Word: matzerath
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...college sophomores arguing over the meaning of a stuffed armadillo that has had its claws removed, or the significance of Wheelwright's carrying his small friend on his shoulders to slam-dunk a basketball. For graduate students there is the fact that Meany shares more than initials with Oskar Matzerath, the runt hero of Gunter Grass's masterpiece, The Tin Drum...
...narrator is explicitly Grass himself. He alludes to his birth and childhood in Danzig (now Gdansk), his service as a Hitler Cub during his early adolescence, and his later authorial relations to one Oskar Matzerath, the hunchbacked, stunted hero of The Tin Drum. Having asked for and received a pet rat as a Christmas present, the speaker begins suffering nightmares in which he must endure diatribes by "the She-rat of my dreams." She complains of, among many other things, the beastly treatment the rat has had to suffer at the hands of humans, dating all the way back...
...occupying Russian forces. His body falls across the path of some ants that have set up supply lines to a smashed sack of sugar. "The ants found themselves facing a new situation," Grass wrote, "but, undismayed by the detour, soon built a new highway round the doubled-up Matzerath, for the sugar that trickled out of the burst sack had lost none of its sweetness while Marshal Rokossovski was occupying the city of Danzig...
Stunted Growth. "Pictures must talk by themselves," Antes says, but many critics see a clue to his stunted gnomes in their resemblance to the deformed dwarf, Oskar Matzerath, of German Novelist Günter Grass's bestseller, The Tin Drum. As Antes seeks to show life from a different perspective, so Grass's Oskar, a moral hunchback who reaches his third year and refuses to grow any more, sees the world from chair level. There are striking parallels, too, between writer and painter. Both were born in the decade that spawned Nazism, both learned their ABCs in Hitler...
...probably the most inventive talent to be heard from anywhere since the war. In The Tin Drum, he employs every technique from realism to surrealism, every tone from a whisper to a howl. The gaudiest gimmick in his literary bag of tricks, however, is a character named Oskar Matzerath. For Oskar is that wildly distorted mirror which, held up to a wildly deformed reality, gives back a recognizable likeness...
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