Book Club Guide

The Tin Drum

by Gunter Grass · 1959 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

Oskar's refusal to grow up as a response to fascism
The grotesque as the only honest mode for the Nazi era
Danzig — a city between Germany and Poland — as the site of Germany's unprocessable history

About this book

Oskar Matzerath, born in Danzig in 1924, decides at age three never to grow up and beats his tin drum obsessively, watching the rise of Nazism from below adult eye level. Grass's Booker Prize-winning novel is one of the 20th century's great satirical novels — grotesque, comic and devastating — told from the unreliable perspective of a wilfully stunted narrator.

Published in German in 1959 and English in 1962, The Tin Drum won the Nobel Prize when Grass received it in 1999 (cited as his primary work). It was one of the first German novels to directly engage with the Nazi period through satire rather than tragedy.

Discussion questions

Oskar decides at age three to stop growing. How does Grass develop this choice — and what is he saying about the relationship between innocence, childhood and moral responsibility?
The novel is narrated from a psychiatric institution. How does Grass use this frame — and what does it say about sanity and madness in the context of what Germany did?
Oskar's tin drum and his glass-shattering voice are his two forms of power. What do they represent — and how does Grass use them allegorically?
The Tin Drum is often described as Germany's coming-to-terms with Nazism. What specifically does it do — and how does the grotesque mode serve this reckoning?
Grass was himself later revealed to have been a member of the Waffen-SS. How does this biographical revelation affect how you read the novel — and does it matter?