The Tin Drum

Amtrak estimated nine hours travel time from Charleston, SC to Ft. Lauderdale. Scheduled to board at six, I cracked the dawn with depot coffee and the first page of Gunter Grass’ The Tin Drum.

The depot dappled with the broken smiles and bleary eyes of travel. We were all waiting for the first glimpse of the train to button through the distance. When the train didn’t arrive, the depot stirred with tension. Transformed from mere waiting room into something much more cruel and disruptive, I chuckled as Grass’ hero, the beneficent hellion Oskar Matzerath, opened the tale with this disclaimer, “Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital.”

The Tin Drum was a tremendous literary achievement. It’s timeliness and lyrical power harnessed the tension, sadness and anger of a culture utterly broken from WWII. With Oskar Matzerath as his spokesman, Grass gave voice to the thousands whose lives had been shattered by violence. Adapted for the screen forty years after its publication, the movie version of this tale succeeded in translating a current of words into a visually arresting film. It avoids failure by crawling into the novel’s soul, and emerges as something creative and true.

Directed by Volker Schlondorff, the film is a hallucinatory montage of a society at the brink of collapse. Like an out of control race car, the movie veers from robust, beautiful images of Germany’s countryside to stark, skeletal depictions of Dresden after an air raid. Schlondorff equals the novel’s swift pace by congealing sprawling passages into succinct scenes. Much is learned in minutes here. People are revealed instantly; they seem to work backwards, trying to hide what they’ve already shown. Swabbed with vivid hues and pallid horizons, the film operates like a dream, splashing memorable events with corresponding colors. Even duality is given another set of hands. More than representing man’s dual nature, the movie flags society’s influence, and shows how much and how far people experiencing extreme circumstances can stretch. A good hand at adapting literature, Schlondorff also directed War and Peace. Adhering to a text’s true nature, the director proves insightful and ambitious with his moviemaking.

The Tin Drum is a willfully obscure historical reference. At age three, coinciding with the rise of Nazi rule, Oskar flings himself down his cellar stairs. His action is a protest against the absurd methods of government. Stunting his growth yet aging all the same, Oskar is given a tin drum. Seduced, he becomes obsessed with the drum’s music. His percussion is the drumbeat that chronicles the encroaching tide of war. The movie follows Oskar’s attempts at love, his disruption of various social gatherings, his involvement with a circus troupe, and the disharmony within his own family. He also possesses a glass-shattering scream. If threatened the lad lets fly and brings the windows down. His vitriol is always near boil; he is a tender rogue, a one of a kind character whose meager frame does nothing to hamper his huge historical implications. He makes and breaks his family, affords love and snatches it away. He is a violent little man with an Arian’s saintly good looks, destined to rattle the lives of all those he encounters.

Books are important because of their lessons. The mountain of information documenting World War II grows as it explains. As generations return to The Tin Drum, they will enjoy its glories under an umbrella of varying circumstances. The novel won the Nobel Prize for Literature and deeply influenced writers like Murakami, John Irving, and Paul Auster. The movie won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and The Cannes Film Festival Palme d‘Or.

For my money, I’d start with the book. Grass’s manipulation of language is a genuine force. He commands his narrative like a bird in the skyway. The plot, like Oskar’s grandmother’s skirt, is multilayered and warm. It’s enough to take your mind off a train trip that’s taken ten hours longer than expected, and breaks the ground for the movie’s unique destiny.

Just as Amtrak, rattling along, had become my destiny. Six hours in we weren’t out of South Carolina. “Engine change!” an engineer yelled. But it was no bother, the characters on the train competed with those in the novel, and stranded or not, I was curious to see if I could finish the 589 pages in one sitting. For those pressed, the movie requires a little less time. Clocking in at 142 minutes, it’s not brief, but it moves. Unlike my train trip, the time goes by unnoticed.

Ripe for criticism and applause, the movie version has a reputation to defend. It does a spanking good job transforming a novelist’s fictional creations into tangible things that breathe and move. The careful reader will notice aspects missing from the movie. But like traveling, you’ve got to take the good with the bad. Invariably, The Tin Drum is a reminder of how blessed, how terrible, life can be.

Trailer of The Tin Drum