Die Blechtrommel
Volker Schlöndorff (1979)
The prologue to this screen adaptation of Günter Grass’s 1959 novel The Tin Drum takes place in 1899, in rural Kashubia. A peasant woman called Anna Bronski sits in a field that looks onto a bleak, nearly empty landscape. She roasts on a makeshift fire a few of the potatoes she has dug from the earth. An arsonist called Joseph Koljaiczek, on the run from the law, rushes towards Anna and begs her to hide him under her capacious skirts. This unusual first meeting of the couple results in the birth of a baby girl, Agnes. A year later, the police track Joseph down: he’s sitting, with Anna and Agnes, in a different part of the same glum countryside. Joseph once more evades capture – this time he plunges into a lake rather than under skirts – but he’s never seen or heard of again. He may have drowned; family legend has it that he emigrated to America and made a fortune there. These facts (or fictions) are recounted in voiceover by the film’s narrator. This is Agnes’s son Oskar, born in 1924 in Danzig (present-day Gdańsk). Oskar’s paternity is open to question: Agnes has two lovers – a German grocer called Alfred Matzerath, whom she marries; and Jan Brodski, a Polish post office worker, who is also Agnes’s cousin. At birth, Oskar has the mind and volition of an adult – he’s dubious about emerging from the womb at all. Conversation in the room where Agnes is in labour tips the balance in favour of coming into the world: clairaudient Oskar learns that, on his third birthday, he’ll receive the gift of a tin drum. When the big day arrives, he gets the drum but also decides that enough is enough. He doesn’t want to grow up. Alfred has left the cellar door open and Oskar throws himself down a steep flight of steps. No bones are broken but Oskar doesn’t grow another inch. He also develops an instant, unshakeable attachment to the tin drum and the unusual talent of a scream so piercing that he can use it to shatter glass – and cause havoc – at will. He make use of this talent whenever he’s angry or threatened.
Grass’s novel, the first book of his ‘Danzig trilogy’, has been described as a surrealistic black comedy, and a political parable seen through a magic-realist lens. The novel’s timeframe extends to the mid-1950s, by which time the narrator Oskar is a patient in a mental hospital. The film, with a screenplay by Volker Schlöndorff, Jean-Claude Carrière and Franz Seitz, ends in 1945, at the point of the German surrender and its immediate aftermath. At first, Oskar’s willed infantilism doesn’t seem an inevitable expression of his time and place. His equivocation at the threshold of life could simply be the rational reaction of a precociously developed intelligence. His uneasy fascination with the primal scene is remarkably vivid (from within a wardrobe, he watches his mother and Jan having intercourse; on another occasion, he assumes correctly they’re doing the same thing when he can’t actually see them) but not necessarily exceptional. Oskar’s mentality isn’t immediately that of a budding Nazi or Nazi victim but his immature aspect and extraordinary characteristics connect increasingly with the historical and geographical setting. Oskar’s father might be German or might be Polish, like Danzig itself. The city, where Günter Grass was born in 1927, represented a kind of lebensraum blueprint and Volker Schlöndorff dramatises this powerfully. Once the story reaches the late 1930s, Oskar’s propensity for breaking glass can’t fail to resonate with Kristallnacht. In an early scene on the streets of Danzig, Oskar and other children at play march about chanting, ‘Burn the witch, black as pitch’. A later scene, which takes place during World War II, describes a party at which Nazi officers, in their cups, are being entertained by the troupe of performing midgets which Oskar has joined. The sequence ends with the whole company moving in a weirdly martial conga, singing the same children’s song.
The Tin Drum, which shared the Cannes Palme d’Or with Apocalypse Now in 1979 and the following year became the first German picture to win the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, has two outstanding features. They are David Bennent, who plays Oskar, and a persistent and distinctive physicality, expressed chiefly through the sights and sounds of people having food and sex, and the preparations for these. Schlöndorff makes both forms of consumption intimidating and, in the case of the eating, horribly alive. The film’s menu has a humble starter of charred potatoes but moves on to conger eels that reach shore in the severed head of a horse, and which are even more alarming when their own heads are removed before cooking and their bodies continue to wriggle. Later on, there’s an aphrodisiac of sherbet powder mixed with spittle. What lies beneath fabric is a strong motif too: after that opening scene in which a man goes inside a woman’s skirts, we see Oskar, at his third birthday party, crawling under the tablecloth, where his mother and ‘Uncle’ Jan are playing footsie. Schlöndorff and his cameraman Igor Luther do a fine job of following up this image, as gross adult legs career in close-up down the cellar stairs to reach the body of Oskar lying at the foot of them.
The narrative works best in the movie’s first half, where it takes the form of a succession of startling, often funny vignettes. Some of the sequences in the 1939-45 period are less satisfactory. For the most part, they seem not as sharp as the earlier ones (at 142 minutes, The Tin Drum is slightly too long); a larger problem is the sex scenes involving Oskar. (These caused considerable controversy at the time the film came out.) After Agnes’s death, Alfred employs a girl called Maria to help out in the grocery and subsequently marries her. Maria is seduced by Oskar and becomes his mistress. In the story, Maria and Oskar are more or less the same age but this isn’t true of the people playing them: Katharina Thalbach is twenty-five, while David Bennent is eleven. It’s hard to see how Volker Schlöndorff could have avoided this difficulty, without suddenly compromising the prevailing physical frankness of the film. But it is a difficulty. The strong, emphatic playing of the main adult actors – Angela Winkler (Agnes), Mario Adorf (Alfred) and Daniel Olbrychski (Jan) – is well orchestrated. The cast also includes Charles Aznavour as a Jewish toymaker (Oskar needs his drum replacing every now and then). Aznavour’s countryman Maurice Jarre supplies an imaginative and effective score.
I saw the film on its original release, not again until now. Although I reckon once every thirty-five years or so is often enough, The Tin Drum remains an impressive piece: it’s important to remember how unusual it was, at the time it appeared, for a mainstream German movie to address the national pathology and traumas of the Nazi period. It’s impossible to watch the film now without being reminded that in 2006 Günter Grass admitted to having been a teenage member of the Waffen-SS during World War II. On a sillier level but still hard to ignore: there are moments, while he has a pudding-basin haircut, when you think the large-eyed, pale-faced Oskar, if he had grown up, might have turned into Angela Merkel.
31 August 2016
