Grass’ masterpiece and the greatest single work of postwar German literature, is a sustained series of quasi-odd events — magical realism in fact — that unloads all the living detail of life in a great city. The city is Danzig, a fascinating, once-beautiful city on the Baltic shore, now a part of Poland and renamed Gdansk. Part of the fascination is its mixed ethnic character, part Low German (a Northern German language similar to Dutch) part Polish and part Kashubian (a Slavic minority people). Partly the book is about the tensions around who the city belongs to that eventually lead (in World War Two) to its ethnic and physical destruction as a predominantly German city. It also reveals a world of affectionate or competitive interaction between different groups of the sort we see in any of the great multi-ethnic cities of today like London, New York or São Paulo.

The focal point of the saga of Danzig is Grass’ greatest leap of imagination, the character of the dwarfish ‘tin drummer’ Oskar, who unites in himself the different ethnic strains and takes no active part in their rivalry; more than anything he observes a world slowly slipping into chaos around him. He is a classic outsider-witness and perhaps his ‘dissassociatedness’ is what a German writer needs to look at his or her own recent history.

Later on Oskar, in retirement from life, ‘drums up’ for himself the past and it is Grass’ magnificent achievement that this book so graphically and wittily evokes the city’s vibrant past in its nearly 600 gripping pages. Reading the Tin Drum does almost feel like having been there, in Danzig, Grass’ city, bombed, ruined, then finally thoroughly ethnically cleansed. A place in fact taken to oblivion from where this master storyteller and ‘rememberer’ has rescued it...

(An officer, Bebra, is inspecting fortified pillboxes on German sea defences — ed.)

‘LANKES: See! There’s always something cockeyed. Every real artist has got to express himself. If you’d like to take a look at the ornaments over the entrance, sir, I did them.

BEBRA (after a thorough examination of them): Amazing! What wealth of form. What expressive power!

LANKES: Structural formations I call them.

BEBRA: And your creation, your picture, or should I call it a relief, has it a title?

LANKES: I just told you: Formations. Or Oblique Formations if you like that better. It’s a new style. Never been done before.

BEBRA: Even so, you ought to give it a title. Just to avoid misunderstandings. It’s you work, after all.

LANKES: What for? What good are titles? Except to put in the catalogue when you have a show.

BEBRA: You’re putting on airs, Lankes. Think of me as an art lover, not as an officer. Cigarette? (Lankes takes it) Well then, what’s on your mind?

LANKES: Oh, all right, if you put it that way. This is how I figure it. When this war is over one way or another, it will be over someday — well, then, when the war is over, the pillboxes will still be here. These things were made to last. And then my time will come. The centuries... (He puts the last cigarette in his pocket.) Maybe you’ve got another cigarette, sir? Thank you, sir... the centuries start coming and going, one after another like nothing at all. But the pillboxes stay put just like the Pyramids stayed put. And one fine day one of those archaeologist fellows comes along. And he says to himself: what an artistic void there was between the First and the Seventh World Wars! Dull drab concrete; here and there, over a pillbox entrance, you find some clumsy amateurish squiggles in the old-home style. And that’s all. Then he discovers Dora Five, Six, Seven; he sees my Structural Oblique Formations, and he says to himself, Say, take a look at that, Very, very interesting, magic, menacing, and yet shot through with spirituality. In these works a genius, perhaps the only genius of the twentieth century, has expressed himself clearly, resolutely, and for all time. I wonder, says our archaeologist to himself, I wonder if it’s got a name? A signature to tell us who the master was? Well, sir, if you look closely, sir, and hold your head at a slant, you’ll see, between those Oblique Formations...

BEBRA: My glasses. Help me, Lankes.

LANKES: All right, here’s what it says: Herbert Lankes, anno nineteen hundred and forty-four. Title: Barbaric, mystical, bored.’

BEBRA: You have given our century its name’. p329-330