Word: danzig
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Oskar's history is the history of Germany during The War. Oskar lived in Danzig where he watched the Nazis come and go, the Jews live and die, the city stand and fall, his family shrink and grow. His story is about the destruction of Germany by a force that had proposed to make the Germans the mightiest race on Earth and how the Germans and the world learned to accept that destruction and drum on. Oskar is a little bit mad and Oskar's history is a little...
Gunter Grass filled his first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), with symbols that are not symbols, with allegories that are not allegories, with messages that are not messages. Volker Scholondorff has turned this sprawling, self-conscious novel of post-war Germany into a beautiful and disturbing film that recreates Danzig of the '30s and '40s without adequately illuminating Grass' novel. His film is both a magnificent success--well-acted, unblinkingly photographed, crisply edited--and a huge failure, an adaptation that dismally dissipates the epic power of the novel...
Maybe it is impossible to build a film on three adjectives: barbaric, mystical, bored. But if Schlondorff had kept those words in mind as he guided his camera over the russet rooftops of Old Danzig, he might have crafted a film that captured the anguish of the 20th Century as well as Gunter Grass' The Tin Drum...
...since 1968 kind of putting a damper on things. But in Poland and Romania as well, a lot of people I spoke with this summer seemed to find the "Eternal Brotherhood With the Soviet Union" propaganda approach somewhat heavyhanded. A Polish student in Gdansk (known in history books as Danzig) told me a joke that is currently making the rounds among his friends. An orange is rolling on the Polish-Soviet border, and two border guards, one Russian and one Polish, find it simultaneously. The Pole claims that it is on the Polish side of the border, therefore...
Game Plan. Is the world made up of nothing but "the violent and the righteous"? Are there no other snail lovers left? Just to make sure, Grass invents one, a "Dr. Doubt," a Danzig schoolteacher, who sits out World War II in a cellar, collecting snails and falling in love, among other activities. He says: "I know more now. Hesitation comes more easily." Grass's middle-aged snail wisdom might easily be mistaken for Doubt's. At 45, Grass is too wise to be possessed by any one credo. Yet Grass cannot stay in his cellar while history...