> Setting: Insane asylum post WWII in Germany....and the preceding years of Oskar's life
> published in 1959
> As a boy, Oskar, born in 1924, receives a drum and becomes obsessively attached, using a glass-breaking scream to stop anyone from taking it away
> Oskar alternates between 1st & 3rd person narration when referring to himself
> Book is set up as an autobiography being written by Oskar as an inmate of the asylum
>Characters: Mama, Jan Bronski (her lover, and natural father of Oskar), Matzerath (her husband), Bebra (the midget, clown)
> Bebra recognizes Oskar as having stopped his own growth, forewarns of Nazis, "always take care to be sitting on the rostrum and not standing out in front of it."
> 1934-1938 - Oskar disrupted rallies with his drum from under rostrums, "transforming marches to waltzes"
> Favorite quote, refers to being under his grandmother's 4 skirts: "I was looking for Africa under the skirts, or perhaps Naples, which, as we all know, one must have seen before dying. This was the watershed, the union of all streams; here special winds blew, or else there was no wind at all; dry and warm, you could listen to the whishing of the rain; here ships made fast or weighed anchors; here our Heavenly Father, who has always been a love of warmth, sat beside Oskar; the Devil cleaned his spyglass and the angels played blindman's bluff; beneath my grandmother's skirts it was always summer, even when it was time to light the candles for Christmas or to hunt for Easter eggs; even on All Saints Day. Nowhere could I have been more at peace with the calendar than beneath my grandmother's skirts."
> O tempted people who looked at an item in a shop window by breaking a hole in a window from a distance with his voice....watched them steal the item
> p.130 "... a doorway is the favorite dwelling place of evil"
>p.138 word play with religious symbols is great ....i.e....Jesus as an athlete, champion hanger on cross with "regulation nails"
> p.180...."To remain human without external growth, what a task, what a vocation!"....Signora Roswitha, Bebra's lover
> house of cards imagery....Polish resistance to German invasion
> card playing - repetitive image of ephemeral, chancy nature of life
> vocab: occiput: back of the skull or head, sacerdotal: priestly
> p.247 - I have never been able to look at a building under construction without fancying the same building in the process of being torn down."...Oskar and his anarchic way of thinking
> p.248 "I tend, like everyone else, to make allowances for my ignorance, the ignorance which came into style in those years and which even today quite a few of our citizens wear like a jaunty and oh so becoming little hat.".....Oskar regarding his "importunate feeling of guilt" which "sits on the very pillows of my hospital bed"....guilt of feeling responsible for his mother's and Jan Bronski's deaths....symbolically the deaths cause by the Nazis
> Just as Oskar hid from adulthood in his child-like stature, so too did the German people hide from responsibility for their complicity in the holocaust of WWII
> Oskar's sexual awakening w Maria via "fizzy powder"....wonderful!
> fatherhood....Oskar fathers a son, Kurt (1941) with Maria....she marries Matzerath
> while in Paris, Oskar likened standing under the Eiffel Tower to being under his g'mother's 4 skirts
> June 12, 1944....D-Day, Kurt's 3rd birthday at which Oskar gives him a drum......Kurt whipped him as the Allies whipped Germany
> Oskar joins the adolescent anarchists, "The Dusters"...as their leader, "Jesus", when caught by police he uses his stature to feign innocence, metaphor for defeated Germany
> Matzerath swallows his Nazi Party pin to avoid the wrath of the Russions...he chokes to death on it
> p.404 "It was a jagged pointed lozenge...intending...that he put the Party in his mouth and choke on it....on the Party, on me, his son; for this situation couldn't go on forever." end of the "Fatherland"
> as father is buried, Oskar begins to grow
> Oskar became a hunchback....post-war Germans deformed by past
> sold synthetic honey....false sweetness
> p.436 "...today I know that a postwar binge is only a binge and therefore followed by a hangover, and one symptom of this hangover is that the deeds and misdeeds which only yesterday were fresh and alive and real, are reduced to history and explained as such....".............collective guilt
> p.463 "Oskar...was the shattered image of man, an accusation, a challenge, timeless yet expressing the madness of our century.".....art professor to students for whom Oskar sat as a model
> two sides to human nature......"Goethe" and "Rasputin"
> "The Onion Cellar", a club, all guests peel onions to allow themselves to cry....
> p.525 "It did what the world and the sorrows of the world could not do; it brought forth a round human tear."
> Too many tears led to chaos, releasing too much sorrow, Oskar calmed the guests by drumming them back to their childhoods
> No matter what Oskar chooses to do with his life, he knows he will be heckled by the "Black Witch".....the powerful dark side of life....death
> AMAZING NOVEL!!!!
> LibraryThing Review: This novel ranks among the most brilliant pieces of fiction that I have ever read. A 589 page metaphor for the pain and shame of the German people from the period of WWII. Oskar, the self stunted midget who expresses himself via his tin drum and shatters glass with his voice with a precision not to be believed (Kristallnacht) and who hides in his 3 year old body to avoid taking responsibility for his choices is the epitome of the anarchist. He drums the psyche of the Rasputin and the Goethe in every German. The satiric humor is absolutely brilliant. I caught myself laughing and then self-recriminating because it wasn't funny at all! I will never forget the imagery of Oskar craving the safety of hiding beneath the four skirts of his grandmother, his sexual awakening, and his love of nurses. The themes in this book include: the dichotomy of human beings, fear, shame, love, and the very human struggle to survive our own human frailties.
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