ABSTRACT
So Günter Grass, author in 1959 of the novel The Tin Drum, imagined his protagonist, Oskar Matzerath, musing. Oskar, who, aged three, had thrown himself down the family staircase, seemed to symbolise many aspects of modern Germany. Maybe he was a classic case of (self-) arrested development, this hunchback of the Notre Dame of Gdansk/Danzig, a surreal child-adult, adult-child? As once Germany’s ruling elites had hoped Hitler would be their ‘drummer’, so Oskar could not be separated from his tin drum. Was he also then, this tinniest and most pertinacious of drummers, the master of propaganda? Certainly, with his voice that shattered glass and made every night a potential Kristallnacht, he could control and deploy violence. He also knew about (rye) bread (eels with sour cream and dill sauce) and circuses. And after liberation from Nazism, he could only embrace modernity from an asylum bed.
