Recommendations
Books Like The Tin Drum
What to read after The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
Günter Grass's The Tin Drum (1959) is the great German novel of the twentieth century — Oskar Matzerath, narrating from a mental institution, recounting his life in Danzig through the Nazi period with savage comedy and unflinching honesty. If you were drawn to its formal ambition and its willingness to approach the Nazi era through a narrator who is both innocent and complicit, these novels will find you in the same place.
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Life and Fate
by Vasily Grossman
The Russian companion to The Tin Drum in the literature of the Second World War — both are massive novels about a historical catastrophe that do not flinch from the moral and physical reality of what happened; The Tin Drum approaches it through grotesque comedy and an unreliable narrator, Life and Fate through documentary realism and multiple perspectives
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The Book Thief
by Markus Zusak
Liesel Meminger in Nazi Germany, narrated by Death — the most widely read contemporary novel set in the same period and country as The Tin Drum; where Grass approaches the Nazi era through a grotesque allegorical figure, Zusak approaches it through sentiment and a supernatural narrator; for readers who want the same period in a more accessible register
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Midnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie
Saleem Sinai, born at the moment of Indian independence, whose story is entangled with the history of India — the postcolonial magical-realist novel most directly in the tradition The Tin Drum belongs to; Rushdie acknowledged Grass's influence and the two novels are often taught together as the paradigmatic examples of magical realism put to political-historical use
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez
The Buendía family across a century in Macondo — the magical realist novel that The Tin Drum belongs to the same tradition as; both use a fantastic premise (Oskar's glass-shattering voice and decision to stop growing; the Buendía family's supernatural experiences) to carry the weight of a whole history; García Márquez and Grass are the two founders of the tradition
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Catch-22
by Joseph Heller
Yossarian trying to escape from World War Two — the American satirical novel of the war; where Grass uses grotesque comedy to approach Nazi Germany's guilt, Heller uses surrealism to approach American military bureaucracy's absurdity; both novels use comedy not to avoid the horror of war but to approach it from an angle that realism cannot reach
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All Quiet on the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque
A German soldier in the trenches of World War One — the German anti-war tradition that The Tin Drum is in conversation with; where Remarque wrote in a mood of earnest pacifism, Grass writes in a mood of grotesque irony; reading both novels shows the range of what German fiction has done with the experience of German soldiers in the two World Wars
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The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov
The devil in 1930s Soviet Moscow — the satirical-fantastical approach to totalitarianism that The Tin Drum belongs to in the European tradition; both novels use a combination of the supernatural and the comic to approach a political horror that earnest realism cannot fully capture
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The Painted Bird
by Jerzy Kosiński
A young boy wandering alone through Eastern Europe during World War Two — one of the most disturbing novels about the Holocaust and the war in any language; where Grass uses dark comedy to approach the period, Kosiński uses unrelenting brutality; both are unflinching about what the war actually was, and both have been attacked for their methods
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