Just Finished Reading The Tin Drum by Günter Grass

I first saw the movie The Tin Drum back in 1981 when HBO had it in their lineup...I was able to see both the English audio version as well as the original German version with English subtitles...the latter seemed more powerful.  It's based on the Günter Grass novel with the same title, first published in 1959 in German with the title Die Blechtrommel and which I finally just got around to reading (the English translation).  Both the author and his protagonist, Oskar Matzerath, grew up in the formerly German city of Danzig (now Polish Gdańsk) in the late 1920s during the Weimar Republic and in the 1930s and 40s while Hitler was in power and experienced World War II from the side of the Germans.  The book conforms in large part to the movie, with a few minor variations, up to the last part (the years after the war) which the movie omitted. In the book version, while in a mental hospital in the 1950s, Oskar narrates his life story, all the way from birth: an important detail since he claims he was born imbued with an adult's thinking and viewpoint of the world.  Like Grass, Oskar distinguishes his national identity using his mother's lineage as Kashubian...neither Pole nor German: like the movie he goes back to relate how his grandmother met his anarchist, arsonist grandfather.  By the time Oskar turns three, he is fed up with the duplicity and hypocrisy of the adult world.  For his birthday his mother gives him a tin drum, to which he quickly bonds.  And then he makes the Peter Pan-like decision to stop growing: he maintains his three-year old height at 3'1" until the war ends in his early adulthood.  Oskar's narration occasionally returns to his mental institution and his keepers and visitors, but he is primarily focused on relating significant events in his earlier life.  His mother has been involved in a long-term romantic triangle between Pole Jan Bronski (whom Oskar considers to be his true father) and her husband, German Alfred Matzerath.  Not to give away all that happens, but in film and book both it turns into a story of attrition, with little Oskar always seeming to be a sort of catalyst in the unfolding tragedies while coming out of them himself unscathed.  He is obsessed with his tin drum, which he beats with fervor and force, constantly wearing out the one he has and needing to replace it.  He also discovers a special talent: he can break glass with his high-pitched, loud shrieks, rendering him virtually immune from discipline.  The film version seemed to make a connection between the rise of Nazism and Oskar's decision to drop out of the growth process, but the book isn't at all clear on this. Grass makes the point, I think, that you can have an adult's perspective without the necessary accompanying knowledge and character: that is certainly the case with Oskar.  And to that extent I identified with this singular fictional character, recalling my own younger years...not that I possessed any magical ability to suspend my own physical growth.  When I first saw the movie I was greatly impressed...it won an Academy Award for best foreign movie and the soundtrack music was hauntingly beautiful.  But a few years later a controversy arose about whether the actor portraying Oskar, David Bennett, a minor at the time, had been improperly used for a sex scene.  After some censorship of the movie, an investigation ensued, the director exonerated...but still there is a shadow hanging over it: regrettable, for while very intense and disturbing in places, I consider The Tin Drum to be one of the greatest films ever made.  Since I already knew pretty much what was going to happen having watched the movie, the book was a bit anticlimactic...although I enjoyed Oskar's intellectual wit and defiance at the world that came out better on paper.  Good book, good movie: take your pick...