The Tin Drum d-1

by Günter Grass

  It was in the first days of September. The sun was in the sign of Virgo. A late-summer storm was approaching through the night, moving crates and furniture about in the distance. Mercury made me critical, Uranus ingenious, Venus made me believe in comfort and Mars in my ambition. Libra, rising up in the house of the ascendant, made me sensitive and given to exaggeration. Neptune moved into the tenth house, the house of middle life, establishing me in an attitude between faith in miracles and disillusionment. It was Saturn which, coming into opposition to Jupiter in the third house, cast doubt on my origins. But who sent the moth and allowed it, in the midst of a late-summer thunderstorm roaring like a high school principal, to make me fall in love with the drum my mother had promised me and develop my aptitude for it?

  Outwardly wailing and impersonating a meat-colored baby, I made up my mind to reject my father’s projects, in short everything connected with the grocery store, out of hand, but to give my mother’s plan favorable consideration when the time came, to wit, on my third birthday.

  Aside from all this speculation about my future, I quickly realized that Mama and this Mr. Matzerath were not equipped to understand or respect my decisions whether positive or negative. Lonely and misunderstood, Oskar lay beneath the light bulbs, and figuring that things would go on like this for some sixty or seventy years, until a final short circuit should cut off all sources of light, he lost his enthusiasm even before this life beneath the light bulbs had begun. It was only the prospect of the drum that prevented me then from expressing more forcefully my desire to return to the womb.

  Besides, the midwife had already cut my umbilical cord. There was nothing more to be done.

  The Photograph Album

  I am guarding a treasure. Through all the bad years consisting only of calendar days, I have guarded it, hiding it when I wasn’t looking at it; during the trip in the freight car I clutched it to my breast, and when I slept, Oskar slept on his treasure, his photograph album.

  What should I do without this family cemetery which makes everything so perfectly clear and evident? It has a hundred and twenty pages. On each page, four or six or sometimes only two photographs are carefully mounted, sometimes symmetrically, sometimes less so, but always in an arrangement governed by the right angle. It is bound in leather and the older it grows the stronger it smells of leather. At times my album has been exposed to the wind and weather. The pictures came loose and seemed so helpless that I hastened to paste them back in their accustomed places.

  What novel—or what else in the world—can have the epic scope of a photograph album? May our Father in Heaven, the untiring amateur who each Sunday snaps us from above, at an unfortunate angle that makes for hideous foreshortening, and pastes our pictures, properly exposed or not, in his album, guide me safely through this album of mine; may he deter me from dwelling too long on my favorites and discourage Oskar’s penchant for the tortuous and labyrinthine; for I am only too eager to get on from the photographs to the originals.

  So much for that. Shall we take a look? Uniforms of all sorts, the styles and the haircuts change. Mama gets fatter and Jan gets flabbier, some of these people I don’t even know, but I can guess who they are. I wonder who took this one, the art was on the downgrade. Yes, gradually the art photo of 1900 degenerates into the utilitarian photo of our day. Take this monument of my grandfather Koljaiczek and this passport photo of my friend Klepp. One need only hold them side by side, the sepia print of my grandfather and this glossy passport photo that seems to cry out for a rubber stamp, to see what progress has brought us to in photography. And all the paraphernalia this quick photography takes. Actually I should find fault with myself even more than with Klepp, for I am the owner of the album and should have maintained certain standards. If there is a hell in wait for us, I know what one of the more fiendish torments will be: they will shut up the naked soul in a room with the framed photographs of his day: Quick, turn on the pathos: O man amid snapshots, passport photos. O man beneath the glare of flash bulbs, O man standing erect by the leaning tower of Pisa, O photomaton man who must expose his right ear if he is to be worthy of a passport! And—off with the pathos. Maybe this hell will be tolerable because the worst pictures of all are not taken but only dreamed or, if they are taken, never developed.

  Klepp and I had these pictures taken and developed during our early days in Jülicher-Strasse, when we ate spaghetti together and made friends. In those days I harbored plans for travel. That is, I was so gloomy that I resolved to take a trip and, to that end, apply for a passport. But since I hadn’t money enough to finance a real trip, including Rome, Naples, or at least Paris, I was glad of the lack of cash, for what could have been more dismal than to set out on a trip in a state of depression? But since we had enough money to go to the movies, Klepp and I in those days attended motion picture theaters where, in keeping with Klepp’s taste, wild West films were shown, and, in response to my needs, pictures where Maria Schell was the tearful nurse and Borsche, as the surgeon, played Beethoven sonatas by the open window after a difficult operation, and displayed a lofty sense of responsibility. We were greatly dissatisfied that the performances should take only two hours. We should have been glad to see some of the programs twice. Often we arose at the end, determined to buy tickets for the next showing. But once we had left the hall and saw the line waiting outside the box office, our courage seeped away. Not only the thought of a second encounter with the ticket-seller but also the insolent stares with which total strangers mustered our physiognomies shamed us out of lengthening the line.

  The upshot was that after nearly every show we went to a photo studio not far from the Graf-Adolf-Platz and had passport pictures taken. We were well known and our entrance was greeted with a smile; however, we were paying customers and treated politely as such. As soon as the booth was free, we were pushed into it by a young lady—all I remember about her is that she was nice. She deftly set our heads at the right angle, first mine, then Klepp’s, and told us to fix our eyes on a certain point, and a moment later a flash of light and a bell synchronized with it announced that six succesive likenesses had been transferred to the plate.

  Still stiff around the corners of the mouth, we were pressed into comfortable wicker chairs by the young lady, who nicely, but no more than nicely, and nicely dressed too, asked us to be patient for five minutes. We were glad to wait. For now we had something to wait for—our passport pictures—and we were curious to see how they would turn out. In exactly seven minutes the still nice but otherwise nondescript young lady handed us two little paper envelopes and we paid.

  The triumph in Klepp’s slightly protuberant eyes! As soon as we had our envelopes, we had ipso facto an excuse for repairing to the nearest beer saloon, for no one likes to look at his own passport pictures on the open, dusty street, standing amid all the noise and bustle and blocking the traffic. Just as we were faithful to the photo studio, we always went to the same saloon in Friedrichstrasse. We ordered beer, blood sausage, onions, and rye bread, and, even before our order came, spread out the slightly damp photographs over the little round table and, while partaking of our beer and blood sausage, which had arrived in the meantime, immersed ourselves in our own strained features.

  We always brought along other photographs taken on the occasion of previous movie shows. This gave us a basic for comparison; and where there is a basis for comparison, there is also ground for ordering a second, third, fourth glass of beer, to create merriment, or, as they say in the Rhineland, ambiance.

  I am not trying to say that a passport photo of himself can cure a gloomy man of a gloom for which there is no ground; for true gloom is by nature groundless; such gloom, ours at least, can be traced to no identifiable cause, and with its almost riotous gratuitousness this gloom of ours attained a pitch of intensity that would yield to nothing. If there was any way of making friends with our gloom, it was through the photos, because in these serial snapshots we found an image of ourselves which, though not exactly clear, wa
s—and that was the essential—passive and neutralized. They gave us a kind of freedom in our dealings with ourselves; we could drink beer, torture our blood sausages, make merry, and play. We bent and folded the pictures, and cut them up with the little scissors we carried about with us for this precise purpose. We juxtaposed old and new pictures, made ourselves one-eyed or three-eyed, put noses on our ears, made our exposed right ears into organs of speech or silence, combined chins and foreheads. And it was not only each with his own likeness that we made these montages; Klepp borrowed features from me and I from him: thus we succeeded in making new and, we hoped, happier creatures. Occasionally we gave a picture away.

  We—I am speaking only of Klepp and myself, setting aside all synthetic photo-personalities—got into the habit of donating a photo to the waiter, whom we called Rudi, every time we saw him, and that happened at least once a week. Rudi, a type who ought to have had twelve children and at least eight wards, appreciated our distress; he had dozens of profiles of us and still more full-faced views, and even so his eyes were full of sympathy and he said thank you when after long deliberation and a careful process of selection we handed him his photo.

  Oskar never gave any pictures to the waitress at the counter or to the redheaded young thing with the cigarette tray; it’s not a good idea to give women pictures, for you never know what use they may make of them. Klepp, however, who with all his easygoing corpulence was a setup for the fair sex, who was communicative to the point of folly and required only a feminine presence to make him spill his innermost guts, must have given the cigarette girl a photo unbeknownst to me, for he became engaged to the snippety little thing and married her one day, because he wanted to have his picture back.

  I have gotten ahead of myself and devoted too many words to the last pages of my album. The silly snapshots don’t deserve it; however, if taken as a term of comparison, they may give you an idea how sublimely grandiose, how artistic if you will, the portrait of my grandfather Koljaiczek on the first page of the album still seems to me.

  Short and stocky he stands there behind a richly carved coffee table. Unfortunately he had himself photographed not as a firebug, but as Wranka the volunteer fireman. But the tight-fitting fireman’s uniform with the rescue medal and the fireman’s helmet that gives the table the aspect of an altar almost take the place of the incendiary’s mustache. How solemn is his gaze, how full of all the sorrow of those sorrowful years. That proud though tragic gaze seems to have been popular and prevalent in the days of the German Empire; we find it again in Gregor Koljaiczek, the drunken gunpowder-maker, who looks rather sober in his pictures. Taken in Czestochowa, the picture of Vincent Bronski holding a consecrated candle is more mystical in tone. A youthful portrait of the sickly Jan Bronski is a record of self-conscious melancholy, achieved by the methods of early photography.

  The women of those days were less expert at finding the expression suited to their personality. In the photographs taken shortly before the First World War even my grandmother Anna, who, believe me, was somebody, hides behind a silly glued-on smile that carries not the slightest suggestion of her four great, asylum-giving skirts.

  During the war years they continued to smile at the photographer as he danced about beneath his black cloth. From this period I have a picture, double postcard size on stiff cardboard, of twenty-three nurses, including my mother, clustering timidly round the reassuring solidity of an army doctor. The nurses seem somewhat more relaxed in a picture of a costume ball attended by convalescent warriors. Mama ventures a wink and a rosebud mouth which despite her angel’s wings and the tinsel in her hair seem to say that even angels have a sex. Matzerath is seen kneeling at her feet in a costume that he would have been only too glad to wear every day: he has on a starched chef’s hat and he is even brandishing a ladle. But when wearing his uniform adorned with the Iron Cross Second Class, he too, like Koljaiczek and Bronski, peers into the distance with a wittingly tragic look, and in all the pictures he is superior to the women.

  After the war the faces changed. The men look rather demobilized; now it is the women who rise to the occasion, who have grounds for looking solemn, and who, even when smiling, make no attempt to conceal an undertone of studied sorrow. Melancholy was becoming to the women of the twenties. With their little black spit curls they managed, whether sitting, standing, or half-reclining, to suggest a harmonious blend of madonna and harlot.

  The picture of my mama at the age of twenty-three—it must have been taken shortly before the inception of her pregnancy—shows a young woman with a round, tranquil face slightly tilted on a firm, substantial neck. But tilted or not, she is always looking you straight in the eye. Good solid flesh, but the effect of solidity is called into question by the melancholy smile of the day and by those eyes, more grey than blue, which seem to look upon the souls of her fellow men—and her own soul as well—as solid objects, something like teacups or cigarette holders. I should say that the look in my mama’s eyes is something more than soulful.

  Not more interesting, but easier to appraise and hence more revealing, are the group photos of that period. How beautiful, how nuptial the wedding dresses were in the days of the Treaty of Rapallo. In his wedding photo Matzerath is still wearing a stiff collar. A fine figure of a man, he looks distinctly elegant, almost intellectual. His right foot is thrust forward, and he rather resembles a movie actor of the day, Harry Liedtke perhaps. The dresses were short. My mama’s wedding dress, white and accordion-pleated, reaches barely below the knee, showing her shapely legs and cunning little dancing feet in white buckled shoes. Other pictures show the whole bridal assemblage. Surrounded by people who dress and pose like city dwellers, my grandmother Anna and her grace-favored brother Vincent are always conspicuous for their provincial gravity and a confidence-inspiring air of unsureness. Jan Bronski, who like my mama stems from the same potato field as his father and his Aunt Anna, manages to hide his rural Kashubian origins behind the festive elegance of a Polish postal official. He is small and frail amid these robust occupiers of space, and yet the extraordinary look in his eyes, the almost feminine regularity of his features, make him the center of every picture, even when he is on the edge of it.

  For some time now I have been looking at a group picture taken shortly after the marriage. I have been compelled to take up my drum and drumsticks and, gazing at the faded brownish rectangle, attempt to conjure up the dimly visible three-cornered constellation.

  The picture must have been taken in the Bronski flat in Magdeburger-Strasse not far from the Polish Students’ House, for in the background we perceive a sunlit balcony of a type seen only in the Polish quarter, half-concealed by the vinelike foliage of pole beans. Mama is seated, Matzerath and Jan Bronski are standing. But how she sits and how they stand! For a time I foolishly tried to plot the constellation of this triumvirate—for she gave the full value of a man—with the help of a ruler, a triangle, and a school compass that Bruno had to go out for. Starting with the angle between neck and shoulder, I drew a triangle; I spun out projections, deduced similarities, described arcs which met significantly outside the triangle, i.e., in the foliage, and provided a point, because I needed a point, a point of vantage, a point of departure, a point of contact, a point of view.

  All I accomplished with my metaphysical geometry was to dig a number of small but annoying holes in the precious photo with the point of my compass. What, I cannot help wondering, is so remarkable about that print? What was it that made me seek and, if you will, actually find mathematical and, preposterously enough, cosmic references in it? Three persons: a woman sitting, two men standing. She with a dark marcel wave, Matzerath curly blond, Jan chestnut brown, combed back flat from the forehead. All three are smiling, Matzerath more than Jan Bronski; and both men a good deal more than Mama, for their smile shows their upper teeth while of her smile there is barely a trace in the corners of her mouth and not the least suggestion in her eyes. Matzerath has his left hand resting on Mama’s right shoulder; Jan
contents himself with leaning his right hand lightly on the back of the chair. She, her knees slightly to one side but otherwise directly facing the camera, has in her lap a portfolio which I took years ago for one of Jan’s stamp albums, later reinterpreted as a fashion magazine, and more recently as a collection of movie stars out of cigarette packages. Her hands look as if she would begin to leaf through the album the moment the picture was taken. All three seem happy, as though congratulating one another on their immunity to surprises of the sort that can arise only if one member of the triumvirate should acquire a secret life—if he hasn’t had one all along. In their tripartite solidarity, they have little need of the fourth person, Jan’s wife Hedwig Bronski née Lemke, who may at that time have been pregnant with the future Stephan; all they needed her for was to aim the camera at them, so perpetuating their triangular felicity, photographically at least.

  I have detached other rectangles from the album and held them next to this one. Scenes showing either Mama with Matzerath or Mama with Jan Bronski. In none of these pictures is the immutable, the ultimate solution so clearly discernible as in the balcony picture. Jan and Mama by themselves: this one smacks of tragedy, money-grubbing, exaltation turning to surfeit, a surfeit of exaltation. Matzerath and Mama: here we find an atmosphere of conjugal weekends at home, a sizzling of cutlets, a bit of grumbling before dinner and a bit of yawning after dinner; jokes are told before going to bed, and the tax returns are discussed: here we have the cultural background of the marriage. And yet I prefer such photographed boredom to the distasteful snapshot of later years, showing Mama seated on Jan Bronski’s lap in the Forest of Oliva near Freudenthal; because this last picture with its lewdness—Jan’s hand has disappeared under Mama’s skirt—communicates nothing but the mad passion of this unhappy pair, steeped in adultery from the very first day of Mama’s marriage; Matzerath, I presume, was the disabused photographer. Here we see none of the serenity of the balcony picture, none of the delicate, circumspect little gestures which seem to have been possible only when both men were together, standing behind or beside Mama or lying at her feet as on the bathing beach at Heubude; see photo.