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The Tin Drum
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The Tin Drum (1959) (edit title/settings)

by Günter Grass (Author) (edit contributors)

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The publication of "The Tin Drum" in 1959 launched Gunther Grass as an author of international repute. Bitter and impassioned, it delivers a scathing dissection of the years from 1925 to 1955 through the eyes of Oskar Matzerath, the dwarf whose manic beating on the toy of his retarded... read more

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Quotes edit see section history

  • “It was this drought, this tearlessness that brought those who could afford it to Schmuh's Onion Cellar, where the host handed them a little chopping board--pig or fish--a paring knife for eighty pfennigs, and for twelve marks an ordinary, field-, garden-, and kitchen-variety onion, and induced them to cut their onions smaller and smaller until the juice - what did the onion juice do? It did what the world and the sorrows of the world could not do: it brought forth a round, human tear. It made them cry. At last they were able to cry again. To cry properly, without restraint, to cry like mad. The tears flowed and washed everything away. The rain came. The dew. Oskar has a vision of floodgates opening. Of dams bursting in the spring floods. What is the name of that river that overflows every spring and the government does nothing to stop it?”
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • Even bad books are books, and therefore holy.
    Highlighted by 14 Kindle customers
  • He drank because he was a thorough man who liked to get to the bottom of things, including his liquor.
    Highlighted by 13 Kindle customers
  • Any one who has examined a grandstand from behind, and examined it closely, will be marked from that hour, and thus immunized against any and all forms of magic practiced on grandstands. The same can be said for the rear view of church altars; but that's another story.
    Highlighted by 13 Kindle customers
  • If hell's in store for us someday, one of its most refined forms of torture will be to lock a person naked in a room filled with framed photos of his era.
    Highlighted by 9 Kindle customers
  • Today I know that all things are watching, that nothing goes unseen, that even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings. It's not God in his heaven who sees everything. A kitchen chair, a clothes hanger, a half-filled ashtray, or the wooden replica of a woman named Niobe can serve perfectly well as an unforgetting witness to our every deed.
    Highlighted by 8 Kindle customers
  • portraying for one brief moment a somewhat sympathetic older woman who, forgetting her teaching profession, escapes the existential caricature it prescribes and turns human, that is, childlike, curious, complex, immoral.
    Highlighted by 8 Kindle customers
  • If Apollo strove for harmony and Dionysus for intoxication and chaos, Oskar was a diminutive demigod who harmonized chaos and intoxicated reason, with one advantage, in addition to his mortality, over all the gods recognized throughout the ages: Oskar could read what he pleased, whereas the gods censored themselves.
    Highlighted by 7 Kindle customers
  • 'We have nothing to do with parties, we're fighting against our parents and all grownups, regardless of what they may be for or against.'
    Highlighted by 7 Kindle customers
  • LANKES: All right, here's what it says: Herbert Lankes, anno nineteen hundred and forty-four. Title: Mystical, barbaric, bored. BEBRA: You have given our century its name.
    Highlighted by 6 Kindle customers
  • I asked Satan within me, 'Did you make it through?' Satan hopped up and down and whispered, 'Did you see those church windows, Oskar? All glass, all glass!'
    Highlighted by 5 Kindle customers
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First Sentence edit see section history

GRANTED : I AM an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.

Series & Lists edit see section history

This is book 88 of 97 in Waterstone's Top 100 Books of the 20th Century. (authoritative list)
This is book 39 of 91 in The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time, 2004. (authoritative list)
This is book 5 of 9 in Best German Novels of the Twentieth Century. (authoritative list)
This book is in Guardian 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read. (authoritative list)
This is book 462 of 1286 in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. (authoritative list)

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Günter Grass (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: German
Publisher: Luchterhand
Country: Germany
Publication Date: 1959
ISBN: Add the ISBN.
Page Count: 736

Classification edit see section history

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