One day a little boy, annoyed by his father's decision for him to become a grocer, decides that he will never grow up. Grocery is a dull job and staying a child is his protest against it. This strange little boy-man, never separated from a tin drum he is always banging, is our hero of the table. It covers three crucial decades of 20th century history. Little Oscar Matzerath will experience love, war and imprisonment in a story that paints an unforgettable picture of Central Europe between 1923 and 1954.
This is an overview of the story of The Tin Drum, the most famous work by the German Nobel-winning author Günter Grass, who passed away on April 13 at the age of 87. The Tin Drum also established Grass as one of the leading authors of Germany. It also set a high bar of comparison for all of his following works. Just as his best-known fiction is both the story of an individual and of an age, so it is that Grass' life cannot be understood without referring to the history of Germany. He was called "Germany's conscience", because he reminded Germans of a past during the Second World War (1933-1945) that many would have rather forgotten.
This sometimes made him unpopular. Many Germans did not agree in 1989 when he said that East Germany and West Germany should remain separate, as a united country would be too strong and threaten the world's peace. And Grass was called a hypocrite when he revealed in his memoir
Peeling the Onion (2006) that he had been a teenage member of the Waffen-SS, the Nazi (纳粹) Party's fighting force. The man who had blamed the actions of others had a less-than-perfect record himself.
Grass was a man of the pen and the page and also a man with a gift for speaking to the public.
His writing was noisy and annoying, but one had to listen to it, a little like the sound of the drum banged by his most famous literary creation.
