günter Grass

  * * *

  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT

  Boston New York 2009

  * * *

  Also by GÜNTER GRASS

  Cat and Mouse

  Dog Years

  The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising

  Four Plays

  Speak Out!

  Local Anesthetic

  Max: A Play

  From the Diary of a Snail

  Inmarypraise

  In the Egg and Other Poems

  The Flounder

  Meeting at Telgte

  Headbirths

  Drawings and Words, 1954-1977

  On Writing and Politics, 1967-1983

  Etchings and Words, 1972-1982

  The Rat

  Show Your Tongue

  Two States—One Nation?

  The Call of the Toad

  Novemberland

  My Century

  Too Far Afield

  Crabwalk

  Peeling the Onion

  * * *

  For Anna Grass

  Copyright © 1959 by Hermann Luchterhand Verlag GmbH

  Translation copyright © 2009 by Breon Mitchell

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this

  book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing

  Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Grass, Günter, date.

  [Blechtrommel. English]

  The tin drum / Günter Grass ; a new translation by Breon Mitchell.

  p. cm.

  Translation of: Die Blechtrommel.

  ISBN 978-0-15-101416-3

  1. Germany—History—1945-1955—Fiction. I. Mitchell, Breon. II. Title.

  PT2613.R338B5513 2009

  833'.914—dc22 2009013272

  Book design by Linda Lockowitz

  Printed in the United States of America

  Doc 10987654321

  * * *

  Contents

  Introduction vii

  BOOK ONE

  The Wide Skirt 3

  Under the Raft 13

  Moth and Light Bulb 26

  The Photo Album 38

  Glass, Glass, Little Glass 50

  The Schedule 61

  Rasputin and the ABCs 72

  Long-Distance Song Effects from the Stockturm 84

  The Grandstand 96

  Shop Windows 111

  No Miracle 121

  Good Friday Fare 133

  Tapering toward the Foot 146

  Herbert Truczinski's Back 155

  Niobe 168

  Faith Hope Love 181

  BOOK TWO

  Scrap Metal 193

  The Polish Post Office 205

  House of Cards 219

  He Lies in Saspe 229

  Maria 241

  Fizz Powder 253

  Special Communiqués 264

  Carrying My Helplessness to Frau Greff 274

  Seventy-five Kilos 287

  Bebra's Theater at the Front 299

  Inspecting Concrete—or Mystical Barbaric Bored 310

  The Imitation of Christ 327

  The Dusters 341

  The Christmas Play 352

  The Ant Trail 364

  Should I or Shouldn't I 377

  Disinfectant 389

  Growth in a Boxcar 400

  BOOK THREE

  Flintstones and Gravestones 413

  Fortuna North 428

  Madonna 49 440

  The Hedgehog 453

  In the Wardrobe 466

  Klepp 476

  On the Coco Rug 487

  The Onion Cellar 497 On the Atlantic Wall or Bunkers Can't Cast Off Concrete 512

  The Ring Finger 527

  The Last Tram or Adoration of a Canning Jar 538

  Thirty 553

  Translator's Afterword 565

  Glossary 578

  * * *

  Introduction

  In the summer of 1959, I completed my first novel, The Tin Drum, in Paris. I had just corrected proofs and created an image for the dust jacket when a letter arrived from the legendary publisher Kurt Wolff in New York. Wolff, who had left Germany in the thirties, asked me to meet him at a hotel in Zurich. He strode up to me in the hotel lobby, a tall gentleman, with his wife and colleague Helen Wolff beside him.

  "I'm thinking of publishing your book in America," he said. "Do you think the American reader will understand it?" "I don't think so" I replied. "The setting is provincial, not even Danzig itself, but a suburb. The novel is filled with German dialect. And it concentrates solely on the provinces—" "Say no more," he broke in. "All great literature is rooted in the provincial. I'll bring it out in America."

  The American Tin Drum appeared in 1962 with Pantheon Books of New York, a firm founded by Wolff.

  Later on, I was often urged to give some account of the origins of my first novel, but I didn't feel ready to sift through the circumstances and influences with a prying eye. I was almost frightened I might discover my own tricks.

  Up to then I had written poetry and plays, as well as libretti for the ballet (my first wife Anna was a dancer). In 1956 Anna and I left Berlin and moved to Paris with the vague idea of writing a novel circulating in my mind. I took pleasure in art, enjoyed the varieties of form, and felt the urge to create an alternate reality on paper—in short, I had all the tools needed to undertake any artistic project, regardless of its nature. If things had gone solely according to my own desires and instinct for play, I would have tested myself against purely aesthetic norms and found my role in the scurrilous. But I couldn't. There were obstacles. The gestation of German history had brought forth piles of rubble and dead bodies, a mass of material that, once I began to clear it away, only increased from book to book.

  With the first sentence, "Granted: I'm an inmate in a mental institution...," the barriers fell, language surged forward, memory, imagination, the pleasure of invention, and an obsession with detail all flowed freely, chapter after chapter arose, history offered local examples, I took on a rapidly proliferating family, and contended with Oskar Matzerath and those around him over the simultaneity of events and the absurd constraints of chronology, over Oskar's right to speak in the first or third person, over his true transgressions and his feigned guilt.

  The Tin Drum struck a distinctly new tone in postwar German literature, one that was greeted with enthusiasm by many critics and with annoyance by others. The poet and essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger offered this review in 1959:

  The Tin Drum knows no taboos.... Again and again the narrative enters the forbidden sphere where disgust and sexuality, death and blasphemy meet.

  What differentiates Grass in this respect both from any form of pornography, and from the so-called "stark realism" of the American school, what legitimizes these blunt forays, indeed elevates them to acts of artistic brilliance, is the total objectivity with which he presents them. Unlike Henry Miller, Grass does not seek out taboos; he simply doesn't notice them. It would be unfair to accuse him of deliberate provocation. He neither avoids scandal nor invites it; but that is precisely what will give rise to scandal: Grass doesn't have a guilty conscience, he takes what we find shocking for granted.

  This passage shows the wide variety of responses my work evoked in the late fifties. As a result, from the very start of my career as a novelist, I was considered controversial.

  The "shocking" parts of The Tin Drum may have led translators and publishers in other countries to omit or shorten passages they believed their own readers might find disgusting or blasphemous. And some no doubt thought
that by pruning this very long novel, written by a bra- zen young author who was still unknown, they could only improve it. I thought highly of the late Ralph Manheim, and his translations of several of my works into English were marvelous, but both literary historians and translators indicated repeatedly that his translation of The Tin Drum needed revision. I heard the same thing about the early translations of The Tin Drum into other languages.

  Thus, in the early summer of 2005, ten translators, including Breon Mitchell, joined me in Gdańsk with one set goal in mind: to create new versions of my first novel in their own languages. To prepare myself for their questions, I reread The Tin Drum for the first time since I'd written it, hesitantly at first, then with some pleasure, surprised at what the young author of fifty years ago had managed to put down on paper.

  For eight days the translators from various lands questioned the author; for eight days the author talked with them, responded to their queries. During breaks I would take them to this or that spot mentioned in the rapidly shifting narrative of the novel.

  How much more relaxed the reader's attitude toward The Tin Drum is today, even in Catholic countries like Poland, was evident one Sunday when the author and his translators visited the Church of the Sacred Heart in the Danzig suburb of Langfuhr, where I was born and raised. In my autobiographical memoir Peeling the Onion, I recounted the story:

  And there, in this neo-Gothic scene of a youthful crime, a young priest with a cryptic smile, a man who bore not the faintest resemblance to Father Wiehnke, asked me to sign a Polish copy of the book in question, and the author, to the astonishment of his translators and editor, did not hesitate to place his name below the title. For it was not I who broke off the Christ Child's little watering can that day at the Altar of Our Lady. It was someone with a different will. Someone who had never renounced evil. Someone who did not wish to grow...

  Lübeck, January 2009

  BOOK ONE

  The Wide Skirt

  Granted: I'm an inmate in a mental institution; my keeper watches me, scarcely lets me out of sight, for there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can't see through blue-eyed types like me.

  So my keeper can't possibly be my enemy. I've grown fond of this man peeping through the door, and the moment he enters my room I tell him incidents from my life so he can get to know me in spite of the peephole between us. The good fellow seems to appreciate my stories, for the moment I've finished some tall tale he expresses his gratitude by showing me one of his latest knotworks. Whether he's an artist remains to be seen. But an exhibition of his works would be well received by the press, and would entice a few buyers too. He gathers ordinary pieces of string from his patients' rooms after visiting hours, disentangles them, knots them into multilayered, cartilaginous specters, dips them in plaster, lets them harden, and impales them on knitting needles mounted on little wooden pedestals.

  He often plays with the notion of coloring his creations. I advise him not to, point toward my white metal bed and ask him to imagine this most perfect of all beds painted in multiple hues. Horrified, he claps his keeper's hands to his head, struggles to arrange his somewhat inflexible features into an expression of manifold shock, and drops his polychrome plans.

  My white-enameled metal hospital bed thus sets a standard. To me it is more; my bed is a goal I've finally reached, it is my consolation, and could easily become my faith if the administration would allow me to make a few changes: I'd like to have the bed rails raised even higher to keep anyone from coming too close.

  Once a week Visitors Day disrupts the silence I've woven between my white metal bars. It signals the arrival of those who wish to save me, who find pleasure in loving me, who seek to value, respect, and know themselves through me. How blind, nervous, and ill-mannered they are. Scratching away at my white bed rails with their nail scissors, scribbling obscene, elongated stick figures on the enamel with ballpoint pens and blue pencils. My lawyer, having blasted the room with his hello, routinely claps his nylon hat over the left-hand bedpost at the foot of my bed. This act of violence robs me of my inner balance and good cheer for as long as his visit lasts—and lawyers always have plenty to say.

  Once my visitors have placed their gifts on the little white oilcloth-covered table that stands beneath a watercolor of anemones, once they've laid out some future plan to save me, or one already under way, once they've managed to convince me, by their tireless attempts to rescue me, of the high quality of their brotherly love, they find renewed joy in their own existence and depart. Then my keeper arrives to air out the room and gather up the string from the gift wrappings. Often after airing he finds time, sitting by my bed and disentangling the string, to spread a silence so prolonged that in the end I call the silence Bruno, and Bruno silence.

  Bruno Münsterberg—I'm talking about my keeper now, I'm done playing with words—bought five hundred sheets of writing paper on my behalf. Should this supply prove insufficient, Bruno, who is unmarried, childless, and hails from the Sauerland, will revisit the little stationery shop, which also sells toys, and provide me with whatever additional unlined space I need for my recollections, which I hope will be accurate. I could never have requested this favor of my visitors, my lawyer, or Klepp, say. The solicitous love prescribed for me would surely have prevented my friends from anything so dangerous as bringing me blank paper and allowing my incessantly syllable-excreting mind free use of it.

  When I said to Bruno, "Oh, Bruno, would you buy me a ream of virgin paper?" he looked up at the ceiling, sent his finger pointing in that same direction to underline the comparison, and replied, "You mean white paper, Herr Oskar."

  I stuck with the word virgin and told Bruno to ask for it that way at the shop. When he returned later that afternoon with the package, he seemed a Bruno lost in thought. He stared long and hard a few times at the ceiling, that source of all his bright ideas, and then announced, "That word you recommended was right. I asked for virgin paper and the salesgirl blushed bright red before she gave me what I wanted."

  Fearing a long conversation about salesgirls in stationery shops, I regretted having emphasized the paper's innocence by calling it virgin, and said nothing, waited till Bruno had left the room. Only then did I open the package with the five hundred sheets of paper.

  I lifted the resilient stack for a moment and tested its weight. Then I counted off ten sheets and stored the rest in my bedside table. I found the fountain pen by my photo album in the drawer: it's full, it won't fail for lack of ink; how shall I begin?

  You can start a story in the middle, then strike out boldly backward and forward to create confusion. You can be modern, delete all reference to time and distance, and then proclaim or let someone else proclaim that at the eleventh hour you've finally solved the space-time problem. Or you can start by declaring that novels can no longer be written, and then, behind your own back as it were, produce a mighty blockbuster that establishes you as the last of the great novelists. I've also been told it makes a good impression to begin modestly by asserting that novels no longer have heroes because individuals have ceased to exist, that individualism is a thing of the past, that all human beings are lonely, all equally lonely, with no claim to individual loneliness, that they all form some nameless mass devoid of heroes. All that may be true. But as far as I and my keeper Bruno are concerned, I beg to state that we are both heroes, quite different heroes, he behind his peephole, I in front of it; and that when he opens the door, the two of us, for all our friendship and loneliness, are still far from being some nameless mass devoid of heroes.

  I'll begin long before me, for no one should describe his life who lacks the patience to commemorate at least half of his grandparents' existence before detailing his own. To all of you forced to live confusing lives beyond the confines of my mental institution, to all you friends and weekly visitors who have no inkling of my store of paper, I introduce Oskar's maternal grandmother.

  My grandmother Anna Bronski sat in
her skirts late one October afternoon at the edge of a potato field. You could have seen how expertly my grandmother raked the limp potato tops into tidy piles that morning, ate a hunk of bread at noon smeared with dripping and sweetened with syrup, dug through the field one last time, and sat at last in her skirts between two nearly full baskets. Before the upturned and inwardly tilted soles of her boots, flaring up asthmatically from time to time and sending a flat layer of troubled smoke across the slightly tilted crust of the soil, smoldered a potato-top fire. The year was eighteen ninety-nine, she sat in the heart of Kashubia, near Bissau, nearer still to the brickworks, this side of Ramkau she sat, beyond Viereck, facing the road to Brentau, between Dirschau and Karthaus, with her back toward the black forest of Goldkrug she sat, shoving potatoes under the hot ashes with the charred tip of a hazel stick.

  If I've singled out my grandmother's skirt for special mention, making it clear, I hope, that she was sitting in her skirts—even calling the chapter "The Wide Skirt"—it's because I know how much I owe to that article of clothing. My grandmother didn't wear just one skirt, she wore four, one atop the other. Nor did she wear one top skirt and three underskirts; she wore four so-called top skirts, each skirt wore another, but she wore all four, according to a system of daily rotation. The skirt on top the day before descended one layer on the next, her second skirt became the third. The skirt that yesterday was third now nestled right against her skin. Yesterday's inmost skirt now clearly showed its pattern, which was none at all: my grandmother Anna Bronski's skirts all preferred the same standard potato color. It must have suited her.

  Aside from their color my grandmother's skirts were distinguished by a lavish expanse of material. They formed broad arcs, billowed when the wind rose, fell slack when it had had enough, rattled as it passed, and all four flew out ahead of her when the wind was in her stern. When she sat down, my grandmother gathered her skirts about her.

  In addition to the four skirts that permanently billowed, drooped, draped, or stood stiff and empty by her bed, my grandmother possessed a fifth. This skirt differed in no way from the four other potato-colored ones. And this fifth skirt was not always the same fifth skirt. Like its brothers—for skirts are masculine by nature—it too was subject to rotation, was one of the four skirts she wore, and like them, when its time had come each fifth Friday, it descended into the washtub, hung Saturday on the clothesline at the kitchen window, and lay when dry on the ironing board.