Why was Joseph Koljaiczek running from the law? Describe this event in detail. Is it likely that this event happened the way Oskar tells the story? Of the people Oskar is telling the story to, who truly believes him? Provide evidence to support your answer.
The Tin Drum Essay Topics & Writing Assignments
What does Oskar's drum represent? Is it possible that Oskar affected so many people and events with his small toy drum? Discuss the relationship between Oskar's mother, Bronski, and Matzerath. Of the two men, who do you think Oskar's mother truly loved? How does this relationship affect each of these three characters? How does the relationship affect Oskar? View all Lesson Plans available from BookRags. Get The Tin Drum from Amazon. I've read somewhere that Oskar symbolizes Nazism. Maybe, but I think Fascism would be closer to the mark. Germany falls through and so he wants to go to America.
So America will become the new Fascist state? Paul Michael Garcia does a decent job as the audio reader. I followed along in the ebook as I listened to the audio. He hid and denied this most of his life and in fact spent much of his later life denouncing the Nazis. So the author's real life story resembles that of Oskar in a way. Like Oskar, he was an opportunist. May 11, Elie F rated it really liked it Shelves: Painful because what is presented as entertainment is actually crime. Disturbing because what is responded by laughter should be responded by tears. This is a world unaware of its crime, and in the aftermath of the atrocity unable to mourn.
There are a lot of brilliant use of symbolisms. The one that stuck with me the most is the peep hole Bruno used to observe Oskar which resembles the peep hole equipped in gas chamber to observe the struggle of the dying. To end with a quote: We must perform, we must run the show.
Take care young man. View all 4 comments. May 23, Whitaker rated it it was amazing Shelves: For a novel that so famously deals with Germany's war guilt, there is remarkably little about the war in the novel. I don't mean to say that the novel does not touch on or talk about World War II. Of course it does. There is, after all, two whole chapters dealing with the German invasion of Poland, for example, where Oskar, Jan Bronski, and a dying man play a game of cards at the Polish Post Office while it is being attacked by German armed forces.
However, for every such episode dealing with the events of WWII, there are others interspersed in between dealing with much more domestic concerns: This is so much so that even episodes that deal directly with war events talk about them in an off-hand way. In the episode on the attack of the Polish Post Office, for example, the main thrust is not the fighting but Oskar's determined search in the post office for a new tin drum: Oskar got up slowly and avoiding the shattered glass, moved quietly but single-mindedly toward the wooden rack with the toys, mentally constructing a pedestal of boxes on a nursery chair, tall and stable enough to make him the new owner of a brand-new tin drum, when Kobyella's voice and then the janitor's horny hand caught up with me.
I pointed to the drum in despair. Kobyella pulled me back. I stretched both arms out toward the drum. The disabled man was already weakening, was about to stretch forth his hand and grant me happiness, when machine-gun fire entered the nursery and antitank shells exploded at the main entrance; Kobyella flung me into the corner with Jan Bronski, flung himself behind his gun and loaded for a second time while my eyes remained fixed on the tin drum.
And here is how he deals with Kristallnacht, where Oskar is again searching for tin drums: Once upon a time there was a grocer who closed his shop one November day because something was going on in the city, took his son Oskar by the hand and travelled with the Number Five tram to Langgasser Gate, because the synagogue there was on fire, as were those in Zoppot and Langfuhr. The synagogue was burned almost to the ground, and the firemen were making sure the fire didn't spread to the surrounding buildings.
Outside the ruin, civilians and men in uniforms were piling up books, sacral objects, and strange pieces of cloth. The mound was set ablaze, and the grocer took the opportunity to warm his hands and his passions at the public fire.
Essay Topic 1
His son Oskar, however, seeing his father so involved and inflamed, slipped away unnoticed and hurried off toward the Arsenal Arcade, because he was worried about his drums of white and red lacquered tin. Once upon a time there was a toy merchant named Sigismund Markus, and he sold, among other things, white and red lacquered tin drums. Oskar, mentioned above, was the major customer for these tin drums, for he was a drummer by trade, and could neither live without a drum nor wished to. He hurried away from the burning synagogue to the Arsenal Arcade, for there dwelt the keeper of his drums; but he found him in a state that made it impossible for him ever to sell tin drums again in the world.
Indeed, the closer he gets to the exposed raw nerve, the more oblique Grass becomes. Here is another extract on Kristallnacht: An entire gullible nation believed faithfully in Santa Claus.
- Essay Topic 2.
- Training ohne Geräte: Fit mit dem 3D-System (Trainieren mit dem eigenen Körpergewicht) [E-Book inkl. Code für HD-Videotraining] (German Edition).
- The Tin Drum!
- Star Crossed.
- Custom Reading Lists?
But Santa Claus was really the Gasman. In faith I believed it smelled of walnuts and almonds. But it smelled of gas. Soon it will be what's called first Advent. And the first and second through fourth Advent will be turned on like a gas cock, so that it smells believably of walnuts and almonds, so that all those nutcrackers can take comfort in belief: The Christ Child, the Saviour? Or was it the heavenly Gasman with the gas meter under his arm, ticking away. In the first extract quoted, you'll note that Grass veers from third to first person, from Oskar to I.
This occurs throughout the whole book. It's a shifting of the lens, a distancing from the self that is almost schizophrenic, deliberately so. It made me think of how psychiatrists give dolls to abused children, and have the children tell their story through the doll: It didn't happen to me, it happened to dolly. There's so much more about The Tin Drum that was moving and wonderful and mind blowing: I can see why he was awarded the Nobel Prize for this work.
I knew this book is good, but I had no idea it were that good. The novel that is not novel On the surface, this is a fairly simple, easy to read book. You would think an author of this caliber would produce something that has a sophisticated or should I say complicated? But — he didn't. Grass obviously wasn't very fond of this. Right at the I knew this book is good, but I had no idea it were that good. Right at the beginning he lets his narrator issue the following statement about the so-called "crisis" of modern novel: Das mag alles so sein und seine Richtigkeit haben.
You can start a story in the middle, then strike out boldly backward and forward to create confusion. You can be modern, delete all reference to time and distance, and then proclaim or let someone else proclaim that at the eleventh hour you've finally solved the space-time problem. Or you can start by declaring that novels can no longer be written, and then, behind your own back as it were, produce a mighty blockbuster that establishes you as the last of the great novelists.
I've also been told it makes a good impression to begin modestly by asserting that novels no longer have heroes because individuals have ceased to exist, that individualism is a thing of the past, that all human beings are lonely, all equally lonely, with no claim to individual loneliness, that they all form some nameless mass devoid of heroes. All that may be true. But as far as I and my keeper Bruno are concerned, I beg to state that we are both heroes, quite different heroes, he behind his peephole, I in front of it; and that when he opens the door, the two of us, for all our friendship and loneliness, are still far from being some nameless mass devoid of heroes.
The hero who is not heroic So we do have a self-proclaimed hero here, something like that anyway, and his name is Matzerath, Oskar Matzerath. Oskar sits in the center of it, everything else circles around him like moths around light-bulbs.
See a Problem?
Oskar is the smallest as in body and biggest as in ego "hero" I've ever encountered. At the tender age of three he decides to quit growing. His body length remains a convenient 96 centimeters roughly 3 foot 2. This is convenient for him because a he is treated by his parents, neighbors, and strangers as a small child and b he is able time and again to return to some kind of embryonic state.
His favorite places for this are under the skirts of his grandma, under tables, and in cupboards. From there he experiences the world around or above him, drawing his conclusions, growing intellectually. For quite some time Oskar doesn't speak and his means of communication are drumming more on that later and screaming in a way that makes glass burst. Danzig Oskar is born in and growing up or not growing up in a suburb of the city of Danzig. Back then the situation was more complicated. The official name of Danzig between and was Free City of Danzig.
Located at the Baltic Sea, with borders to the German Empire and Poland, Danzig and its surrounding settlements were declared free in in accordance to the treaty of Versailles after World War I. And if that's not complicated enough, Danzig was primarily inhabited by ethnic Germans, while Poland was given full rights to develop and maintain transportation, communication, postal services, and port facilities in the city.
In hindsight it comes as no surprise that the very first acts of World War II, committed by the Germans, were the shelling of the Danzig port from the sea-side, and the attack on the Polish Post Office as part of the invasion of Poland. The latter event plays a vital part in this story, and Oskar becomes a first-hand witness of it. As a side note I like to mention that reading this chapter was a strange experience for me. I never read this novel before, of that I'm sure, and I only saw some trailers of the movie. The images were so clear, and seemed so familiar that I have a hard time to figure out how they came to my mind in the first place.
Maybe, although unlikely, we had to read this single chapter way back in school, and that I simply forgot about this fact, but I doubt it. After the war they became refugees. The scenes describing their flight in a boxcar from Danzig to West Germany are the most disturbing ones, so I better skip these too. I can go there in less than an hour by car if traffic allows , and I could visit the places mentioned in the book. Maybe I'll do that one time. I learned there is a small monument in appreciation of Grass and his novel in a catholic church — of all places.
This last job takes him to a club called Zwiebelkeller The Onion Cellar where people are supposed to peel onions with a knife prior to the band's performances. The onions do what onions usually do when peeled and that is making the peelers cry and crying obviously didn't come naturally in what is called in the book the tear-less century. In there he remembers his early childhood in Danzig through the late s right before The Tin Drum. I wonder how many tears he shed while he wrote this book which I haven't read yet At the age of thirty he wrote The Tin Drum and Oskar's story ends, you probably guessed it, on Oskar's thirtieth birthday.
Funny how similar some CVs are! Drumming The very first sentence in this novel is one of the most revealing ones, I think: If you ever wondered whether the narrator you're dealing with is reliable or not, here's one case where it's pretty easy to decide. Oskar Matzerath isn't reliable at all! He tells his story from this institution and he mentions far too many incredible, fantastical, events that cannot possibly be all true. Magic realism this is called, or was it realistic magic? Be it magical or real events Oskar is telling, you can't help but like him. Because he remains looking like a small child for all of his life, and small children are supposed to invent fantastical events, don't they?
In addition he always carries a toy with him and that's finally the titular tin drum. Although it's not the same drum all the time, because continuously drumming such a thing wears it out after a couple of weeks, and the drum has to be replaced. There's also a period of a few years when he doesn't drum at all. But the little drummer boy picks it up again and starts drumming stronger and louder than ever, in fact he says that the he is not narrating his story, but rather drumming it.
I think with the tin drum device Grass found the ideal symbol for his writing. Such a thing makes a lot of noise and people can't help but hearing it. In this sense a tin drum is not much unlike a mechanical typewriter Grass used to write his manuscripts with. And Grass made a lot of noise too.
With his novels against oblivion, with his articles in newspapers, with his whole being as a politically active intellectual. Of course he didn't have only friends in Germany and elsewhere , but many adversaries as well. I also did not agree with everything he uttered, but, at the very least, what he uttered was always deliberate and worth considering. Now he has left us, and he took all the toys in the world away. He shares this place with the much older statue of Oskar Matzerath.
The Tin Drum Essay Topics & Writing Assignments
Era uma vez uma mulher chamada Anna que escondeu debaixo de quatro saias um fugitivo e nove meses depois nasceu Agnes. Era uma vez uma vez uma mulher chamada Agnes que amava Jan e casou com Alfred. Nasceu Oskar que, ou era filho de Alfred, ou de Jan. Era uma vez um menino chamado Kurt que, ou era filho de Alfred, ou de Oskar.
Jul 16, Michael Finocchiaro rated it it was amazing Shelves: Oskar is unlike any other character you will ever read about besides maybe Tyrion Lannister maybe. The book is a comic masterpiece, a fanciful rendering of Germany during the war and after. It is part vaudeville, part absurd, part insane and like nearly all great literature impossible to classify.
The movie was also unbelievably great. If you want to read one book by this Nobel laureate, I would suggest starting here - you will have a hard time putting in down. I think that it wo One crazy ride. I think that it would be a good companion read to Gravity's Rainbow by Pynchon. Un fiume di parole e di scene assurde. Oskar, pertanto, gestisce il suo stesso sdoppiamento e mentre spezza se stesso fa altrettanto con la dovuta concentrazione della lettura. Il tutto scandito dal suono di un tamburo ovviamente. Ci sono passaggi veramente memorabili personalmente ho apprezzato, in particolar modo il capitolo intitolato: Ma, come accadrebbe a chiunque, nei giorni in cui un senso di colpa sgarbato e impossibile da scacciare mi abbatte sui guanciali del mio letto di manicomio, cerco di appigliarmi alla mia ignoranza, che allora venne di moda, e che ancora oggi molti si portano in giro.
Pesa sul lettore un senso di oppressione e di angoscia, un disgusto di fondo dovuto alle immagini forti e ai dettagli che Oskar il tamburino descrive con maniacale precisione di quanto accade dentro e fuori di lui, da prima che venisse al mondo, dalla fine del , fino al compimento dei suoi 30 anni, nel Per me sarebbe impossibile, lo fa Oskar nelle pagine finali del libro. Come fai a dargli meno di 4 stelle, ma che faticaccia! Aug 27, Jonfaith rated it it was amazing. Funny I missed rating and reviewing this jewel. This is the lodestar, the mandrake root, the intrepid ooze making friends in the lukewarm pools of primeval poetry.
This was the point of departure. A hallowed book I finished in a laundromat. I almost can't remember my reading life before wee Oskar. Eels, fizz, post offices, onions and Dusters have littered my imagination seemingly forever. I wanted to read the new translation and likely will someday. My memories of my own grandmother now smell li Funny I missed rating and reviewing this jewel. My memories of my own grandmother now smell like butter.
He stopped growing, break glass with his voice and annoy people with his tin drum. But Oskar won a Nobel. How can a midget who can barely talk win this prize? But he did it. For showing us this world from another perspective. Showing us WW2 - and war in general- from another perspective.
The Tin Drum Lesson Plans for Teachers
He wasn't the English soldier who sees the horrors of war. He wasn't the German soldier who feels sorry for what he did. He wasn't the jew. He wasn't the journalist who show us the real face of war. Four Week Quiz B.
Eight Week Quiz A. Eight Week Quiz B. Eight Week Quiz C. Eight Week Quiz D. Eight Week Quiz E. Eight Week Quiz F. Eight Week Quiz G. Mid-Book Test - Easy. Final Test - Easy. Mid-Book Test - Medium. Final Test - Medium.