By Günter Grass
Still hardly born, Oskar Matzerath recognizes the world as a universal disaster - and rejects it. Only the metal drum promised by his mother opens up an acceptable survival perspective: the form of being a drummer, a grotesque artist with ambivalent motivations and effects. So on his third birthday, Oskar decides not to grow, but to watch and drumming.
Image gallery
Die Blechtrommel
Die Blechtrommel
Die Blechtrommel
Die Blechtrommel
Die Blechtrommel
Die Blechtrommel
From the frog's perspective, he portrays the raising of fascist thought and action, narrative of adultery and pogrom night, links private history with contemporary history. He is a witness, at the same time an outsider as a participant in a world in which a civilization break like the Holocaust is possible.
Not guilty, but responsible for the horror, which was committed in the German name, Günter Grass felt a sense of time. "The steel drum" is also an attempt to make the mechanisms of its own seduction translucent. Despite all the controversies surrounding the novel and Nobel Prize laureate Günter Grass, the text remains a milestone of German post-war literature. Director Oliver Reese tells the story of the eternal drummer in a version tailored to the main character's perspective.
(Program in German)
