The Tin Drum

by Günter Grass

  And yet—and here Oskar too must admit to development—something was growing, and not always to my own advantage, ultimately taking on messianic proportions; but what grownup in my day had eyes and ears for Oskar, the eternally three-year-old drummer?

  Glass, Glass, Little Glass

  Having just described a full-length photo of Oskar with drum and drumsticks, and having announced at the same time the fully matured decisions Oskar reached during that photographic session in the presence of those gathered round the birthday cake with its three candles, I must now, since the album beside me maintains a closed silence on the subject, relate other events that, though they don't explain why I remained a three-year-old, also took place, and which I initiated.

  It was clear to me from the very beginning: grownups won't understand you, they will call you retarded if they can't see you grow, they'll drag you and their money to scores of doctors in search of an explanation, if not a cure, for your disorder. So to keep consultations to an endurable minimum, I had to provide a plausible explanation for my failure to grow before the doctor offered his.

  A sunny day in September, my third birthday. Delicate, late summer glass-blowing, even Gretchen Schemer's laughter was subdued. Mama at the piano intoning airs from The Gypsy Baron, Jan behind her at the stool, touching her shoulder, pretending to study the score. Matzerath getting supper ready in the kitchen. Grandmother Anna with Hedwig Bronski and Alexander Schemer gathering around the greengrocer Greff, who was always full of stories, Boy Scout stories in which loyalty and courage played important roles; a grandfather clock as well, which did not miss a single quarter-hour of that gossamer September day; and since, like the clock, they were all so busy, and since a line ran from the Gypsy Baron's Hungarian countryside through Greff's Boy Scouts wandering in the Vosges, past Matzerath's kitchen, where Kashubian mushrooms with scrambled eggs and pork belly sputtered in fright in the pan, and down the hallway to the shop, I, casually sorting things out on my drum, followed that flight line and soon stood behind the counter in the shop—piano, mushrooms, and the Vosges far distant now—and saw that the trapdoor to the cellar stood open; Matzerath, who had brought up a can of mixed fruit for dessert, must have forgotten to close it.

  It took me a minute or two to understand what the trapdoor to our cellar demanded of me. Not suicide, by God! That would have been far too simple. But the alternative was difficult, painful, demanded sacrifice; and even then, as always when a sacrifice is demanded of me, my brow broke out in a sweat. Above all, no harm must come to my drum; I would have to carry it safely down the sixteen well-worn steps and place it among the sacks of flour to explain its undamaged state. Then back up to the eighth step, no, down one, actually the fifth would do just as well. But from there safety and credible injury could not be combined. Back up then, too high this time, to the tenth, and finally, from the ninth step, I flung myself down, carrying a shelf laden with bottles of raspberry syrup along with me, and landed head-first on the cement floor of our cellar.

  Even before the curtain descended on my consciousness, I registered the success of the experiment: the raspberry bottles I had intentionally pulled down made enough clatter to attract Matzerath from the kitchen, Mama from the piano, and the rest of the birthday party from the Vosges, luring them into the shop, to the open trapdoor, and down the stairs.

  Before they arrived, I basked in the fragrance of flowing raspberry syrup, noted that my head was bleeding, and pondered—by now they were already on the stairs—whether it was Oskar's blood or the raspberries that smelled so sweet and soporific, but was greatly relieved that everything had gone so well and that thanks to my foresight my drum had sustained no damage.

  I think it was Greff who carried me up. Only in the living room did Oskar emerge from that cloud consisting no doubt half of raspberry syrup and half of his own young blood. The doctor had not yet arrived; Matzerath was trying to calm Mama, who was screaming and flailing away at his face, and not just with her palm, but with the back of her hand as well, calling him a murderer.

  So with a single fall, by no means harmless, but self-administered in a carefully measured dose, I managed to provide the cause grownups needed for my failure to grow—repeatedly confirmed by the doctors—and, as an added bonus, to unintentionally transform a decent and harmless Matzerath into a guilty Matzerath. He had left the trapdoor open, Mama heaped all the blame on him, and for years to come he carried the burden of that guilt, which Mama brought up only rarely but drove home without mercy when she did.

  The fall earned me four weeks in the hospital, followed, except for Wednesday visits to Dr. Hollatz later on, by relative peace from the medical profession; on my first day as a drummer I had managed to give the world a sign; my case was clarified before the grownups could grasp the true nature of the condition I had initiated. From then on, the story was this: On his third birthday our little Oskar fell down the cellar stairs, he was still in one piece, but he just wouldn't grow any more.

  And I began to drum. Our building had four floors. I drummed up and down the stairs, from the ground floor to the attic rooms. From Labesweg to Max-Halbe-Platz, on to Neuschottland, Anton-Möller-Weg, Marienstraße, Kleinhammerpark, the Aktien Brewery, Aktien Pond, Fröbel Meadow, the Pestalozzi School, Neuer Markt, and back again to Labesweg. My drum could take it, but grownups had a harder time, they tried to shut my drum up, to obstruct it, to trip my drumsticks—but Nature came to my aid.

  The ability to drum up the necessary distance between grownups and myself on a toy drum developed soon after my fall down the cellar stairs, almost simultaneously with the emergence of a voice that allowed me to sing, scream, or sing-scream at such a high pitch and with such sustained vibrato that no one dared take away the drum that pained their ears; for when my drum was taken from me I screamed, and when I screamed something quite valuable would burst into pieces: I was able to singshatter glass; my scream slew flower vases; my song caused windows to crumple to their knees and let drafts rule; my voice sliced open display cases like a chaste and therefore merciless diamond, and, without losing its innocence, assaulted the harmonious, nobly bred liqueur glasses within, bestowed by loving hands and covered with a light film of dust.

  It wasn't long before my ability was well-known up and down our street, from Brösener Weg to the housing development near the airfield, indeed throughout the entire suburb. If the neighborhood children saw me, whose games like "Pickled herring, one, two, three" or "Better start running, the Black Cook's coming!" or "I see something you don't see" held no interest for me, an entire unwashed chorus would bawl out:

  Glass, glass, little glass,

  Sugar and no beer,

  Mother Holle runs upstairs

  And sheds a tiny tear.

  Just a silly, meaningless nursery rhyme. The little song hardly bothered me as I tramped through their midst behind my drum, through Little Glass and Mother Holle, while taking up the simple rhythm, not without its charm, and drumming Glass, Glass, Little Glass, drawing the children after me, though I was no Pied Piper.

  Even today, when Bruno is polishing the windows in my room, for instance, I still make room on my drum for the rhythm of this nursery rhyme.

  More irritating than the mocking songs of the neighborhood children, and more annoying to my parents, was the costly fact that every windowpane broken in our area by willful, ill-bred rowdies was blamed on me, or more specifically on my voice. At first Mama paid up conscientiously for kitchen windows shattered mostly by slingshots, until she too finally understood the way my voice worked, and with cool gray businesslike eyes demanded proof when damages were claimed. People in the neighborhood were indeed doing me an injustice. Nothing could have been more mistaken at the time than to assume that I was possessed by a childish urge for destruction, that I hated glass and glassware for some inexplicable reason, like children who sometimes demonstrate their strange, random dislikes by running angrily amok. Only someone at play willfully destroys. I never played, I worked on my dru
m, and as far as my voice was concerned, it was used, at least initially, only in self-defense. It was solely my desire to keep working on my drum that led me to use my vocal cords so single-mindedly. If with the same tones and techniques I could have cut up the boring, intricately embroidered tablecloths that sprang from Gretchen Schemer's fantasia of patterns, or stripped the piano's gloomy varnish, I would gladly have left all glassware intact and soundly ringing. But tablecloths and varnish remained impervious to my voice. I could neither obliterate the wallpaper's pattern by incessant screaming, nor by rubbing together two long drawn-out tones with stone-age patience, allowing them to swell and ebb, produce sufficient heat to generate the spark I would have needed to set the tinder-dry curtains of our living room windows, seasoned with tobacco smoke, ablaze in decorative flames. I never sang the leg off a chair Matzerath or Alexander Scheffler was sitting in. I would gladly have defended myself in more harmless and less miraculous ways, but nothing harmless would serve; glass alone heeded me, and had to pay the price.

  I made my first successful presentation of this sort shortly after my third birthday. I'd had my drum a good four weeks, and during that time, diligent as I was, had worn it out. True, the top and bottom were still joined by the cylinder of red and white flames, but the hole in the top that called the tune could no longer be ignored; and since I spurned the bottom, the hole grew bigger and bigger, frayed, and left sharp, jagged edges; tiny scraps of pounded tin splintered off and fell inside the drum, rattling about angrily at every stroke, while specks of white lacquer that could no longer endure life on my martyred drum glittered all over the living room rug and on the reddish brown planks of the bedroom floor.

  It was feared I would cut myself on the treacherously sharp edges of the tin. Matzerath in particular, who had become exceedingly cautious since my fall down the cellar stairs, urged me to be careful while playing the drum. Since my arteries were always in extremely violent motion near the jagged edge of the crater, I must admit that Matzerath's fears, though exaggerated, were not entirely unfounded. A new drum would have removed all danger, of course, but that was far from their minds; instead they planned to take away the one I had, the good old drum that had fallen with me, gone to the hospital and been released with me, gone up stairs and down with me, paced cobblestones and sidewalks with me through "Pickled herring, one, two, three," past "I see something you don't see," past "Better start running, the Black Cook's coming," they planned to take that drum away from me and not replace it. A stupid piece of chocolate was offered as bait. Mama held it out, pursing her lips. It was Matzerath who reached for my crippled drum with a show of severity. I clung to the wreck. He pulled. My strength, which was barely adequate for drumming, began to fail. One red flame after another slid slowly away, the rim of the frame was about to slip from my grasp, when, for the first time, Oskar, who till that day had been deemed a quiet, almost too well-behaved child, produced his first destructively effective scream: the polished round crystal that protected the honey-yellow face of the grandfather clock from dust and dying flies shattered and fell, still splintering, to the reddish brown floorboards — for the carpet didn't quite reach to the base of the clock. The interior of the precious clock, however, was undamaged: the pendulum continued serenely—if you can say this of a pendulum — on its way, and the same for the hands. Not even the chimes, which reacted sensitively, almost hysterically, to the slightest jolt, to beer wagons rolling by on the street, gave any sign of having been impressed by my scream; only the glass gave a start, but one that startled it to bits.

  "The clock is broken!" cried Matzerath, and released the drum. With a brief glance I satisfied myself that my scream had done no real damage to the clock, that only the crystal was gone. But for Matzerath, and for Mama and Uncle Jan Bronski, who was paying his usual Sunday afternoon call, more than the glass covering the clock's face seemed to have fallen to pieces. They blanched, exchanged shifting, helpless glances, reached out for the tiled stove, seized hold of piano and buffet, were afraid to stir from the spot, and Jan Bronski's dry lips moved, as he cast his eyes upward in supplication, in what I still believe today was my uncle's attempt to utter a prayer for aid and mercy, something like O Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world — miserere nobis. And this text three times and then one Lord I am not worthy that Thou shouldst enter under my roof, say but the word...

  Of course the Lord said not a word. After all, the clock wasn't broken, just the glass. But grownups have a strange and childish relationship to their clocks, childish in the sense in which I was never a child. Yet the clock may well be the grownups' greatest achievement. Be that as it may: to the extent that grownups can be creative, and with diligence, ambition, and a little luck actually are, they become creatures of their own epoch-making inventions the moment they create them.

  But the clock remains nothing without the grownup. He winds it, sets it forward or back, takes it to the clockmaker to be checked, cleaned, and if necessary repaired. Like the cry of the cuckoo that fades too soon, like overturned saltcellars, spiders in the morning, black cats from the left, the uncle's portrait that falls from the wall when the hook pulls from the plaster, just as with mirrors, grownups see more behind and in clocks than clocks can possibly signify.

  Mama, who in spite of a few whimsical fancies was the most levelheaded, even if she could be flighty at times, and always interpreted any apparent sign in her favor, found words to save the situation.

  "Broken glass brings good luck!" she cried, snapping her fingers, brought out dustpan and brush, and swept up the shards of good luck.

  If I take my mama's words at face value, I brought my parents, my relatives, acquaintances, and even strangers plenty of good luck, for every time someone tried to take my drum, windowpanes, glasses of beer, empty beer bottles, perfume bottles redolent of spring, crystal bowls heaped with artificial fruit, in short, all glassware blown in glassworks by the glass blowers' art and sold on the market, from plain glass to art glass, were screamshattered, singshattered, shardshattered.

  To limit the damage, for I've always loved fine glassware, I restricted myself, when they tried to take my drum away at night, even though it belonged in bed with me, to punishing one or more light bulbs from the fourfold effort of our living room lamp. Thus on my fourth birthday, in early September nineteen twenty-eight, I plunged the entire assembled birthday company—my parents, the Bronskis, Grandmother Koljaiczek, the Schemers, and the Greffs, who had given me everything under the sun: tin soldiers, a sailing ship, a fire engine, but no tin drum—plunged the whole lot of them, who wanted me to waste my time playing with tin soldiers, with all this fire-engine nonsense, who begrudged me my battered but trusty drum, who planned to take it away and palm off on me instead a silly little ship with the top sails set all wrong, all those with eyes only to overlook me and my wishes—I plunged them all, with an expanding circular scream that slew all four light bulbs of our hanging lamp, into primeval darkness.

  Well, you know how grownups are: after their first cries of shock and almost fervent demands for the return of light, they accustomed themselves to the dark, and by the time my grandmother Koljaiczek, who was the only person other than little Stephan Bronski with nothing to gain from the darkness, had fetched tallow candles from the shop, with Stephan sniveling at her skirts, and returned with lighted candles to brighten the room, the remnants of the totally inebriated birthday party were found strangely paired.

  As might be expected, Mama was perched with disheveled blouse on Jan Bronski's lap. The sight of the short-legged baker Alexander Scheffler almost disappearing into the Greffian realm was unsavory. Matzerath licked at Gretchen Schemer's gold and equine teeth. Only Hedwig Bronski sat alone, her bovine eyes pious in the candlelight, holding her hands in her lap, near but not too near the greengrocer Greff, who hadn't been drinking, but still sang, sang sweetly, wistfully, with drawn-out melancholy, sang urging Hedwig Bronski to join in his song. They sang a scout duet in which, according to the lyric
s, a certain Rübezahl haunts the mountains of Bohemia.

  Me they had forgotten. Under the table sat Oskar with the remnant of his drum, coaxing scraps of rhythm from the tin, and the spare but steady sound of drumbeats may well have proved pleasant to those who, swapped and in ecstasy, sat or lay about the room. For the drumming varnished over the kissing and sucking sounds produced by all the feverish and labored demonstrations of their diligence.

  I was still under the table when my grandmother arrived like a candle-bearing angel of wrath, inspected Sodom by candlelight, spotted Gomorrah, kicked up a row that shook the candles, called the whole lot of them pigs, and put an end to idylls like Rübezahl's strolls through the mountains of Bohemia by sticking the candles on saucers, pulling a deck of skat cards from the buffet, throwing them on the table, and announcing to the still whimpering Stephan that the second half of the birthday party was about to begin. Soon thereafter Matzerath screwed new light bulbs into the old sockets of our hanging lamp, chairs were scooted up, beer bottles were popped open, and a tenth-of-a-penny game of skat got under way above me. Mama suggested a quarter-penny game at the outset, but that was more than Uncle Jan dared risk, and if the pot hadn't been considerably enlarged now and then by someone going set or making a grand with four, they would have stuck to pinching tenths of a penny.

  I felt fine under the table, in the leeward shadow of the dangling tablecloth. Gently drumming, I countered the fists thumping cards above me, gave myself over to the course of the game, and declared skat in just short of an hour: Jan Bronski lost. He had good cards, but still lost. No wonder, since he paid so little attention. Had other things on his mind than diamonds without two. Had slipped the low black shoe off his left foot right at the start of the game, while still talking to his aunt, playing down the previous little orgy, and stretching his gray-stockinged left foot right past my head toward my mama, who was sitting opposite him, sought and found her knee. At the first touch Mama scooted closer to the table so that Jan, who in response to Matzerath's bid passed at thirty-three, lifting the hem of her skirt, could, first with his toe and then with his entire filled sock, which was of course fresh that day and practically clean, wander about between her thighs. You've got to admire my mama, who despite this woolen molestation under the table still managed, on the taut tablecloth above, to win the most daring games, including clubs without four, sure-handedly and accompanied by the most amusing banter, while Jan, increasingly bold below, lost several hands above that even Oskar could have taken to the bank with somnambulistic certainty.