Summary Tin Drum
Günter Grass
Tin Drum
The action takes place in the XX century. in the Danzig area. The narrative is conducted on behalf of Oscar Macerath, a patient of a special medical institution, a man whose growth stopped at the age of three and who never parted with a tin drum, trusting him with all secrets, describing with his help everything he sees around him. A medical officer named Bruno Munsterberg brings him a bundle of clean paper, and he begins a biography of himself and his family.
First of all, the hero describes the maternal grandmother, Anna Bronsky, a peasant woman, who once in October, 1899, rescued from the gendarmes the grandfather of the hero, Josef Kolyaichek, hiding it under his numerous wide skirts. Under these skirts, on that memorable day, the hero says, his mother Agnes was conceived. The same night Anna and Josef got married, and the grandmother’s brother Vincent drove the newlyweds to the central city of the province: Kolyaichek hid from the
On the same tug was the new master Dyukerhof, in the past a master at a sawmill where Kolyaychek worked, who recognized him and gave it to the police. But Kolyaichek did not want to surrender to the police and, upon arrival at his home port, jumped into the water in the hope of reaching the neighboring pier, where they were just launching a ship called Columbus. However, on his way to the “Columbus” he had to dive under the too long raft, where he found his death. Since his body was not found, there were rumors that he still managed to escape and he sailed to America, where he became a millionaire, getting rich on wood trade, match factories and insurance against fire.
A year later, my grandmother married the elder brother of her deceased husband, Gregor Kolyachek. As he drank everything he earned on
Soon Oscar appeared. Endowed with a childishly acute perception, he forever remembered his father’s words: “One day a shop will go to him” and mother’s words: “When little Oscar turns three, he will get a tin drum.” His first impression was a moth, beating about burning light bulbs. He seemed to be drumming, and the hero was called by his “mentor Oscar.”
The idea of getting a shop caused the protagonist a sense of protest, and Mother’s offer was pleasant; immediately realizing that he was destined to remain incomprehensible all his life his own parents, he forever did not want to live, and only the promise of a drum reconciled him with reality. First of all, the hero did not want to grow up and, using the oversight of Macerat, who forgot to close the cellar lid, fell down on his third birthday from the stairs leading down. In the future this saved him from going to the doctors. On the same day it turned out that in a voice he was able to cut and beat the glass. It was for Oscar the only way to save the drum. When Macerath tried to take away his drum-pierced hole, he broke the glass of the floor clock with a shout. When in early September 1928, on his fourth birthday, the drum tried to replace other toys,
Oscar was six years old, and my mother tried to identify him in the school named after Pestalozzi, although from the point of view of others he still could not speak properly and was very undeveloped. At first the boy liked the teacher named Fraulein Schlollenhauer, because she successfully drummed the song she asked to sing, but then she decided to remove the drum in the closet. At the first attempt to tear out the drum, Oscar only scratched her glasses with the voice, the second one – with a voice broke all the window panes, and when she tried to hit him with a stick on her hands, broke her glasses, scratched his face blood. This is how Oscar graduated from school, but he wanted to learn to read at all costs. However, none of the adults did not care about the underdeveloped freak, and only mother’s friend childless Gretchen Shefler agreed to teach him to read and write. The choice of books in her house was very limited, so they read Goethe’s “Selective Affinity” and the weighty volume “Rasputin and Women.” Teaching was easy for a boy, but he had to hide his successes from adults, which was very difficult and offensive to him. From three to four years, while the teaching continued, he concluded that “in this world every Rasputin is opposed by his Goethe.” But especially he was pleased with the excitement that Mother and Gretchen experienced from reading a book about Rasputin.
At first, Oscar’s world was exhausted by an attic, from which all the nearby yards were visible, but one day the kids fed him with a “soup” of crushed bricks, live frogs and urine, after which he began to prefer long walks, most often with his mother’s hand. On Thursdays my mother took Oscar with her to the city, where they invariably visited the toy store of Sigismund Marcus to buy another drum. Then my mother left Oscar with Marcus, and she went to the cheap furnished rooms, which Jan Bronsky specially filmed for meetings with her. One day the boy ran away from the store to try his voice at the City Theater, and when he returned, he found Marcus on his knees in front of his mother: he persuaded her to flee with him to London, but she refused – because of Bronsky. Hinting at the coming to power of the fascists, Marcus, among other things, said that he was baptized.
In 1934, the boy was taken to the circus, where he met a lilliput named Bebra. Foreseeing torchlight processions and parades in front of the stands, he uttered the prophetic words: “Try to always sit among those in the stands and never stand in front of them. … Small people like you and me will find a place even on the most crowded scene. not on it, it’s true under her, but for nothing – in front of her. ” Oscar forever remembered the covenant of an older friend, and when, one day in August 1935, Macerat, who joined the Nazi party, went to a demonstration, Oscar, hiding under the stands, spoiled the entire procession, knocking down the storm troopers’ band for waltzes and other dance rhythms.
In the winter of 1936-37, Oscar played the tempter out of himself: hiding in front of some expensive store, he cut out a small hole in the window in the window so that the buyer who looked at her could take the item she liked. So Ian Bronsky became the owner of an expensive ruby necklace, which was presented to his beloved Agnes.
Oskar believed the drum to be the truth of religion: putting the drum into the hands of a plaster baby Christ in the temple, he waited a long time for him to start playing, but the miracle did not happen. When he was found at the crime scene by the vicar Rashtsey, he never managed to smash the church windows,
Shortly after visiting the church on Good Friday, the Macerats with the whole family, together with Jan, went for a walk along the seashore, where they witnessed how a man caught eels on a horse’s head. On Mother Oscar, it made such an impression that she was at first long in shock, and then began to devour in huge quantities fish. It all ended that my mother died in the city hospital from “jaundice and fish intoxication.” At the cemetery, Alexander Shefler and musician Maine rudely escorted the Jew Marcus, who came to say goodbye to the deceased. An important detail: at the cemetery gate local crazy Leo Durachok shook Marcus’s hand in sympathy. Later, at other funerals, he refuses to shake hands with the musician Maine, who joined the squad of storm troopers; from grief, he will kill four of his cats, for which he will be sentenced to a fine and for inhuman treatment of animals banished from the ranks of the SA, although for the sake of redemption of guilt he will especially zealously during the “crystal night” when they set fire to the synagogue and smashed the shops of the Jews. As a result, the toy merchant will leave the world, taking with him all the toys, and only the musician named Maine who “plays marvelously on the trumpet” will remain.
On the day when Leo Durachok refused to shake hands with the attack aircraft, Oscar’s friend Herbert Truchinsky was buried. He worked as a waiter for a long time in a port tavern, but resigned from there and arranged as a caretaker to the museum – to guard the halion figure from the Florentine galleass, which, according to legends, brought misfortune. Oscar served Herbert as a kind of talisman, but one day, when Oscar was not allowed into the museum, Herbert died a terrible death. Worried about this memory, Oscar hits the drum particularly hard, and the orderly Bruno asks him to humble more quietly.
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