a tin[n]y beat
by
Douglas Messerli
Günter
Grass Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum), 1959, English language
version translated by Ralph Mannheim (New York: Random House, 1961).
Jean-Claude
Carrière, Franz Seitz, and Voker Schlöndorff (screenplay, based on the novel by
Günter Grass), Volker Schlöndorff (director) Die Blechtrommel (The Tin
Drum), / 1979, USA 1980
Writing about Volkner Schlöndorff’s 1979 film adaptation of Günter Grass’s 1959 fiction The Tin Drum, Roger Ebert began his review with the following series of critical “accusations”:
Allegories have trouble standing for
something else if they
are too convincing as themselves. That
is the difficulty
with The Tin Drum, which is either (a) an allegory about
one person's protest against the
inhumanity of the world, or
(b) the story of an obnoxious little
boy.
The movie invites us to see the
world through the eyes of
little Oskar, who on his third birthday
refuses to do any more
growing up because the world is such a
cruel place. My
problem is that I kept seeing Oskar not
as a symbol of courage
but as an unsavory brat; the film's
foreground obscured its larger
meaning.
So what does that make me? An
anti-intellectual philistine?
I hope not. But if it does, that's
better than caving in to the
tumult of publicity and praise for The Tin Drum which has
shared the Grand Prix at Cannes (with Apocalypse Now)
and won the Academy Award as best
foreign film, and is hailed
on all fronts for its brave stand
against war and nationalism and
in favor of the innocence of childhood.
Actually, I don't think little Oskar
is at all innocent in this
film; a malevolence seems to burn from
his eyes, and he's compro-
mised in his rejection of the world's
evil by his own behavior as
the most spiteful, egocentric, cold and
calculating character in the
film (all right: except for Adolf
Hitler).
The film has been adapted by the West
German
filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff from the
1959 novel by Günter
Grass, who helped with the screenplay.
It chronicles the career of
little Oskar, who narrates his own life
story starting with his
mother's conception in a potato patch.
Oskar is born into a world
divided: in the years after World War I,
both Germans and Poles
live in the state of Danzig, where they
get along about as well as
Catholics and Protestants in Belfast.
Oskar has fathers of both
nationalities…., and he is not
amused by the nationalistic chauvinism
he sees around him.
So, on his third birthday, he reaches a
conscious decision
to stop growing. He provides a plausible
explanation for
his decision by falling down the
basement stairs. And for
the rest of the movie he remains
arrested in growth: a solemn-
faced, beady-eyed little tyke who never
goes anywhere without
a tin drum which he beats on
incessantly. For his other trick, he
can scream so loudly that he shatters
glass.
There is a scene in which Oskar's drum so
confuses a Nazi
marching band that it switches from a
Nazi hymn to "The Blue
Danube." The crashing obviousness
of this scene aside, I must
confess that the symbolism of the drum
failed to involve me.
And here we are at the central problem of
the movie: Should I,
as a member of the audience, decide to take
the drum as, say,
a child's toy protest against the
marching cadences of the German
armies? Or should I allow myself to be
annoyed by the child's
obnoxious habit of banging on it
whenever something's not to
his liking? Even if I buy the wretched
drum as a Moral Symbol,
I'm still stuck with the kid as a pious
little bastard.
I’ve quoted at length here because the
generally exuberant and supportive film critic, Ebert, writes words that
somewhat echo my own feelings—but oddly, not about the film, but the original
novel. That book, published in 1959, is often described as the first and most
important of German World War II books that dealt straight-forwardly with
German guilt. And it has consistently been praised by numerous critics (see,
for example, the Gaurdian review of a
new translation in 2009) as one of the greatest of 20th century
fictions.
Although I think of myself as an
extraordinarily well-read person when it comes to fiction and poetry, for some
reason I had never before read the book, but given the news of Grass’ death
earlier this year, and my focus on World War II and Germany in these 2015
volumes, I became determined to correct that.
I cannot report that it was a completely
enjoyable project. Although Grass has a remarkable command of various fictional
genres which he employs throughout the book, and although he most certainly
creates a larger-than-life surrealist-tinged story, the book almost seems to me
to cloak what I might have thought to be its major subject: life in Nazi
Germany.
By
locating the action in Danzig, Poland, away from the German heartland, in part,
Grass delimits his focus. While Danzig, in fact, been one of the first
territories to have been taken over by
the Nazis, who claimed the city, in large, because of its large German
population and its long ties with Prussia, and led, soon after to the German invasion
of Poland, by placing most the work’s action there, Grass puts the worst of the
German atrocities on the fringes. Yes, we get a first-hand glimpse, so to
speak, of the battle of the Polish Post Office; and through the fact that Oskar’s
legal if not true father, Matzerath, is a Nazi sympathizer, we do get an
immediate portrayal of how that might effected family life. We even get a
close-up glimpse of a Nazi rally which little Oskar, with his endless drumming,
purportedly and quite miraculously “breaks up” by causing the Nazi band to
shift to the rhythms of a waltz. But these events, including the later
destruction of the Jewish Markus’ toy shop and Oskar’s later involvement in a
troupe of dwarves entertaining the German soldiers in the bunkers, all seem
almost incidental to the central tale which focuses on the determined little
person, Oskar.
The very fact that the fiction’s hero,
Oskar, is a kind of eternal child, who would rather drum that talk, prevents
the fiction from fully exploring and encountering deeper issues about the Nazi
takeover. From a child’s point-of-view we get mostly glimpses, long
perspectives, hints as opposed to direct presentation of the world Hitler and
his associates created. The only thing that truly matters to Oskar is his
drumming, and all else seems almost tangential.
The book, moreover, does not at all make
it clear that Oskar drums in opposition to the immorality he witnesses. At
numerous times, Oskar seems far more attracted to and interested in Bronski,
his mother Agnes’ not-so-secret lover than in Matzerath. While he may apply his
shrill scream to nearby windows while he is left with Markus during one of his
mother’s trysts, he also uses his drumming and screaming skills to tempt
strangers—as well as Bronski—to steal good through windows he has cracked open.
If Matzerath is a closet Nazi, he is more emphatically a wonderful cook and a
rather doting father, despite the fact that even he must wonder about Oskar’s
parentage.
Oskar, moreover, is hardly presented as
an individual with moral values in opposition with the German-controlled world
around him. The forever young hellion is only too happy to deface church property,
to seduce his own father’s shopkeeper and—after Agnes dies—his mistress, Maria,
and father her son Kurt. And, in a long episode, Oskar becomes the leader of a
group of armed young bandits, The Dusters (an imitation of the real Edelweiss
Pirates of Cologne) who represent the mirror image of the brownshirts, using
the chaos of the Nazi’s last years to create chaos.
Oskar
is quite ready to be able to join with Bebra, Roswitha, and others of the midget
group celebrated by Nazi soldiers. He witnesses the murder of several nuns walking
across a nearby beach by Corporal Lankes. Rather than drumming out in disgust,
Oskar seems to take in the event with little of the horror one might expect: “Roswitha,
stop your ears, there’s going to be shooting like in the newsreels.” In other words,
for him reality has become a kind simulacrum.
After the war, Oskar turns even more
corrupt, breaking into the bedroom of his neighbor, a nurse, and later,
attempting to rape her. When she is murdered he is suspected and placed in an
asylum, from which, even if he is found not guilty, he has no desire to leave.
In short, Oskar, in Grass’ original
work, is not only the “pious little bastard” who Ebert sees him as, but has
been a child-voyeur, street thug, rapist, and collaborator, as well as an
out-and-out liar whose tale is clearly unreliable, which completely diminishes
any moral ground by which we might judge Nazi Germany. Since so much of the
work is written in a kind hazy surrealist style with allegorical implications,
moreover, it is indeed very difficult throughout to find in Grass’ The Tin Drum any moral center.
One
might argue, of course, that during the Nazi regime there was no moral position
left, and that Oskar represents the childlike aspects the culture as a whole,
neither entirely good or bad, but mixed in its attempts to simply to survive.
The drum is, arguably, a symbol of the potential of art to sustain existence
within a world with no moral compass, and, like all art, is neither entirely
evil or morally responsible. It is what it is, a force of expression that
sometimes subverts the evil around it, but just often joins in to encourage
society’s tortures, such as, late in the novel, when Oskar plays in a jazz
group hired by a club whose members gather to grate onions so they might be
able to cry, releasing their otherwise inexpressible feelings.
As the first major post-holocaust German
novel, such statements, however, seem to me to be as tinny and tiny as the beat
of Oscar’s little drum. I might suggest, without actually judging Grass, that
it is a work of a man who, having himself been involved in the Nazi regime, did
not seriously want to explore the darkest aspects of those horrific years.
In the film, Volker Schlöndorff, is only
too ready to present Oskar as a moral center of the work, cutting vast sections
of Grass’s original, including the last section, and extending scenes that
show, in far more simplistic terms, direct connections with Oskar’s tin
drumming and the immorality he witnesses around him. While Markus (Charles
Aznavour), another of Agnes’ admirers, is very briefly presented in the book,
for example, Schlöndorff extends the scenes in which he gently proposes to
Agnes, and adds a long connecting scene wherein Markus’s shop is destroyed by
brownshirts and left without any hope.
Since Oskar is actually played in the film
by an 11 year-old child (the eerie David Bennent), we can more easily forgive
his selfish actions such as his determination to take the drum from the shelf
of the Post Office director’s family during the building’s siege. His interest
in Maria, and licking of effervescent sherbet
powder from her navel seems more like curiosity than the fiction’s 16 year-old
stunted boy’s same actions—even if it does end in sexual acts.
Schlöndorff’ and his writers quickly wash
over some of Oskar’s contradictory actions, clean up the hundreds of minor
entanglements of the fiction and cut long sections to present a far more flowing
narrative, where allegory is made more comfortable.
Using Grass’ generation myth concerning an
escaping criminal and Oskar’s grandmother’s many layers of skirts under which
the criminal hides, the director even ends his film as a kind of testament to
the Kashubian roots of Grass’ Danzig, pulling it away from both its Polish and
Nazi pasts.
If Schlöndorff’s vast reconstruction of
Grass’ original might be said to be a great simplification of the novel, it is
nonetheless far more satisfying as a moral allegory which quite entertainingly
uses its somewhat loathsome tyke as a force standing apart and against of the
ills of the period. Whether or not he was able to make Oskar likeable is
another issue. But the issues around him are certainly more centered and
focused in Schlöndorff’s cinematic rendition than in Grass’ original work. And
the acting, finally, is quite brilliant.
Los Angeles,
October 29, 2015
