Truth -- Well, Perhaps Not

Truth -- Well, Perhaps Not

Gunter Grass's post-World War II novel the Tin Drum is a layered story told in different parts by a narrator who shifts through different degrees of reliability. But unlike books in which different narrators simply present their own versions of the truth and so are equally reliable, this shifting narrator is not equally reliable. In some sense, the task of the reader of this book is to determine what is true.

This question might seem to be an academic one as we read it in the post-Cold War world, in a world in which the veterans and other survivors of World War II are quickly dying away. We know that fiction is fiction, after all, and we know (as we are also inhabitants of a post-modern world) that narrators are often reliable. But for readers in the 1950s when the book was published, and especially for German readers in the 1950s, the questions of truth and reliability for far more potent and more compelling.

The German civilian population in the 1950s were constantly questioned -- by the world around them as well as by each other -- as to their own culpability in the war. They were asked -- to borrow a question from what was then their future -- what did they know and when did they know it? Germans came up again and again with the question of how it could have been possible that they as an entire people did not know about the deportation and slaughter of the Jews -- along with other groups like gays, gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses. How could Germans not notice the constant disappearance of their neighbors? How could they not notice the smokestacks? How could they not notice the smell of millions of burning bodies?

How could they be innocent?

On the other hand, many Germans, perhaps even most Germans, did believe themselves to be innocent. They proclaimed so again and again. They knew nothing until after the war was over. They were simply being good citizens. Good Germans. They did what everyone else -- in every country in the world -- had done. They had supported their leaders. They were innocent of anything like war crimes. They had simply followed their leaders, followed orders. They were not Nazis, they were simply Germans.

Grass called into questions these stories. He asked his compatriots to ask themselves harder questions and to tell themselves harder stories. He asked them each to acknowledge what one might call -- flippantly, to be sure, and also in a phrasing that would not yet be current -- their inner-Naziness.

Who Knows the Truth?

The story is told by Oskar Matzerath, who is presented to us as a highly unreliable narrator because during the "time" of the narration (1952-54) he is in a mental hospital. Thus we are struck from the beginning of our acquaintance with Oskar that we cannot trust him. After all, how can you trust those who are mad? And yet, as we read farther and farther into Oskar's narrative, we do begin to trust him.

It is impossible for us as readers in our own moment of history to understand in any authentic way how Germans would have read this. We know the truth about what happened in Germany in a far more complete way (in no small part because we know what has happened in the intervening years) than the Germans first reading the novel would have known.

We trust Oskar because he understands (or at least he appears to) that Germans living during the war were all Nazis. They each contained within them both the good German and the Nazi. Oskar tells us that he has two real fathers, two different fathers. The first ot these is his mother's husband. Alfred is a member of the Nazi Party -- the kind of German that we are now deeply familiar with, the kind of German who has populated popular culture since the middle of the last century.

He is in many ways a stereotype, even a caricature at times, of the Nazi officer. A man who is not overly thoughtful, a man capable of just following orders, but also a man who is not that concerned that he is involved in a terrible crime. He is the kind of German whom many of us now find to be familiar. A man who is evil because he does not care enough to be good. Oskar's view -- and Grass's point in this case -- is that evil is far more powerful than people often believe. Grass's evil is not simply the lack of presence of goodness.

Grass's concept of the struggle between good and evil is also portrayed explicitly as the images of both Jesus and Satan are invoked in the book. Satan is a powerful force, something that may or may not be defeated in the end. He may rise up -- and win -- even as Germany rose up from the first world war and struck again. And perhaps a third time, Germany/Satan would win.

Oskar's other father -- in his own mind -- in his mother's lover, Jan, a Pole from what was then the free city of Danzig. Poles too were slaughtered by the Germans during the war, and so to some extent Jan is a stereotype too. He is executed by the Nazis for being a part of the forces defending the Polish Post Office. He is thus a stereotype of the Resistance fighter, a man who does what he has to in the face of tremendous odds against him. A man who faces his own death not without fear, but with the sure knowledge that he must do the right thing.

Who Can Be Counted Among the Innocent?

These two strains -- the Nazi and the hero of the Resistance -- run through Oskar's sense of himself, as if they were twinned in his DNA, spiraled together in an inseparable way. You cannot have one kind of German without the other, Oskar and Grass seem to be saying . The complexity of the ways in which the good and the evil of German heritage and national character (something believed in much more in the 1950s than now) were bound together is further highlighted by another element of the plot, which is when Alfred -- after the death of Oskar's mother -- marries Maria, who was formerly Oskar's mistress. Maria then gives birth to a boy who may be Oskar's son.

Another key theme -- possible the most important theme of the book -- emerges with the birth of this child. This boy grows -- he matures -- in ways that Oskar has refused to do. The tin drum of the title is a gift that Oskar received when he was three. In refusing to give up this toy, Oskar is also refusing to grow up. This is part of what -- ironically -- makes us both trust and distrust Oskar as a narrator. There is a part of all of us that remembers the truths that we learned and understood as young children. We know that children tell truths that adults are afraid to or humiliated to.

And yet we also distrust Oskar for the same reason. The child may tell us the truth. But does the childish adult? Isn't this the stand that the world believed that Germans had taken in general? Weren't all Germans like childish adults, holding their hands over their eyes and pretending that the real world out there just didn't exist? Or is Oskar childlike rather than childish, a sort of idiot savant? A Cassandra?

It is important to note that there is a similar duality in terms of reliability of the madman that Oskar is also described as being. The insane are quintessentially unreliable in that they do not share the same reality that the rest of us do. And yet, when the rest of the world is mad -- as surely as Germany and Germans were in some sense during the war -- surely the mad themselves can tell us the truth. If the mad do not share the common madness of the sane, are they not themselves to be considered both sane and reliable?

The ways in which Oskar bridges the worlds of adulthood/maturity and childhood/childishness/childlikeness and the sane/normal/reliable and the mad / delusional is also underscored by the fact that during the war Oskar joins a troupe of performing dwarfs. Dwarfs occupy a liminal, marginalized space in both society and art. They are half-children, half-adults -- at least as they are often seen by those who are ignorant. They are also among the people who were seen as subject to annihilation as members of the physically disabled.

And yet these dwarfs are not killed by the Germans. They are used to entertain them, which is itself a different kind of grotesquerie. They are exploited for what the Nazis see as a form of subhumanity, which disgusts us. And yet, of course, this is a far better fate than served out to so many. And so they are allowed to live. (Except for Oskar's beloved Roswitha, who is killed by the "good guys" -- the Allied troops at Normandy.)

Can Art Save Us?

Oskar appears to grow up when he converts his childish toy to a professional instrument and becomes a jazz player. Jazz was anathema to the Germans (at least to the Nazis) because it was a symbol of a lesser race. It was black music -- and blacks were barely human to the Nazis. In taking up such a musical trope, Oskar seems to cast off the Nazi part of himself, seems to find an authentic degree of redemption. But then he takes on the guilt of a murder that he did not commit. He is unable to escape the collective guilt of his nation, his people. And perhaps of himself. Perhaps, after all, he seems to be asserting to both himself and to the readers, that there are no good Germans.

But even as Oskar reverts to his childhood, and the drum reverts to his status as a toy, we have a sense that art is the key to salvation. Not, perhaps, for Oskar. Probably not, in fact for Oskar. And possibly not even for Grass. But for Germany. And for the world at large. Among the atrocities that the Nazis committed was the destruction of many pieces of artwork that they considered to be barbaric. This included a great deal of modern art -- and many piece of art created by Jews. These actions of destruction were not trivial, nor in any way peripheral to their other actions of destruction. Nazi leaders understand deeply and early on the power of art to free people. Art, like knowledge, has the power to set people free.