The Tin Drum

“The Tin Drum” is the first novel by the famous German writer, Nobel Prize laureate (1999) Günter Grass. A novel that introduces us to a boy named Oskar who decides, at age three, not to grow; a novel that makes you look at the terrifying realities of war through a child’s eyes. The idea for such a story arose for Grass in France, when he saw a boy completely detached from the adult world—this boy played the tin drum with devotion.

The main character is the three-year-old boy Oskar, who views the world with an insightful—and very adult—understanding: he doesn’t want to live according to the laws of this world and of his country. He expresses his protest by refusing to grow, and, being a three-year-old child, he remains so—never parting with the tin drum that shatters all glass with his cries. And perhaps the fascist regime of Germany and other horrors of our world made Oskar not only an eternal dwarf, but also a person far from likable: he is the man who inspires both sympathy and antipathy at the same time. This very work, grotesquely reflecting the history of 20th-century Germany, brought its author worldwide fame.