Here Come the Drums, Here Come the Drums

After breezing through Peter Stamm's Sieben Jahre in just a couple of days, I was fooled into thinking that I was ready for a tougher task.  For a long time now, I've had a copy of Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) sitting on the shelves, so before the adrenalin rush of cruising through Stamm's book could wear off, I launched into the monstrous tome you can see on the left - three weeks later...

*****
Günter Grass, for many reasons, has become a rather controversial figure, but there is no doubting the fact that he is one of the most important German literary figures of the twentieth century - and Die Blechtrommel is the book that made him.  It's a huge, rambling piece of magical realism, divided into three books which loosely cover the period before WWII, the war itself, and then the post-war years in West Germany.  The novel is partly autobiographical; however, once you start reading it, you suspect that few of the more interesting scenes come from Grass' personal memories ;)

The story is narrated by its hero, Oskar Matzerath, a man approaching his thirtieth birthday trapped inside a mental institute.  In the company of his helpful guard Bruno, Oskar decides to set down the story of his life (beginning, strangely enough with the conception of his mother...), telling the tale of how he lived through some of the most dramatic and sickening events in human history.  And, as he works his way through his story, the events take place to the beat of a drum...

The drum is the latest of a line descended from the one he received, as promised by his mother, for his third birthday.  The red-and-white tin drum, ever present, helps Oskar beat out the rhythm of history, taking the reader back in time to watch little Oskar growing up in Danzig.  Sentient from birth, stuck (of his own choosing) at the height of a three-year-old, with a voice that can shatter glass, this is - as you can imagine - no ordinary narrator.

After the simple, straight-forward text of Sieben Jahre, Die Blechtrommel came as a bit of a shock.  Put simply, it's a monster of a book.  The dense, complex text, with every page containing a host of unknown words, tested my German reading ability to the limit.  To wade through the 779 pages, I spent fifteen days out of twenty two, with a couple of rests between the books to relax with something a little less strenuous.  In addition to the linguistic issues, the bizarre plot (or lack of it) also made it a tricky read.  In one sense, it's a pretty straight-forward linear work, following Oskar and his family from 1899 to 1954; in another, it's a never-ending stream of increasingly bizarre episodes in the vein of Gabriel García Márquez or Haruki Murakami, never allowing you to relax in the certainty of where the story is going next.

Oskar is the focus of the book, a classic unreliable narrator who fabricates and embellishes, occasionally admitting that matters occurred slightly differently to how he had been portraying them.  Through his eyes, we see the rise of the Nazis and the start of the war in the ever-shifting city of Danzig (Gdańsk), a town divided between Polish and Germanic allegiances.  He is a witness to history, allowing us to relive events such as Kristallnacht or the taking of the Polish post-office in Danzig - although what we see has to be taken with a pinch of salt...

Our vertically-challenged friend is also a harbinger of death, bringing about (intentionally or accidentally) the demise of a host of characters, including his mother, his two fathers (it's a long story), a gang of boys he takes over, a dwarf lover, a nurse he takes a shine to...  He is less a person than a tool of destiny, a 94-cm figure dooming all he comes into contact with.  Whether as a thief, a revue performer, a nude model or an engraver of tombstones, the banging of his drum inevitably leaves death in its wake.

What makes Die Blechtrommel fascinating is the sheer variety of stories the writer produces.  The start of the book, where Oskar's grandmother uses her ingenuity (and clothing) to rescue a fugitive criminal, is a classic scene, a story which could stand alone as a great piece of literature.  That is just the beginning though: from there, Oskar takes us to his chaotic first - and last - day of school; a career as a jazz drummer in a rather unusual night club; an unfortunate incident with a cursed wooden carving; a jam session with a baby Jesus statue...  The recaps which begin to appear towards the end of the book serve to remind the reader of just how many great stories the book contains.

While it may appear that it's just a mad collection of over-the-top anecdotes, there is a more serious side to Die Blechtrommel.  Grass skilfully portrays the appeal of the Nazi party to the ordinary working man, only to turn the tables by concentrating on the gruesome, horrendous details of the atrocities committed by those people in the years before the war.  Oskar's quasi-magical qualities allow him to bear witness to events he should not have seen, such as the desperate defence of the post-office by workers who believed fervently that the French would rush to their aid, and that the British fleet was sailing into Gdańsk's harbour as they spoke...

Die Blechtrommel is a wonderful book, a truly memorable version of twentieth-century history.  It does sag a little at times (inevitably so in a book of this size and daring), but it is well worth the effort.  I'm not sure that I'll be rereading it any time soon, but if I do, I'll probably approach it differently next time, taking it a chapter at a time and treating it as self-contained stories, perhaps even selecting particular passages to have another look at.  Whatever you may think of the writer (and there are many people who don't think that much of him), his creation, Oskar is well worth getting to know.  Make the time to find out for yourself - even if it takes a lot of finding ;)

69 - 'Katz und Maus' by Günter Grass

Last week, I attended the 22nd English Australia Conference, the annual meeting for the Australian ESL industry, in Melbourne (which meant that instead of a flight interstate and a stay at a nice hotel, I got to wake up earlier than usual and spend the best part of an hour each way on the train every day), and one of the presentations I attended spent some time outlining the virtues of free reading for language learners. One of the points the speaker stressed was that the students should read voluntarily, should choose something they want to read and should attempt a book which is pitched just above their level (no more than 4-5 unknown lexical items per page). It was an interesting little talk; however, seeing as the topic of the workshop was 'Paraphrasing: The How To Guide', most of the audience was, understandably, fairly annoyed with the presenter for completely ignoring the supposed topic.

The connection, of course, to today's post is that I was thinking about this description of free reading as I was struggling through Nobel Prize Winner Günter Grass' novella, 'Katz und Maus' ('Cat and Mouse'). I haven't really checked, but I think I could probably count on one hand the number of pages where there were fewer than five words whose meaning was completely unknown (although a lot of those were descriptions of plants, trees, types of ships or religious terminology - none of which I'm particularly up-to-speed on in my native language either). The difficulty with vocabulary was not helped by the vagueness I found in the storyline, but at least I wasn't the only one who struggled to follow the plot. The entry for 'Cat and Mouse' in the English version of Wikipedia includes the following passage: "The narrative in the story is often fairly incoherent. For instance, the timeline of the narration is often treated flexibly, moving from the narrator's perspective to different points within his memory of the events." Good to see it's not just me then...

Pilenz, the narrator, relates his memories of life during the war years in his home town of Danzig (now the Polish city of Gdansk), but in reality, he focuses squarely on the character of Joachim Mahlke, later nicknamed 'the Great Mahlke'. Mahlke, a non-descript boy were it not for the huge Adam's Apple which draws everyone's attention, becomes part of Pilenz's group of friends one summer, coming to dominate the scene without really making an effort. The boys spend most of the summer swimming out to a sunken Polish minesweeper, where Mahlke continually dives into the depths of the ship, eventually discovering a room inside above the water level in which he makes himself a hideaway.

Throughout the story's description of the group's schooldays, the realities of war are never far from the surface. The boys mess around on their boat, watching out for Navy vessels in the distance, and their families get by on rations, hoping for news from family members at the front, hoping not to be visited by a man in uniform... Former students come back to school to tell of their experiences in the war, entrancing the crowd of students with stories of aerial fire-fights and sunsets over the Atlantic. One day, when a U-Boat captain returns to talk about his war, Mahlke, whose views on war seem to be less than positive, takes his first step on a path that will lead to tragedy.

'Katz und Maus' is a book which is difficult to pin down; what exactly is the author trying to say? This confusion isn't helped by the deliberately obscure narration which swings between using the second and third person to describe events. Pilenz, while supposedly writing about Mahlke, switches frequently to addressing him directly, and the overall impression is a masterly one of a writer who is trying to get something out but is not quite sure that they actually want to (and is not really sure exactly what they want to say anyway). This memoir, with the focus squarely on his friend, also comes across as an excuse, an apology, an attempt to square up whatever happened in the past.

Belief is an important theme in this novel, both in the conventional sense and in the slightly sinister patriotic sense. Mahlke's almost fanatical church attendance stands out amongst a more apathetic background, yet even this belief is shown to be something different to what it should be. His devotion to the Virgin Mary (and the collection of objects strung around his neck with his crucifix, helping to counterbalance the enormous protuberance nature has already placed there) turns into a type of idolatry, something he later admits to Pilenz. His approach to patriotism runs along similar lines; he only wants to go to war to earn an Iron Cross so that he too can come back to his former school and talk in front of a hall full of students. When this dream is prevented from becoming reality, he has nowhere to go, nothing left to achieve.

The story ends much as it began, out on the old sunken minesweeper, just Pilenz and Mahlke. As the rain lashes down on the Baltic Sea coast, the reader wonders what the future has in store for the two of them, knowing what the future has in store for their city (and country). Pilenz writes this down for us years later, yet he has just as little idea what to make of it all as we have. The story is his way of coming to terms with a past, and a friend, that he doesn't really understand. As for me, I'm not really sure I fully get it either. Perhaps reading the other 'Danzig Trilogy' books will give me more of an idea of what Grass wants to say about the war years. At any rate, it will definitely give me the chance to improve my German...