Grandmother in the potato field. Hides Jakob under her skirts. Then the war breaks out. Then ends. His mother grows up – she was getting older too –
Oskar telling the story from the perspective of a boy. Who’s his father?
The woman with the two makes three. Who is Oskar’s dad? Suppose we’ll get to that.
Oskar as fetus! Born live action from inside the womb! The blood canal, dripping folds of skin, his first light a 40-watt bulb. The only thing keeping me from crawling back inside the womb was the tin drum. From lost object to new object. The drum. Oskar sees it all. The flirtation – foot fucking under the table during cards – Oskar threw himself down the stairs in an effort to always remain three.
I, Dr. Dopeness, Professor of the Dope, earned my power and tenure with the world as poet of the potato. Therefore I shout: “I love the potato, because it speaks to me.” Yes, the potato! Ich liebe die Kartoffel. Now in school. Teacher trying to deal. Oskar drums. Arithmetic, Writing, Lesen, you are naughty Oskar. Put that drum away. Try to grab it from him and glass smash, shards so beautiful, wine glass, grandfather clock face (you’d get the time for the next draft). Schoolroom windows.
Joy chemicals are good. Watching this smile rises. Now the Scream inside the doctor’s office, three years since the accident; screeches until specimens in formaldehyde
Formal Dehyde. Fetus on the floor and flood specimen goop. Is this the Dr. Know-It-All, adult hypocrisy, society, and riding through the end of days? The Rasputin Scene. The omg scene. Draw back the curtain. “His black beard grazed her breasts.” Read Goethe’s Elective Affinities. “And thus I grew not in size but in spirit.”
Dag. They undressed quickly. Nudity! Garters. A room. To the bed. Oskar followed his mom down the street. Stands on the sidewalk opposite the hotel. White cotton curtain on the fourth floor flutters, Jan pulls away. To the bed. Fuck screams and music. Now Oskar’s at the top of the cathedral clock tower. Well, he already jumped once. Danzig is and always has been German.
The Circus Development. He meets the little people, and Bebra who stopped his growth at 10. Better late than never. You must join us, you must. He pops some orange lightbulbs. “As you can see, I can lay claim to a certain artistry.”
“You know, Mr. Bebra, to tell the truth, I prefer to be a member of the audience, and let my little art flower in secret.”
“My Dear Oskar, trust an experienced colleague, our kind must never sit in the audience, our kind must perform, and run the show. Or it’s the others that will run us. And the others are coming, They will take over the fairgrounds. They will stage torchlight parades. They will build platforms and fill them, and from these platforms preach our destruction. The First Nazi Flag, They buy a radio. Say it in German. Beethoven above the mantel replaced by Hitler, next to the radio, framed painting. Your siding with Poland is crazy. Oskar’s drumming disrupts the band and soon the parade ground of Sieg Heils drops into a waltz.
Is a pervy, sustained, obvious-to-the-characters love triangle such a great device? Down with titillation, sex, trysts in a downtown hotel and nylon-stockings-play on the beach with grunting husband taking the photograph, while Oskar watches too. Because war is war and love is love. But the whole story begins with a rape. Certainly that’s a rape on the edge of the potato field when Jakob runs from the soldiers. Non-consensual sex. Make a baby. Live together, making it work, to disappearance and the next generation. A criminal rapes a farm girl in a field while she shelters him from danger.
The horse’s head and eels scene is fucked! Nasty. Agnes, she’s puking on the rocks. Dude feels her ass, the ripped-off head, because of war, eel squirms out of an ear, another from eye socket, she’s puking, Oskar paddles the drum not like a drummer – as skill level – and the fisherman reaching an arm down the horse’s mouth. This scene stopped a friend from ever eating eel again. I married her, and I’ll still eat eel. Eel to the kitchen floor. Touchy-feely between the fucking cousins on the couch. Surely this is a joke, a lean toward farcical, and another fight between husband and wife, with the drum, the drum, the drum. Wonder how Gunter Grass wrote the drumming to make it as obnoxious as it is here. Here it’s audible, annoying, tinny. Fighting over Oskar, food, fish.
She’s sobbing on the bed after the fight. Pervy cuzz rolls in, hand up her dress, starts to finger her – while she’s sobbing. Now it’s psychotic. After a good finger fuck and cum, she emerges to eat eels. Grabs the entire lot on the serving plate. Now all Agnes does is stuff her face with fish, jam her fingers down her throat, pukes it up. The town is talking. They watch through the windows from the sidewalk. Now it’s herring. So homegirl’s lost it. How is there not mental illness? And how does it not run in the family? But again, level, chill, what does it mean. Besides a critique of civilization’s hypocrisies, Germans and Poles and the war. They’re coming, the Germans are coming. Jesus, she just bit the head off a fish, chomped and chewed. Great acting! Now we gag. Why don’t you want the child? Asks her husband. It doesn’t matter whose it is.
Now Agnes is dead. Killed herself in the bathroom. An indictment of rapey patriarchy. Of war. Of men specifically. Come on! Author kills the woman. Does that work, psychologically? Nonetheless, she’s gone. Nazi swine! Red pig! The trumpet player Brown Shirts and the Communist. Competing ideas rule the separation and fuel a culture war, sides in a bubble ready to battle over ideology, paranoia, and a willingness to believe self-hype and crew-ideas over universal solution. Social media rampant in Europe in the teens, 20s, 30s and 40s, is what we’re saying, running men and women into the ground. Paranoia and doubt, gas-lighting and never-knowing. Which way to act, which way to turn, where to go for help, who’s on which side, what is real, what’s the core of the system, how do you behave when, 1984 and appearances, layers, obstacles to knowledge, total observation. What we have with Trump, social media, and competing truth systems. Who knows which side we’re on, and where are the sides? Lost mooring, released, not knowing what to hold on to, which thing to do, which task, which master, ruler and signified. Wear your marker, Pole and Jew. Try to stay invisible. Who escaped to London? Who recognized the impending truth-flip and got the fuck out?
After the funeral a meal. Oskar under grandma’s skirts. Once upon a time there was a drummer. His name was Oskar. He lost his poor mama who had eaten too much fish. Once upon a time there was a gullible people, who believed in Santa Claus, But Santa Claus was really the gas man. [Once they burn your synagogue, it’s time to go.]
Once upon a time there was a toy merchant. His name was Sigismund Markus, and he sold tin drums, lacquered red and white.
Now Markus is dead.
September 1, 1939.
Look at those factories time-lapse spewing smoke; at the cathedral; Danzig; at bridges, buildings, and lights. Every institution has its interest. Those who work for a thing represent its interests. These cooperate and they compete. Gaze upon that city. At our central Europe. My God! Soil! Our land! And war.
The tin drum is sanity for the boy, a core. And it’s insanity, constant noise that we don’t want to hear. It’s interruption, stress and anger. It’s loud, insistent and pisses us off. It’s the soul of a boy, it’s the mind of man. We are drum and stick and noise and conflict.
He finds the next drum on a top shelf while the Polish Post Office is under siege, on fire, about to fall. And within the Sturm and Drang, the madness of man, the tin drum, clean and white, pure, rolls to Oskar. The Polish Post Office they shot with a newsreel, for this went down in history as the first battle of World War II.
()()()
He jams his face in her parts in changing room at the beach. They sleep together in her room when his dad attends a Nazi cell party – they’ve made him leader. Oskar fucks her. Next day, however, she’s fucking his dad on the couch. Whoops. Ouch.
A fight. Dad cums inside of her. So where we at?
Oskar rips open the fizzy candy pack – the one he pours into her hand and spits into it and she eats it. A kind of fizzy sugar pack love ritual. So where we at? She sobs, squats over a bowl of water set on a kitchen chair, and, using her nightgown, washes. Oskar attempts the sugar pack love ritual. She looks at him with contempt, smacks his hand away, and offers the next few lines in a piercing scream: “You nasty little dwarf You crazy midget! And, as she kicks him, actually not-acting sending him flying, “You belong in a loony bin, you scumbag!”
She’s pregnant. He gets his own room. Boom-boom-boom, over and over again. She’s waddling. Who’s the dad, because Oskar came inside of her too. She’s sleeping in a chair next to the piano. He plays three notes in a rhythm. He stands, grabs an open pair of scissors, and brings down the blade toward her stomach. She blocks him, holds his wrist, glowers, momentary stare contest. During the Moscow-Falls Dinner, “Now you’ve got a little brother, Oskar.” He stands, pushes the pram across the room, and I don’t want to see him push the baby downstairs, even though it was an ugly-looking mother fucking German Nazi baby. “Shit Oskar, don’t push the baby down the stairs,” I said. “I don’t want to see a dead baby bent in half after falling into the cellar, Oskar.” With the adults screaming. That’s what we feel, and I’m trapped – I don’t want to feel this way.
And on to Moscow on the front. Moscow will have to fall “or we’ll have to feed all those people.”
“Starve ‘em! Starve all our enemies!”
FLK fat fucking Cheney-faced mother fucking German Nazi baby. “My son,” says Oskar. “You are definitely my son” he bounces him, baby crying and wincing nasty, almost the same size as Oskar, you are definitely my son. Well, here we go. Moscow won’t fall. Millions of Germans will die. Russia will push back, overwhelm them. The Americans, too. Eventually meet in Berlin and Germany, based on What, having adopted a New Vision, a story born from the soil, latent populism, freakish nationalist tendencies, meth-xenophobia with a lot of hurt globally and a scapegoat on which to pin their hatred and something else. That something else the desperation of a people without mooring with too many competing voices and one shit-talking asshole steps up to mesmerize the dead.
Here we are today, writ more specific. And the fat fucking ugly-assed German Nazi baby definitely looks like Trump Baby. Cheney-Trump Baby. We cannot neglect the problem of a few insane anxiety leaders driven by something evil and chaotic, snagging the reins of an entire nation’s power, driving forward with the energy of its actual national essence, including GDP as a Thing, with the energy to manifest such earth-scale endeavor, pitching us forward toward the death of mega-millions. Well, what is this, then, we are allowed to ask? Freud’s death wish? What is this, thing. And where is it going? What is the point? And what do we want to do with it?
That baby’s gigantic. That baby’s Helmut Kohl. And when you’re three, I’ll buy you a trommel. And if you want to stay small, I’ll show you how. Reunited with the circus. Now they work for the German Army, entertaining the troops. A picnic on the bunkers. Five nuns walking on a beach looking for shellfish. They’re just nuns looking for shellfish, he said, I know them. That’s an order! And now five angel-nuns ascend to heaven. Look at this shot!
My Children, quick.
What’s wrong?
The Americans are coming!
Beethoven back to the wall.
Now the Russians are coming. Blow the shit out of shit. Your party pin! Now pops tries to hide it, looks around the cellar, digs a small hole. Imagine supporting the party cause in a small town of contested territory you remain small, don’t go to the front, think you’re winning because of propaganda, that everything’s going okay, and then, word of mouth almost, your boys have lost, Russians rolling in on you, Americans rolling into Paris, ass-whipped and over, an extreme life experience. What does this do to a person, a people, a history, a mind, a consciousness? Hide the pin under the winter-kartoffeln, she suggests. The Russians are coming!
Dig a hole with a heel.
War rape. One of the women, with whom Oskar had sex, Russians in the cellar, Oscar with the pin in his hand, jammed it into Alfred’s hand, who then swallows it. Caught in throat, pin jammed into esophagus, he can’t raise his hands, stumbling about, machine gun fire he’s out.
From the off this is not normal life. A reality radically removed from an older way, what happens to life survival, love, food, day to day. This film not for an instant normal, takes place slightly off, out of kilter, as are the lives. And you stand, still you, watching the madness, adapting to the madness, dealing, enduring suffering like you wouldn’t or couldn’t in “peacetime.” War-torn Danzig.
A Jew comes to possess the shop. He survived a concentration camp. His wife and six children killed. He was a disinfector at the camp. He tossed the drum into Matzerath’s grave!
Oskar, should you or shouldn’t you?
I should, I must,
Then Kurt (the gigantic brother-son) throws a rock and hits Oskar in the face and he falls into the grave.
Grandma opened the film, raped, dealt with all the life that followed, including war, suicide, death, madness, drumming, and she’s there at the end, standing, Karshabians were made to be bashed in the head. Going and coming, they just want everything perfect, they bash us Karshabians in the head. She stands as the rest board trains for “the West” – for the Rhineland. Yes, it will be better. Better in the West. Grandma! Shouts Oskar from the train. Die Liliputanter und Zwerge. Die Blechtrommel.
