The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass

Author:Gunter Grass [Grass, Gunter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Classic, Historic Fiction
ISBN: 9780375420573
Amazon: 1433245876
Publisher: Pantheon
Published: 1961-01-01T12:00:00+00:00

Bebra's Theater at the Front

In mid-June of forty-two, my son Kurt turned one year old. Oskar, his father, took it in stride, thought to himself: Just two short years to go. In October of forty-two the greengrocer Greff hanged himself on a gallows of such formal perfection that I, Oskar, have henceforth considered suicide one of the sublime forms of death. In January of forty-three there was a good deal of talk about the city of Stalingrad. Since Matzerath referred to this city in the same tone he'd used earlier for Pearl Harbor, To-bruk, and Dunkirk, I paid no more attention to it than any other place I knew from special communiqués; for war reports and special communiqués had become a sort of geography lesson for Oskar. How else could I have learned where rivers like the Kuban, the Mius, and the Don flowed, who could have explained the location of the Aleutian islands Attu, Kiska, and Adak better than the detailed radio reports on events in the Far East? Thus, though I learned in January of forty-three that the city of Stalingrad is situated on the Volga, I wasn't as worried about the Sixth Army as I was about Maria, who was suffering from a slight case of the flu at the time.

While Maria's flu faded, the radio continued its geography lesson: Oskar can still find the little towns of Rzev and Demyansk on any map of Soviet Russia with his eyes closed. Maria had barely recovered when my son Kurt came down with whooping cough. While I tried to remember the most difficult names of a few hotly contested oases in Tunisia, little Kurt's whooping cough and the Africa Corps both came to an end.

O the merry month of May: Maria, Matzerath, and Gretchen Scheffler were making preparations for little Kurt's second birthday. Oskar attached a greater significance to the upcoming celebration too, for after the twelfth of June in forty-three, only one short year remained. Had I been present on little Kurt's second birthday, I could have whispered in my son's ear, "Just wait, soon you too will be drumming." And it came to pass in those days that on the twelfth of June in forty-three, Oskar was no longer in Danzig-Langfuhr but in the ancient Roman village of Metz. Indeed, he had been away for so long that he had a hard time getting back to the familiar environs of his still undamaged native city by the twelfth of June in forty-four to help celebrate little Kurt's third birthday.

What business took me away? I won't beat around the bush: outside the Pestalozzi School, which had been converted into barracks for the Luftwaffe, I met my master Bebra. But Bebra alone could not have talked me into a trip. On Bebra's arm hung La Raguna, Signora Roswitha, the great somnambulist.

Oskar was coming from Kleinhammerweg. He'd paid a visit to Gretchen Scheffler, leafed through the Struggle for Rome, discovered that even back then, in the time of Belisarius,

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