'It's about German guilt': Why The Tin Drum still divides audiences
The stage version of Günter Grass’s 1959 novel is set to open in London – with its ‘unbearable’ protagonist and tales of Nazi collaboration, it’s as controversial as ever
Philip Oltermann in Berlin Thu 20 Feb 2020
A force of nature in short trousers … Nico Holonics in The Tin Drum, Coronet Theatre, Feb 2020. Photograph: Birgit HupfeldEvery audience loves a hero, but Oskar Matzerath, one of the most unsettling literary characters of the 20th century, doesn’t make it easy for the spectator. By the end of Oliver Reese’s stage version of Günter Grass’s novel The Tin Drum, of which Oskar is the sole protagonist, the realisation spreads through the auditorium that Oskar has played a key part in the deaths of all three people who make up his family.
The man official records call his father, Alfred, has choked on the Nazi membership badge his son handed to him as the Russian Red Army descended on his house. Jan Bronski, his mother’s lover, has been shot dead by the Nazis after being denounced by the boy who might be his biological son. His mother, meanwhile, has stuffed herself with herring and eel until succumbing to fish poisoning, horrified by the realisation she could be about to have another child.
It’s not exactly a list of achievements that makes you warm to young Oskar, a precocious child with a vivid imagination who refuses to grow up when he turns three, and underlines his unyielding will by banging a red and white tin drum and shattering glass with his high-pitched screams. “He’s unbearable,” says director Reese. “He’d be a nightmare as a flatmate.”
In Volker Schlöndorff’s Academy Award-winning 1979 film adaption, Matzerath the younger was played by the 11-year-old Swiss child actor David Bennent, lending an innocent face to Grass’s not-coming-of-age story.
David Bennent as Oskar Matzerath in the
1979 film adaptation of The Tin Drum.
Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
For the stage version, which has been packing out the main hall at the legendary Berliner Ensemble for the last three years and transfers to London’s Coronet theatre for five nights next week, director Reese has fitted this ultimate unreliable narrator with a more grownup face.
Thirty-six-year-old Nico Holonics is a gap-toothed force of nature in short trousers and a hoodie, blossoming on a bare stage decorated with only a pile of soil from juvenile pig-headedness into full-on megalomania, eventually picking fights with those in the audience who still dare to laugh at him.
For Reese, who made his name with one-man shows based on letters and diaries of other such crowd-pleasers as Joseph Goebbels and the notorious German child murderer Jürgen Bartsch, Oskar Matzerath is a man whose conscience is on trial.
“I see The Tin Drum as a novel about German guilt,” he says in his room on the River Spree at the Ensemble – he has been the theatre’s artistic director since 2017. “The second book ends with Oskar Matzerath having effectively killed his three parents. All that coincides not just with the end of the Nazi regime, but also the end of Oskar’s childhood, because he has just turned 21.
Not-coming-of-age story ... Günter Grass,
For the stage version, which has been packing out the main hall at the legendary Berliner Ensemble for the last three years and transfers to London’s Coronet theatre for five nights next week, director Reese has fitted this ultimate unreliable narrator with a more grownup face.
Thirty-six-year-old Nico Holonics is a gap-toothed force of nature in short trousers and a hoodie, blossoming on a bare stage decorated with only a pile of soil from juvenile pig-headedness into full-on megalomania, eventually picking fights with those in the audience who still dare to laugh at him.
For Reese, who made his name with one-man shows based on letters and diaries of other such crowd-pleasers as Joseph Goebbels and the notorious German child murderer Jürgen Bartsch, Oskar Matzerath is a man whose conscience is on trial.
“I see The Tin Drum as a novel about German guilt,” he says in his room on the River Spree at the Ensemble – he has been the theatre’s artistic director since 2017. “The second book ends with Oskar Matzerath having effectively killed his three parents. All that coincides not just with the end of the Nazi regime, but also the end of Oskar’s childhood, because he has just turned 21.
Not-coming-of-age story ... Günter Grass,
David Bennent and Volker Schlöndorff during
shooting of the 1979 film adaptation of
The Tin Drum. Photograph: United Artists/EPA
“The crucial question of this character is: now that the issue of German guilt is dealt with, can I begin to grow up? Can there be, metaphorically speaking, a mature new Germany? Or am I going to keep banging my tin drum like a monstrous little terrorist? That’s the key question. It’s not just Oskar’s coming of age story, but that of an entire country.”
What makes Matzerath an even more ambiguous character is that he is also an artist figure, and part self-portrait of his original creator. When Grass published his debut novel in 1959, aged 31, The Tin Drum was perceived as an assault on the German bourgeoisie.
Its graphic content and critical depiction of the Wehrmacht enraged the country’s churches and soldiers. Senators in the Bremen vetoed Grass from being awarded its literature prize; years later, in 1997, the US state of Oklahoma tried to ban the film version for depicting Matzerath performing oral sex on a teenage girl.
In the novel’s first half, its protagonist uses his artistic talent to sabotage the National Socialist war machine, at one point literally forcing the marchers at a Nazi rally to dance to the beat of his tin drum. The anarchic energy and tuneless protest of Grass’s character found admirers across the globe, especially among other artists.
American novelist John Irving, whose most famous creation Owen Meany carries the same initials as Grass’s, wrote that the German novelist had taught him “that it was possible to be a living writer who wrote with Dickens’s full range of emotion and relentless outpouring of language”. Oskar Schell, the main character in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is another homage to Matzerath’s trail-blazing influence. Even British band Bronski Beat nodded to Grass’s troubled small-town-boy drummer with their name, if Richard Coles’s autobiography is to be believed.
When Grass revealed in 2006 that at 17 he had been drafted into the Waffen-SS before the end of the war, it complicated his legacy, leading some to criticise his status as a conscience of the German nation and call on him to hand back the Nobel prize he was awarded in 1999. Yet in Reese’s view, the moral conflict Grass and his creation carry inside them is precisely what makes his work endure.
“Grass worked his own enmeshment with the Nazi regime, which he only started talking about much later, into the fabric of this work. That’s why this novel is such a work of genius – he answers with a work of art.”
Even in the original text, Reese points out, young Oskar is not just a saboteur but also a collaborator, who eventually agrees to perform singing tricks for Nazi troops in Paris. “Even then, the story is held in a fine balance, because even though Oskar Matzerath is now a collaborator, it’s also clear that he, ‘the dwarf’, would go straight to the gas chamber if the Nazis had their way. They don’t consider his life worth living.”
“The crucial question of this character is: now that the issue of German guilt is dealt with, can I begin to grow up? Can there be, metaphorically speaking, a mature new Germany? Or am I going to keep banging my tin drum like a monstrous little terrorist? That’s the key question. It’s not just Oskar’s coming of age story, but that of an entire country.”
What makes Matzerath an even more ambiguous character is that he is also an artist figure, and part self-portrait of his original creator. When Grass published his debut novel in 1959, aged 31, The Tin Drum was perceived as an assault on the German bourgeoisie.
Its graphic content and critical depiction of the Wehrmacht enraged the country’s churches and soldiers. Senators in the Bremen vetoed Grass from being awarded its literature prize; years later, in 1997, the US state of Oklahoma tried to ban the film version for depicting Matzerath performing oral sex on a teenage girl.
In the novel’s first half, its protagonist uses his artistic talent to sabotage the National Socialist war machine, at one point literally forcing the marchers at a Nazi rally to dance to the beat of his tin drum. The anarchic energy and tuneless protest of Grass’s character found admirers across the globe, especially among other artists.
American novelist John Irving, whose most famous creation Owen Meany carries the same initials as Grass’s, wrote that the German novelist had taught him “that it was possible to be a living writer who wrote with Dickens’s full range of emotion and relentless outpouring of language”. Oskar Schell, the main character in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is another homage to Matzerath’s trail-blazing influence. Even British band Bronski Beat nodded to Grass’s troubled small-town-boy drummer with their name, if Richard Coles’s autobiography is to be believed.
When Grass revealed in 2006 that at 17 he had been drafted into the Waffen-SS before the end of the war, it complicated his legacy, leading some to criticise his status as a conscience of the German nation and call on him to hand back the Nobel prize he was awarded in 1999. Yet in Reese’s view, the moral conflict Grass and his creation carry inside them is precisely what makes his work endure.
“Grass worked his own enmeshment with the Nazi regime, which he only started talking about much later, into the fabric of this work. That’s why this novel is such a work of genius – he answers with a work of art.”
Even in the original text, Reese points out, young Oskar is not just a saboteur but also a collaborator, who eventually agrees to perform singing tricks for Nazi troops in Paris. “Even then, the story is held in a fine balance, because even though Oskar Matzerath is now a collaborator, it’s also clear that he, ‘the dwarf’, would go straight to the gas chamber if the Nazis had their way. They don’t consider his life worth living.”
THE GUARDIAN
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