Word: oskar
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Like many another European writer who grew up under Adolf Hitler, German Novelist Gunter Grass, 36, is a man shadowed by the cruelty and grotesquerie of life. The groans and squeaks, the howls and primitive chuckles of his first hero, a prurient dwarf named Oskar Mazerath, made Grass's The Tin Drum the most powerful first novel to come out of Germany in a generation...
...apple. But if Grass still views life largely as a kind of Gothic sideshow, he permits himself, as he did not in the earlier book, a saving touch of human compassion. As a dwarf who had seceded from the adult world in order to survive in it, Oskar remained a skeptical spectator of absurdity. Through the muted and melancholy chronicle of Mahlke's brief life, Grass seems to say that deformed or not, man can burn with the likeness of a shapely aspiration. Pettiness is sometimes graced by pity...
...Died. Oskar Helmer, 75, Austrian patriot and former Interior Minister (from 1945 to 1959) a courageous pro-Western Socialist who firmly purged the police and security forces of Communist agents during the post-World War II occupation, thereby helping to avert a Czechoslovakia-style Red takeover of the country; of cancer; in Vienna...
...carver, is 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...
Like Grass, Oskar is the son of a German grocer and his pretty Polish wife. Unlike Grass, Oskar, when he is three years old, refuses to grow any more. He remains 31 inches tall. With a man's intelligence in a baby's body, he is largely ignored by adults. What he sees and overhears as a result adds up to a dwarfs-eye view of the Third Reich...