The Tin Drum (Everyman's Library) - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Günter Grass was born in 1927 in Danzig.  Active as an artist, poet, and playwright, he has lived in Paris and traveled widely in Europe.  At present he lives in Berlin with his wife and twin sons.

The Tin Drum, the author's first novel, has been translated into all major European languages.  A film version of the book received an Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1980.  His other works include Cat and Mouse, The Flounder, Headbirths, and The Rat.

In 1999, Günter Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

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Excerpt

Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never letsme out of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shadeof brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.

So you see, my keeper can't be an enemy. I've come to be very fond of him; when hestops looking at me from behind the door and comes into the room, I tell himincidents from my life, so he can get to know me in spite of the peephole between us.He seems to treasure my stories, because every time I tell him some fairy tale, heshows his gratitude by bringing out his latest knot construction. I wouldn't swearthat he's an artist. But I am certain that an exhibition of his creations would bewell received by the press and attract a few purchasers. He picks up common pieces ofstring in the patients' rooms after visiting hours, disentangles them, and works themup into elaborate contorted spooks; then he dips them in plaster, lets them harden,and mounts them on knitting needles that he fastens to little wooden pedestals.

He often plays with the idea of coloring his works. l advise him against it, takingmy white enamel bed as an example and bidding him try to imagine how this mostperfect of all beds would look if painted in many colors. He raises his hands inhorror, tries to give his rather expressionless face an expression of extremedisgust, and abandons his polychrome projects.

So you see, my white-enameled, metal hospital bed has become a norm and standard. Tome it is still more: my bed is a goal attained at last, it is my consolation andmight become my faith if the management allowed me to make a few changes: I shouldlike, for instance, to have the bars built up higher, to prevent anyone from comingtoo close to me.

Once a week a visiting day breaks in on the stillness that I plait between the whitemetal bars. This is the time for the people who want to save me, whom it amuses tolove me, who try to esteem and respect themselves, to get to know themselves, throughme. How blind, how nervous and ill-bred they are! They scratch the white enamel of mybedstead with their fingernail scissors, they scribble obscene little men on it withtheir ballpoint pens and blue pencils. No sooner has my lawyer blasted the room withhis hello than he slaps his nylon hat down over the lower left-hand bedpost?an actof violence that shatters my peace of mind for the duration of his visit, and lawyersfind a good deal to talk about.

After my visitors have deposited their gifts beneath the water color of the anemones,on the little white table covered with oilcloth, after they have submitted theircurrent projects for my salvation, and convinced me, whom they are workingindefatigably to save, of the high quality of their charity, they recover theirrelish in their own existence, and leave me. Then my keeper comes in to air the roomand collect the strings from the gift packages. Often after airing he finds time tosit by my bed for a while, disentangling his strings, and spreading silence until Icall the silence Bruno and Bruno silence.

Bruno Munsterberg?this time I mean my keeper, I've stopped playing with words?hasbought me five hundred sheets of writing paper.

Should this supply prove insufficient, Bruno, who is unmarried and childless andhails from the Sauerland, will go to the little stationery store that also sellstoys, and get me some more of the unlined space I need for the recording of mymemories?I only hope they are accurate. I could never have asked such a service ofmy visitors, the lawyer for instance, or Klepp. The solicitous affection prescribedin my case would surely have deterred my friends from bringing me anything sodangerous as blank paper and making it available to this mind of mine which persistsin excreting syllables.

"Oh, Bruno," I said, "would you buy me a ream of virgin paper?" And Bruno, looking upat the ceiling and pointing his index finger in the same direction by way of invitinga comparison, replied: "You mean white paper, Herr Oskar?"

I stuck to "virgin" and asked Bruno to say just that in the store. When he came backlate in the afternoon with the package, he gave the impression of a Bruno shaken bythought. Several times he looked fixedly up at the ceiling from which he derived allhis inspiration. And a little later he spoke: "That was the right word you told me. Iasked for virgin paper and the salesgirl blushed like mad before getting it."

Fearing an interminable conversation about salesgirls in stationery stores, Iregretted having spoken of virgin paper and said nothing, waiting for Bruno to leavethe room. Only then did I open the package with the five hundred sheets of writingpaper.

For a time I weighed the hard, flexible ream in my hands; then I counted out tensheets and stowed the rest in my bedside table. I found my fountain pen in the drawerbeside the photograph album: it's full, ink is no problem, how shall I begin?

You can begin a story in the middle and create confusion by striking out boldly,backward and forward. You can be modern, put aside all mention of time and distanceand, when the whole thing is done, proclaim, or let someone else proclaim, that youhave finally, at the last moment, solved the space-time problem. Or you can declareat the very start that it's impossible to write a novel nowadays, but then, behindyour own back so to speak, give birth to a whopper, a novel to end all novels. I havealso been told that it makes a good impression, an impression of modesty so to speak,if you begin by saying that a novel can't have a hero any more because there are nomore individualists, because individuality is a thing of the past, because man?eachman and all men together?is alone in his loneliness and no one is entitled toindividual loneliness, and all men lumped together make up a "lonely mass" withoutnames and without heroes. All this may be true. But as far as I and Bruno my keeperare concerned, I beg leave to say that we are both heroes, very different heroes, heon his side of the peephole, and I on my side; and even, when he opens the door, thetwo of us, with all our friendship and loneliness, are still far from being anameless, heroless mass.

I shall begin far away from me; for no one ought to tell the story of his life whohasn't the patience to say a word or two about at least half of his grandparentsbefore plunging into his own existence. And so to you personally, dear reader, whoare no doubt leading a muddled kind of life outside this institution, to you myfriends and weekly visitors who suspect nothing of my paper supply, I introduceOskar's maternal grandmother.

Late one October afternoon my grandmother Anna Bronski was sitting in her skirts atthe edge of a potato field. In the morning you might have seen how expert mygrandmother was at making the limp potato plants into neat piles; at noon she hadeaten a chunk of bread smeared with lard and syrup; then she had dug over the field alast time, and now she sat in her skirts between two nearly full baskets. The solesof her boots rose up at right angles to the ground, converging slightly at the toes,and in front of them smoldered a fire of potato plants, flaring up asthmatically fromtime to time, sending a queasy film of smoke out over the scarcely inclined crust ofthe earth. The year was 1899; she was sitting in the heart of Kashubia, not far fromBissau but still closer to the brickworks between Ramkau and Viereck, in front of herthe Brenntau highway at a point between Dirschau and Karthaus, behind her the blackforest of Goldkrug; there she sat, pushing potatoes about beneath the hot ashes withthe charred tip of a hazel branch.

If I have made a special point of my grandmother's skirt, leaving no doubt, I hope,that she was sitting in her skirts; if indeed I have gone so far as to call the wholechapter "The Wide Skirt," it is because I know how much I owe to this article ofapparel. My grandmother had on not just one skirt, but four, one over the other. Itshould not be supposed that she wore one skirt and three petticoats; no, she worefour skirts; one supported the next, and she wore the lot of them in accordance witha definite system, that is, the order of the skirts was changed from day to day. Theone that was on top yesterday was today in second place; the second became the third.The one that was third yesterday was next to her skin today. The one that was closestto her yesterday clearly disclosed its pattern today, or rather its lack of pattern:all my grandmother Anna Bronski's skirts favored the same potato color. It must havebeen becoming to her.

Aside from the color, my grandmother's skirts were distinguished by a lavish expanseof material. They puffed and billowed when the wind came, crackled as it passed, andsagged when it was gone, and all four of them flew out ahead of her when she had thewind in her stern. When she sat down, she gathered her skirts about her.

In addition to the four skirts, billowing, sagging, hanging down in folds, orstanding stiff and empty beside her bed, my grandmother possessed a fifth. Itdiffered in no way from the other four potato-coloured garments. And actually thefifth skirt was not always fifth. Like its brothers-for skirts are masculine bynature-it was subject to change, it was worn like the other four, and like them whenits time had come, took its turn in the wash trough every fifth Friday, then Saturdayon the line by the kitchen window, and when dry on the ironing board.

When, after one of these Saturdays spent in housecleaning, baking, washing andironing, after milking and feeding the cow, my grandmother immersed herself from topto toe in the tub, when after leaving a little of herself in the soapsuds and lettingthe water in the tub sink back to its normal level, she sat down on the edge of thebed swathed in a great flowery towel, the four worn skirts and the freshly washedskirt lay spread out before her on the floor. She pondered, propping the lower lid ofher right eye with her right index finger, and since she consulted no one, not evenher brother Vincent, she quickly made up her mind. She stood up and with her baretoes pushed aside the skirt whose potato color had lost the most bloom. The freshlylaundered one took its place.

On Sunday morning she went to church in Ramkau and inaugurated the new order ofskirts in honor of ]esus, about whom she had very set ideas. Where did my grandmotherwear the laundered skirt? She was not only a cleanly woman, but also a rather vainone; she wore the best piece where it could be seen in the sunlight when the weatherwas good.

But now it was a Monday afternoon and my grandmother was sitting by the potato fire.Today her Sunday skirt was one layer closer to her person, while the one that hadbasked in the warmth of her skin on Sunday swathed her hips in Monday gloom.Whistling with no particular tune in mind, she coaxed the first cooked potato out ofthe ashes with her hazel branch and pushed it away from the smoldering mound to coolin the breeze. Then she spitted the charred and crusty tuber on a pointed stick andheld it close to her mouth; she had stopped whistling and instead pursed her cracked,wind-parched lips to blow the earth and ashes off the potato skin.

In blowing, my grandmother closed her eyes. When she thought she had blown enough,she opened first one eye, then the other, bit into the potato with her widely spacedbut otherwise perfect front teeth, removed half the potato, cradled the other half,mealy, steaming, and still too hot to chew, in her open mouth, and, snifflng at thesmoke and the October air, gazed wide-eyed across the field toward the nearbyhorizon, sectioned by telegraph poles and the upper third of the brickworks chimney.

Something was moving between the telegraph poles. My grandmother closed her mouth.Something was jumping about. Three men were darting between the poles, three men madefor the chimney, then round in front, then one doubled back. Short and wide heseemed, he took a fresh start and made it across the brickyard, the other two, sortof long and thin, just behind him. They were out of the brickyard, back between thetelegraph poles, but Short and Wide twisted and turned and seemed to be in more of ahurry than Long and Thin, who had to double back to the chimney, because he wasalready rolling over it when they two hands' breadths away, were still taking astart, and suddenly they were gone as though they had given up, and the little onedisappeared too, behind the horizon, in the middle of his jump from the chimney.

Out of sight they remained, it was intermission, they were changing their costumes,or making bricks and getting paid for it.

Taking advantage of the intermission, my grandmother tried to spit another potato,but missed it. Because the one who seemed to be short and wide, who hadn't changedhis clothes after all climbed up over the horizon as if it were a fence and he hadleft his pursuers behind it, in among the bricks or on the road to Brenntau. But hewas still in a hurry; trying to go faster than the telegraph poles, he took long slowleaps across the field; the mud flew from his boots as he leapt over the soggyground, but leap as he might, he seemed to be crawling. Sometimes he seemed to stickin the ground and then to stick in mid-air, short and wide time enough to wipe hisface before his foot came down again in the freshly plowed field, which bordered thefive acres of potatoes and narrowed into a sunken lane.

He made it to the lane; short and wide, he had barely disappeared into the lane, whenthe two others, long and thin, who had probably been searching the brickyard in themeantime, climbed over the horizon and came plodding through the mud, so long andthin, but not really skinny, that my grandmother missed her potato again; becauseit's not every day that you see this kind of thing, three full-grown men, though theyhadn't grown in exactly the same directions, hopping around telegraph poles, nearlybreaking the chimney off the brickworks, and then at intervals, first short and wide,then long and thin, but all with the same difficulty, picking up more and more mud onthe soles of their boots, leaping through the field that Vincent had plowed two daysbefore, and disappearing down the sunken lane.

Then all three of them were gone and my grandmother ventured to spit another potato,which by this time was almost cold. She hastily blew the earth and ashes off theskin, popped the whole potato straight into her mouth. They must be from thebrickworks, she thought if she thought anything, and she was still chewing with acircular motion when one of them jumped out of the lane, wild eyes over a blackmustache, reached the fire in two jumps, stood before, behind, and beside the fireall at once, cursing, scared, not knowing which way to go, unable to turn back, forbehind him Long and Thin were running down the lane. He hit his knees, the eyes inhis head were like to pop out, and sweat poured from his forehead. Panting, his wholeface atremble, he ventured to crawl closer, toward the soles of my grandmother'sboots, peering up at her like a squat little animal. Heaving a great sigh, which madeher stop chewing on her potato, my grandmother let her feet tilt over, stoppedthinking about bricks and brickmakers, and lifted high her skirt, no, all fourskirts, high enough so that Short and Wide, who was not from the brickworks, couldcrawl underneath. Gone was his black mustache; he didn't look like an animal anymore, he was neither from Ramkau nor from Viereck, at any rate he had vanished withhis fright, he had ceased to be wide or short but he took up room just the same, heforgot to pant or tremble and he had stopped hitting his knees; all was as still ason the first day of Creation or the last; a bit of wind hummed in the potato fire,the telegraph poles counted themselves in silence, the chimney of the brickworksstood at attention, and my grandmother smoothed down her uppermost skirt neatly andsensibly over the second one; she scarcely felt him under her fourth skirt, and herthird skirt wasn't even aware that there was anything new and unusual next to herskin. Yes, unusual it was, but the top was nicely smoothed out and the second andthird layers didn't know a thing; and so she scraped two or three potatoes out of theashes, took four raw ones from the basket beneath her right elbow, pushed the rawspuds one after another into the hot ashes, covered them over with more ashes, andpoked the fire till the smoke rose in clouds?what else could she have done?

My grandmother's skirts had barely settled down; the sticky smudge of the potatofire, which had lost its direction with all the poking and thrashing about, hadbarely had time to adjust itself to the wind and resume its low yellow course acrossthe field to southwestward, when Long and Thin popped out of the lane, hot in pursuitof Short and Wide, who by now had set up housekeeping beneath my grandmother'sskirts; they were indeed long and thin and they wore the uniform of the ruralconstabulary.

They nearly ran past my grandmother. One of them even jumped over the fire. Butsuddenly they remembered they had heels and used them to brake with, about-faced,stood booted and uniformed in the smudge, coughed, pulled their uniforms out of thesmudge, taking some of it along with them, and, still coughing, turned to mygrandmother, asked her if she had seen Koljaiczek, 'cause she must have seen him'cause she was sitting here by the lane and that was the way he had come.

My grandmother hadn't seen any Koljaiczek because she didn't know any Koljaiczek. Washe from the brickworks, she asked, 'cause the only ones she knew were the ones fromthe brickworks. But according to the uniforms, this Koljaiczek had nothing to do withbricks, but was short and stocky. My grandmother remembered she had seen somebodylike that running and pointed her stick with the steaming potato on the end towardBissau, which, to judge by the potato, must have been between the sixth and seventhtelegraph poles if you counted westward from the chimney. But whether this fellowthat was running was a Koljaiczek, my grandmother couldn't say; she'd been havingenough trouble with this fire,: she explained, it was burning poorly, how could sheworry her head about all the people that ran by or stood in the smoke, and anyway shenever worried her head about people she didn't know, she only knew the people inBissau, Ramkau, Viereck, and the brickworks?and that was plenty for her.

After saying all this, my grandmother heaved a gentle sigh, but lt was enough of asigh to make the uniforms ask what there was to sigh about. She nodded toward thefire, meaning to say that she had sighed because the fire was doing poorly and maybea little on account of the people standing in the smoke; then she bit off half herpotato with her widely spaced incisors, and gave her undivided attention to thebusiness of chewing, while her eyeballs rolled heavenward.

My grandmother's absent gaze told the uniforms nothing; unable to make up their mindswhether to look for Bissau behind the telegraph poles, they poked their bayonets intoall the piles of potato tops that hadn't been set on fire. Responding to a suddeninspiration, they upset the two baskets under my grandmother's elbows almostsimultaneously and were quite bewildered when nothing but potatoes came rolling out,and no Koljaiczek. Full of suspicion, they crept round the stack of potatoes, asthough Koljaiczek had somehow got into it, thrust in their bayonets as thoughdeliberately taking aim, and were disappointed to hear no cry. Their suspicions werearoused by every bush, however abject, by every mousehole, by a colony of molehills,and most of all by my grandmother, who sat there as if rooted to the spot, sighing,rolling her eyes so that the whites showed, listing the Kashubian names of all thesaints?all of which seemed to have been brought on by the poor performance of thefire and the overturning of her potato baskets.

The uniforms stayed on for a good half-hour. They took up positions at varyingdistances from the fire, they took an azimuth on the chimney, contemplated anoffensive against Bissau but postponed it, and held out their purple hands over thefire until my grandmother, though without interrupting her sighs, gave each of them acharred potato. But in the midst of chewing, the uniforms remembered their uniforms,dashed a little way out into the field along the furze bordering the lane, and scaredup a hare which, however, turned out not to be Koljaiczek. Returning to the fire,they recovered the mealy, steaming spuds and then, wearied and rather mellowed bytheir battles, decided to pick up the raw potatoes and put them back into the basketswhich they had overturned in line of duty.

Only when evening began to squeeze a fine slanting rain and an inky twilight from theOctober sky did they briefly and without enthusiasm attack a dark boulder at theother end of the field, but once this enemy had been disposed of they decided to letwell enough alone. After flexing their legs for another moment or two and holding outtheir hands in blessing over the rather dampened fire, they coughed a last cough anddropped a last tear in the green and yellow smudge, and plodded off coughing andweeping in the direction of Bissau. If Koljaiczek wasn't here, he must be in Bissau.Rural constables never envisage more than two possibilities.

The smoke of the slowly dying fire enveloped my grandmother like a spacious fifthskirt, so that she too with her four skirts, her sighs, and her holy names, was undera skirt. Only when the uniforms had become staggering dots, vanishing in the duskbetween the telegraph poles, did my grandmother arise, slowly and painfully as thoughshe had struck root and now, drawing earth and fibers along with her, were tearingherself out of the ground.

Suddenly Koljaiczek found himself short, wide, and coverless in the rain, and he wascold. Quickly he buttoned his pants, which fear and a boundless need for shelter hadbidden him open during his stay beneath the skirts. Hurriedly he manipulated thebuttons, fearing to let his piston cool too quickly, for there was a threat of direchills in the autumn air.

My grandmother found four more hot potatoes under the ashes. She gave Koljaiczekthree of them and took one for herself; before biting into it she asked if he wasfrom the brickworks, though she knew perfectly well that Koljaiczek came fromsomewhere else and had no connection with bricks. Without waiting for an answer, shelifted the lighter basket to his back, took the heavier one for herself, and stillhad a hand free for her rake and hoe. Then with her basket, her potatoes, her rake,and her hoe, she set off, like a sail billowing in the breeze, in the direction ofBissau Quarry.

That wasn't the same as Bissau itself. It lay more in the direction of Ramkau.Passing to the right of the brickworks, they headed for the black forest withGoldkrug in it and Brenntau behind it. But in a hollow, before you come to theforest, lay Bissau Quarry. Thither Joseph Koljaiczek, unable to tear himself awayfrom her skirts, followed my grandmother.

Continues...

Excerpted from The Tin Drumby Gunter Grass Copyright © 1993 by Gunter Grass. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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