How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
I've just read through my last paragraph again. […] it has managed, as succinctly summarizing treatises often do, to embellish now and then, if not to lie.
To which must be added: […] Oskar […] put on a show of pathetic weeping and pointed at Jan, his father, with accusatory gestures.
[…] that day marks the assumption of my second great burden of guilt (20.1-2, 6).
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.
Quote #5
Yet on days when a rude feeling of guilt simply refuses to leave the room and presses me back into the cushions of my hospital bed, I tend, like everyone else, to make allowances for my ignorance, an ignorance that was just then coming into fashion and, like a jaunty hat, still looks oh so good on many a person today (20.8).
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.
Quote #6
That rainy afternoon in Saspe Cemetery had not stilled my handiwork; on the contrary, Oskar redoubled his efforts and devoted all his energy to the task of destroying the last witness of his shameful conduct with the Home Guard, his drum (21.2).
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.