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"Walkin' the Dog" by Walter Mosley
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Grass entered university in Düsseldorf in 1947, training as a sculptor. He began to write seriously only in the mid-1950s, when he was well into adulthood and making a patchy living as a graphic artist. The bulk of his output during the period was drama, but his first small success -- third prize in a contest sponsored by South German Radio -- was as a poet. This accomplishment helped hook him up with the influential Gruppe 47, a cadre of writers devoted to the idea of a new, postwar German literature. Members of the group, upon hearing him read what would become the first chapter of "The Tin Drum," granted him a cash prize that allowed him to shutter himself in Paris while he finished the novel.

Jan Morris, the travel writer, calls the postwar reconstruction of Danzig/Gdansk "the single most spectacular rebuilding job ever," adding, "I defy any ill-informed stranger to guess that this marvelous city is not in its original incarnation." Grass' first novel did much the same for German literature, standing on old foundations with such confidence and grace that you'd never know it was situated on a gigantic literary bomb crater. Apart from a few determined expatriates, modern German writing had been fairly well killed off under the Third Reich, which promoted a ham-fisted literalism larded with mawkish sentimentality -- an exaggerated middle-American style full of Sieg-heiling Cub Scouts and bosom-clutching Fräuleins. "The Tin Drum" was the direct antithesis of the Nazi novel, a literary de-Nazification program steeped in the surreal, the opaque, the sardonic -- all the elements of the prewar modernist tradition that the Third Reich had loathed and, for a quarter of a century, suppressed.

It was also a thoroughly postwar novel that sought atonement for Germany's crimes without retreating into the common "phantom Nazi" fallacy, wherein all the Nazis went away in 1945, leaving nobody but ordinary Germans behind. "The Tin Drum" followed the course of German society from the Third Reich to the Federal period. And it embodied a new, West German sort of Germanness, a looser, more impolite, more ecumenical version that took hold at the same time as the partitioning of the country and the "economic miracle." Grass has called Oskar Matzerath -- the book's amoral protagonist, who wills himself into remaining a child forever -- the Zeitgeist of that era. Oskar (as Germany) begins telling his story in a mental hospital, having been accused of murder. But the age of the Nazi dwarf was ending, helped along to its conclusion by Grass' vision of the adult West German state. Oskar ends the book as shrunken and miserable as ever, but awaiting the horrors of the future rather than enthralled by those of the past.

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