The Tin Drum

But the situation was beyond saving. The national comrades danced away from the Maiwiese and soon the grassy field, though badly trampled, was quite deserted. The national comrades had vanished with Jimmy the Tiger in the spacious grounds of the nearby Steffens-Park. There they found the jungle that Jimmy promised; there tigers moved on velvet paws, an ersatz jungle for the sons and daughters of the German nation, who only a short while before had been crowding round the rostrum. Gone were law and order. The more culture-minded element repaired to the Hindenburg-Allee, where trees had first been planted in the eighteenth century, where these same trees had been cut down in 1807 when the city was being besieged by Napoleon’s troops, and a fresh set had been planted in 1810 in honor of Napoleon. On this historic ground, the dancers were still able to benefit by my music, because no one turned off the microphone above me. I could be heard as far as Oliva Gate. In the end the excellent lads at the foot of the rostrum succeeded, with the help of Jimmy’s unleashed tiger, in clearing the Maiwiese of everything but daisies.

Even when I gave my instrument a well-deserved rest, the drummer boys kept right on. It was quite some time before my musical influence wore off.

Oskar was not able to leave his hiding place at once, SA men and SS men spent more than an hour kicking at the planks, poking into cra

At least it was quiet in my wooden labyrinth, which was about the size of the whale’s belly where Jonah sat staining his prophet’s robes with blubber. But Oskar was no prophet, he was begi

Who would have noticed a wee mite of a three-year-old, whistling as he skirted the Maiwiese in the direction of the Sports Palace. Behind the te

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Shopwindows

For several years, until November, ‘38, to be exact, my drum and I spent a good bit of our time huddling under rostrums, observing successful or not so successful demonstrations, breaking up rallies, driving orators to distraction, transforming marches and hymns into waltzes and fox trots.

Today I am a private patient in a mental hospital, and all that has become historical, old stuff, dead as a doornail, though still much debated and discussed. It has become possible for me to see my drumming under rostrums in proper perspective, and it would never occur to me to set myself up as a resistance fighter because I disrupted six or seven rallies and threw three or four parades out of step with my drumming. That word “resistance” has become very fashionable. We hear of the “spirit of resistance,” of “resistance circles.” There is even talk of an “inward resistance,” a “psychic emigration.” Not to mention those courageous and uncompromising souls who call themselves Resistance Fighters, men of the Resistance, because they were fined during the war for not blacking out their bedroom windows properly.

Let us cast one more glance beneath Oskar’s rostrums. Did Oskar drum for the people? Did he, following the advice of Bebra his mentor, take the action in hand and provoke the people out in front of the rostrum to dance? Did he confound and perplex Löbsack, the shrewd and able chief of training? Did he, on a one-dish Sunday in August, 1935 and on several occasions thereafter, break up brown rallies on a drum which though red and white was not Polish?

Yes, I did all that. But does that make me, as I lie in this mental hospital, a Resistance Fighter? I must answer in the negative, and I hope that you too, you who are not inmates of mental hospitals, will regard me as nothing more than an eccentric who, for private and what is more esthetic reasons, though to be sure the advice of Bebra my mentor had something to do with it, rejected the cut and color of the uniforms, the rhythm and tone of the music normally played on rostrums, and therefore drummed up a bit of protest on an instrument that was a mere toy.

In those days it was possible to reach the people on and in front of a rostrum with a wretched toy drum, and I must admit that I perfected this little trick, as I had my long-distance, glass-shattering song, for its own sake. For it was not only demonstrations of a brown hue that I attacked with my drumming. Oskar huddled under the rostrum for Reds and Blacks, for Boy Scouts and Spinach Shirts, for Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Kyffhauser Bund, the Vegetarians, and the Young Polish Fresh Air Movement. Whatever they might have to sing, trumpet, or proclaim, my drum knew better.

Yes, my work was destructive. And what I did not defeat with my drum, I killed with my voice. In the daytime I assaulted the symmetry of rostrums; at night—this was in the winter of ‘36 to ‘37—I played the tempter. My earliest instruction in the tempting of my fellow men was provided by my grandmother Koljaiczek, who in that hard winter opened a stand at the weekly market in Langfuhr: there she sat in her four skirts, crying plaintively: “Fresh eggs, golden creamy butter, geese not too fat, not too thin.” Every Tuesday was market day. She took the narrow-gauge railway from Viereck; shortly before Langfuhr she removed the felt slippers she wore in the train, do

Every hour on the dot Schwerdtfeger pushed a hot brick under my grandmother’s four skirts with an iron rake. He pushed the steaming package under the scarcely lifted hems, discharged it, caught hold of the brick of the preceding hour, which was almost cold by now, and pulled it out.

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