The Tin Drum Memory and Guilt

We're not sure why Oskar wants to write his life story, but he recognizes that his personal history begins long before his birth. This is a pretty strong statement that we have to explore the past to understand ourselves.

Most people succumbed to temptation as they passed the shop windows that Oskar broke open. Oskar wonders if it was his evilness that led them to temptation, but he concludes that it was their own nature. They were unaware of it until they did the stealing. Grass has said that many people believed they had been led in some shadowy way by Hitler into going along with the Nazi regime. He obviously doesn't buy that.

Oskar's grandmother tries to make his father feel guilty by reminding him of the things he did that might have contributed to his mother's death. This is an example of how Grass describes the errors of memory—little Oskar threw himself down the steps; Matzerath had nothing to do with it, really. The adults constructed a different, and false, narrative based on what they saw.

Oskar's just finished telling about the fall of the Polish Post Office and how his father Jan was led away by the soldiers. But he reconsiders, because he's left out a self-incriminating part. In the second telling, he admits to being responsible for Jan's capture and eventual execution.

This is probably Grass's clearest accusation against Germans in the postwar period. It was pretty common to claim ignorance about the Nazi era. Oskar describes this as "putting on" an attitude, like you'd wear a fashionable hat to make a statement about yourself. This question's a whole area of scholarship: how much did the average German citizen know about what was happening to Jews? Quite a bit, according to some authors.

Oskar refers here to the drum he got at the Polish Post Office, the scene of his betrayal of Jan. He wants to beat it to death so he can get a new "guiltless drum." But he finds it's not easy to destroy guilt; it takes him three months to destroy the memory of the Polish Post Office.

Fajngold, the Holocaust survivor, has guilt of his own. He's the sole survivor in his family, because he was given the job of disinfecting the gas chambers and sprinkling lime over the corpses. His memories and his guilt destroy him; he hallucinates his family as still alive. His horrible memories, too difficult to recall, get expressed as compulsive attempts to disinfect everything, to make everything go away.

Oskar's commenting on those people in the postwar period who call themselves Resistance fighters, just on the basis of a few minor acts of defiance like refusing to black out their windows during air raids. Grass believed that lots of ordinary German citizens downplayed their participation in the rise of the Nazi regime. He once told the BBC that there were so many "antifascists" in Germany after the War that he couldn't understand how it was possible that Hitler stayed in power for so long!

In his re-telling of the incident when his second father was killed, Oskar admits that he had more of a role in it than he first let on. But he still admits to nothing more than very slight regret. Grass continues his theme about forgetting: Matzerath tried to get rid of the evidence of his Nazi affiliation, but that doesn't save him. It kills him.

Oskar decides to encourage Vittlar to turn him in for the murder of Sister Dorothea, a murder he didn't commit. This occurs just after Oskar sees two men arresting someone for defending the Polish Post Office many years earlier, a man Oskar recognizes from that day in 1939. Oskar rescues the man by magically drumming up the Polish cavalry. So why does Oskar choose this time to confess to a crime? Maybe he thinks that he's finally atoned for what he did at the Post Office and is now ready to pack it in.