Reading Order
The Tin Drum Reading Order
Günter Grass's The Tin Drum (1959) is a standalone novel — there are two companion novels (Cat and Mouse and Dog Years) that are set in the same Danzig milieu and together make up the Danzig Trilogy, but The Tin Drum is entirely self-contained and the only one most readers read. Oskar Matzerath, narrating from a mental institution, recounts his life in Danzig from birth through the Nazi period and the expulsion of the German population after the war.
Where to start
The Tin Drum
Complete The Tin Drum Book List
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The Tin Drum
Günter Grass·1959·The novel itself — approximately 550 pages in most English editions; translated by Ralph Manheim (1962, still the standard) and by Breon Mitchell (2009, a more recent translation with updated notes); the opening chapters, in which Oskar describes his decision to stop growing, are startling; the novel rewards patience - Buy
Cat and Mouse
OptionalGünter Grass·1961·A novella set in wartime Danzig — the simplest and most direct of the three Danzig books; approximately 160 pages; the story of Joachim Mahlke and his Iron Cross; stands entirely alone but shares the Danzig setting and period with The Tin Drum - Buy
Dog Years
OptionalGünter Grass·1963·The longest of the three Danzig books — a more panoramic account of life in Danzig from before the war through the postwar period; formally complex and the hardest of the three to read; for readers who want the full trilogy
The Tin Drum — Frequently Asked Questions
Why does Oskar stop growing?
In the novel, Oskar makes a deliberate decision at age three to stop growing by throwing himself down the cellar stairs — thus preserving his small body and his tin drum, and exempting himself from adult society and its responsibilities. Grass never provides a simple explanation for this: it functions simultaneously as a realistic narrative event, an allegorical refusal of the adult world that produced Nazism, and a comic device that allows Oskar to observe events from a position of apparent innocence. The question of whether Oskar is innocent or complicit in the events around him runs through the entire novel.
Is The Tin Drum too long?
The Tin Drum is approximately 550 pages and is sometimes described as difficult or exhausting. The narrative is digressive, the time scheme moves back and forth, and Grass's style is dense. Most readers who persist find that the novel opens up around a hundred pages in, and many describe the later sections — particularly the chapters about the end of the war and the expulsion of the German population from Danzig — as among the most powerful they have read. It is genuinely demanding but not in the way that, say, Ulysses is demanding: the difficulty is one of patience and the grotesque rather than one of obscurity.
Is Oskar Matzerath a reliable narrator?
Oskar is an extremely unreliable narrator — he tells us himself, in the novel's opening pages, that he is a mental patient narrating from a hospital bed, and his account of his own life is saturated with grandiosity, self-justification, and apparent fantasy. Whether the magical elements of the novel (Oskar's ability to shatter glass with his voice, the literal truth of events that seem impossible) are real events in the novel's world or distortions of Oskar's narration is deliberately left ambiguous. Grass was deeply interested in what it meant to be a German looking back at the Nazi period, and Oskar's unreliability is part of the novel's argument about the self-exculpating tendency of German memory.
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