Volker Schlöndorff’s daring and original but ultimately incoherent film The Tin Drum (1979) resembles nothing else more than a food fight. Schlöndorff indiscriminately condemns every aspect of German society and thereby ends up saying almost nothing. Based on Nobel Laureate Gunter Grass’s celebrated 1959 novel The Tin Drum, this film is a fanciful but chilling portrayal of a time period encompassing the rise and fall of the Third Reich. The story is set in Danzig (Gdansk by its Polish name) shortly before World War II.

The Story: Young Oskar Matzerath (David Bennett) is both the impish protagonist and the narrator of this story. His promiscuous mother, Agnes (Angela Winkler), has two men in her life of roughly equal importance, her husband Alfred Matzerath (Mario Adorf) and her cousin Jan Bronski (Daniel Olbrychski), a Polish postal worker with who she plays footsy and rendezvous with every Thursday. Rather than compete for her affections, the two men have agreed to an openly triangular arrangement. Jan is likely Oskar’s biological father but Alfred his parent legally and by name. Even in the womb, it seems, Oskar was precociously aware and ill-inclined to enter into our troubled world. Once born, however, he takes heart in his mother’s promise to buy him a tin drum when he turns three. At age three, Oskar, having seen more than he cares to of hypocrisy among the adults in his family, willfully determines that he will grow no bigger and throws himself down the basement stairs to provide an appropriate pretext for dwarfism. He soon recovers from his fall but, as he intended, grows not a centimeter taller. Oskar’s tin drum becomes his inseparable companion. Oskar further learns that he has an extraordinary capacity of voice. His high-pitched scream is so shrill that he can cause glass to shatter. With the help of his drum and his exceptional ability to break glass, he effectively manipulates most of the people in his life. That much provides the fanciful premise for the film and the rest consists of countless vignettes revealing various aspects of Polish-German life, the rising tide of Nazi domination, and Oskar’s psychosocial issues and coming-of-age. The following are a small sample:

1. Oskar’s mother was conceived, it seems, one afternoon when Oskar’s maternal grandmother, Anna Koljaiczek, was sitting by herself in a potato field. A Polish man was being chased by World War I-vintage constabulary. In response to his plea for a place to hide, Anna had secluded the man beneath her four-layered skirt while the pursuers searched vainly in the nearby haystacks. Rather than remain idle beneath her skirts, however, the man had set about being useful, ultimately emerging with his fly unzipped!

2. Oskar is examined by a Doctor at age six because he has stopped growing. When the doctor tries to take Oskar’s drum from him so that he can undress, Oskar screams, breaking beakers and flasks and a jar containing a human fetus, which tumbles onto the floor. The Doctor writes a paper in a medical journal on Oskar’s unusual vocal ability.

3. Oskar observes his mother rendezvousing for her Thursday tryst with Jan, climbs a tower in the town square, bangs on his drum, and screams until countless windows break, expressing his disapproval of his mother’s philandering.

4. In probably the best scene of the film, Oskar has hidden himself beneath the bleachers during a Nazi rally. As the goose-stepping soldiers march in to the accompaniment of a 100-piece band, Oskar begins beating his drum in the rhythm of a waltz so loudly that ultimately the entire band has to adjust to his lead and begins playing the Blue Danube Waltz. The members of the audience and the soldiers have soon partnered up and are waltzing about.

5. Danzig becomes the first focal point of Nazi expansionist designs. Alfred joins the S.A. (Sturmabteilung) simply because he expects the Germans to win and likes the look of their uniforms. Jan, on the other hand, being Polish, joins the Polish resistance. Jan is killed after participating in the resistance effort at the Danzig Post Office – which is generally viewed as the first battle of World War II.

6. Oskar at age sixteen (but still looking like age six and played by an actor whose actual age was twelve) becomes sexually interested in the family’s sixteen year-old housekeeper. Their sexual experiments begin with games involving sugar and spit. I’ll leave the rest to your imaginations. The sexual scenes in this relationship caused the film to be temporarily banned as “child pornography” in the State of Oklahoma, though that decision was later overturned by a court. Certainly this film cannot be viewed rationally as pornographic although it has more serious deficiencies.

Themes: The Tin Drum is so ambiguous and utterly inconsistent in its themes and point of view that each viewer has exceptional latitude to interpret this film pretty much as they are inclined. Schlöndorff seems to be reflexively throwing cynical condemnations at anything and everything about prewar German society as if to see what can be made to stick. Although he is dealing explicitly with the worst chapter in human history, he does so without ever taking much of a clear position. The Tin Drum offers neither insight nor advocacy. We are left with no better conclusion than that people are generally no damn good!

Even the protagonist (who doubles as narrator) provides no consistent moral perspective. On the one hand, we’re supposed to imagine Oskar’s decision not to grow (to dissociate himself from the activities of mankind) as a kind of protest against the moral degeneracy of the society into which he was born. Oskar apparently rejects the hypocrisy and amoral philandering that he observes. On the other hand, his own behavior is dominated by selfishness, mean spirited vengeance and manipulation, and, when he reaches adolescence, perversity of the kind that he rejected as a child. The device of Oskar remaining forever small invites us to understand him as representing innocence and a child’s perspective, but then Oskar contributes indirectly to the death of each of his parents, torments the innocent (such as his teacher) as well as the guilty (the Nazis), is indifferent to the death of the Jewish toy-shop owner who befriended him and his mother (he only cares about getting himself another drum), and becomes, in the end, a Nazi collaborator. There’s really very little reason to like Oskar, in this film, and even less reason to value his perspective on the world around him.

The worst flaw of this film is that it condemns with so little discrimination that minor follies end up being equated with the grossest kinds of immoralities. Oskar’s withdrawal from the world was triggered mainly by the hypocrisies that he observed among the adults of his own family and his mother’s infidelities in particular. At the moment that he decides he will no longer grow, he had not yet been exposed to the political turmoil that was to come. The film thereby places a great deal of emphasis on the mother’s promiscuity, which strikes me as a rather minor issue in light of the mass murders that were soon to be perpetrated by the Nazis. One of the film’s thematic inferences seems to be that the moral laxity in the private lives of the German people in the years just before World War II is what rendered them vulnerable to the rigors, discipline, and transcendent dogma (however misguided) of Nazi philosophy. Moral laxity, according to this thesis, allowed official corruption and Hitler’s ascendance to dictatorial power. Certainly German society immediately prior to the advent of Nazism had reached a high level of moral decadence (see the film Cabaret for a marvelous illumination of this issue), but it is glib to attribute the excess of Nazi oppression to the preceding excess of liberality. The obvious inference from such a line of reasoning would be a need for societies to have a stronger moral (i.e., religious) foundation, but Schlöndorff also forecloses that argument. In one scene in The Tin Drum, Oskar has hung his drum over on a statue of Christ urging him to join with Oskar, beating the drum of dissent so to speak, but the statue, of course, does not and, instead, the priest slaps Oskar across the face. Schlöndorff thus condemns the Catholic Church’s role in failing to oppose Nazism (and, in fact, supporting it). I’d buy into condemnation of apathy and indifference, which allowed the rise of Nazism, but Schlöndorff splashes his condemnations so broadly, it is hard to take any of them too seriously. I just can’t get excited about Agnes, Albert, and Jan having an unusual kind of “arrangement” and the suggestion that such a harmless deviation from “moral” principles leads inexorably to genocidal atrocities.

Production Values: Although this film collapses on itself thematically, there is no denying the wealth of production techniques that Schlöndorff brought to bear in realizing an extraordinary novel as an extraordinary film. The range of visual techniques employed in filming The Tin Drum is quite exceptional. Sets and costumes have been recreated meticulously. The Tin Drum is allegorical in its structure and makes extensive use of symbolism (political, phallic, etc.), although too much of the symbolism is excessively obvious and overwrought.

There is gore aplenty and many moments of black humor. In one episode, eels slink out of the orifices of a dead horse’s head pulled from the sea. In another vignette, Oskar is forced by the “soup cooks“ (other kids) to drink a concoction that was produced by dropping a live frog into boiling water and two of the children then peeing into the pan.

Undoubted, however, it is the casting of David Bennett as Oskar that makes this film work – to the extent that it does. Bennett was the twelve year-old son of an actor and had himself stopped growing at age six for some inexplicable reason. Bennett was twelve at the time the film was made, had the body of a six year-old, but he also had the eyes of a very knowing old man! He effectively captured the demonic as well as the innocent quality of Oskar. Schlöndorff acknowledges that the film probably could not have been made had he not discovered David Bennett. The performances of the other leads are also impressive, especially Angela Winkler as Oskar’s mother.

Bottom-Line: The Tin Drum is thus a film that ends up saving nothing but saying it with originality, black humor, and snide cynicism. It is a broad brush surreal fresco of pre-World War II German indulgences and corruptions, seen from the level of ordinary people and the inconsistent perspective of Oskar. The Tin Drum shared the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1979 with Apocalypse Now and won the 1979 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. It is in German with English subtitles and has a running time of 142 minutes. I recommend it (but without much enthusiasm), despite its shortcomings, for the originality of its premise and the general interest of the best of its vignettes. This film is appropriately rated R, for sex, nudity, and violence.


*************************************************************************************************
You might want to check out these other excellent films from Germany:

The American Friend
Beyond Silence
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
The Blue Angel
Das Boot
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Dr. Mabuse the Gambler
Fitzcarraldo
Kings of the Road
M
The Marriage of Maria Braun
Metropolis
The Nasty Girl
Nosferatu
Pandora's Box
Run Lola Run
Stalingrad
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
Threepenny Opera
Wings of Desire
Zentropa

Recommended:
Yes

Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age