Narrative unreliability and German culpability in Günter Grass's The Tin Drum

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 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.

Art has the power to call into question conventional wisdom. It has the power to encourage, perhaps even enforce, insight. Art does not allow people to tell themselves comfortable stories and comforting lies. Grass's novel -- Oskar's narrative -- is meant to use art to substitute for the stories that the Germans had been telling themselves since the war ended.

One of the questions that it is impossible not to ask as we read this book is to what extent art has saved Grass? It seems clear from his autobiography that he has at least tried to make it his salvation. In addition to being an author, he also studied and trained in sculpture and graphic arts. Art has been his medium through which to tell the truth of his own experience. For Grass too is a dual person, a man who cannot ever be entirely innocent. He served during the war in the Waffen SS, a branch of the Nazi Party. Although he was a teenager at the time (and so thus a child himself), he was also responsible. He was Oskar, of course, with both streams of the German DNA twinned and twined in himself as well.

An important way in which Grass's and Oskar's lives diverge is that Grass turned not only to art but to politics. As an adult he compensated for his participation in the Nazi forces by being an active and forceful member of the progressive left. His life asks us to acknowledge that while art has the power to transform, such transformations must be backed up by action in the political world.

Politics is played out in the public arena. Art is a more private affair. Redemption begins with private acts, with private insights, in the intimacy of our own minds and hearts and souls. This is where art is most powerful -- in the singular space of the author's vision and the reader's experience. But this must be followed -- if one is to change the world -- by action in the public sphere.

Grass reminds us at the end of his novel that it is not enough to be redeemed, not enough to know the truth. It is only the beginning of being sufficient when we stand on the mountaintops and shout it.