OSKAR, hero of Gunther Grass's novel The Tin Drum, is a strange commentator on human history. On his third birthday he achieves his only ambition, to possess a tin drum, and henceforth decides to stop growing.
This blond, blue-eyed mannikin, with red and white tin drum and a piercing scream that shatters glass, is the narrator of twenty years of the history of Danzig.
Danzig, now named Gdansk and officially art of Poland, was made a free state aiter the First World War.
War the rise of Nazism posed the question of the Baltic port becoming part of Germany and a referendum of the people of Danzig resulted in its annexation by. Germany.
September 1939, the Nazi invasion of Poland began and was echoed in outright measures against the Danzig Poles.
In this context Oskar observes the pain, confusion mediate family and the people of Danzig as a whole.
Through Oskar's eyes we see each inarmed passionate Before the Second World old the streets, repressive and degradation of his own imdividual as a grotesque; deformed and distorted by the daily struggle with the material conditions of their lives.
The grocer becomes a Nazi and unable to openly express his homosexuality is a ludicrous figure. His buxom, frustrated wife takes the diminutive Oskar under her quilt where he discovers the strong smells of female sexuality.
Agnes, never comes to terms with her prolonged affair with her cousin, enjoyment of him. gorges herself to death on fish — eels, tinned sardines, pickled herring.
His grandmother, the quintessence of the folk, the history of Danzig, conceived Agnes while hiding a runaway convict under her skirts on the edge of a potato field. The Jewish shopkeeper, the Nazis, Oskar's father, all come and go in weird parade against the background of salty, poverty-stricken Danzig.
When Schiondorff's film of The Tin Drum opened in London last month it was hard to believe that this circus of a book could be turned into anything like convincing However, since Grass himself had collaborated in making the film, it was clear that it would not • these not very bright the Clash's replies 'that?' DIZZ and drunkenly Party, and is be a total travesty.
scout leader, the spirit of the book.
sleazy and Oskar's mother, and fears her own She finally lost in the film.
uncontrollable giggles the children of Even so, cinema.
The film is long, two and a half hours, but even so the story is hugely compressed, and ac. tually leaves off before the end. But it is true to David Bennent, who plays Oskar, the film — he is not quite as pretty as the Oskar of the book but his child's physique and utterly knowing face make the casting a complete suc. cess. The film is in German, with subtitles, but nonetheless Oskar's voice, its tone and pensiveness, is a positive element of the film.
Of course it is not just that the story is telescoped, other elements of the book are also The Tin Drum is one of the funniest books I have ever read — the kind where you break into but the film only raises the occasional laugh.
The book's strong element of mystery and magic — Oskar as a figure of semi-supernatural power — is unsuited to the realism of the film, when Oskar stands cathedral tower, his eyes casting majestically to and fro, we know he is capable of anything.
• Similarly the book's fulsome elaboration of the particular history of Danzig — in dialogue, narrative and so on — in the film is reduced to varied architecture.
Drum
makes warmth. lovingly caresses a potato -Danzig Crush to greet Hitler excellent aerial shots of the city panning over its All this is forgiveable because the fun. damental theme of the novel is retained. The us that beings, however degraded by the conditions they have to grapple with, are not in themselves degrad. ed. The system is degraded, and its system of relationships, but each character has human Grass demonstrates implicitly in his book that only the materialist can be a true humanist.
Oskar is an amoral onlooker at life, so he is a real grotesque. The little people of Danzig, who fight and struggle, lie and cheat, love and hate, and who are forced into repellent moulds by everyday reality, are nonetheless real people It is the Nazi grocer who sums this up when he "They are forced into so many ugly shapes by the clods of the earth but still 1 find them pure and innocent It is this innocence which belongs to the people of Danzig, not to Oskar the knowing child. It is this innocence which allows them to . 'They thought they had found Santa Claus, but it was the gasman'.
And it is this innocence that they have to surmount if the history of Danzig is not to endlessly repeat itself in each individual life.