Seeing Great Works Begets Seeing Great Works

What is true of many great works of art is that it makes you want to see other great works of art that inspired it or that came from some of the same minds. One link that The Tin Drum inextricably has is with Apocalypse Now, which it tied for Palme d’Or. These two films, in part about the absurdities of war would make quite a harrowing double feature of sizable length.

This is, somehow, still the only Schlöndorff film I’ve seen to date. Both his other films and the books they are based on now intrigue me even more like The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, (The Confusions of ) Young Törless; as well as works that inspired it like Macunaíma, a Brazilian film starring Grande Otelo, which inspired Oskar’s birth scene; Fellini’s Amarcord, and Homo Faber.

Something discovered while watching the bonuses on this disc was that Schlöndorff cut his teeth working with Louis Malle, and that seems to make a perfect kind of sense and there sensibilities do have a sort of an overlap.

The film is also referred to at one point as Brechtian, which is especially interesting consider the fact that a Schlöndorff adaptation of Brecht’s Baal was produced for West German television and starred Rainer Werner Fassbinder. This is a film I must see and something Criterion should seriously consider looking into.

And additional great work is included as a supplemental feature. It is a dramatized reading of a sequence from the novel by Grass accompanied by the scenes from the film the prose describes.

German films could confront the past through the glorious Hollywood image, as Corrigan states, and this is one of the finest examples but there are certainly others out there worth looking into.

The Irrationality of German History

One of the most telling quotes from the bonus features is that this film sought to deal with the “irrationality of German history” much as the book did. That phrase is aptly stated whereas Germans as a people are known for order and efficiency their history is marred by actions and behaviors that seem to belie that. Thus, the history is irrational and Eddie Izzard’s joke about Hitler being unable to paint trees and deciding to “kill everyone in the world” is dangerously close to the truth.

The Tin Drum is a work of the German New Cinema, a name and approach that was created after a meeting that created the Oberhausen Manifesto.

Something had to be built out of the rubble, as Goebbles destroyed the film industry, and a Golden Age of German cinema in the Weimar Republic, before the war anyway, as cinema or a culture that saw no reason to look to its recent or distant past for influence and co-opted American mores as Wim Wenders put it “WWII created a hole in German culture and we tried to fill it with American culture as soon as possible.” This the influx of American distributors and the Marshall Plan created a love/hate relationship with the Hollywood cinema. And who doesn’t have one anyway?

The cultural colonization came to German after so-called “Rubble Films, melodramas with similar backdrops to Germany Year Zero but little else in common.

A nation now “Excluded from its own history” as Timothy Corrigan puts it seemed to scream, like Oskar seeking the protection of its grandmother’s skirts, and that protection cinematically seemed to come from honestly addressing some ludicrous histories. Yet, some films continued to act as flashpoints. The Tin Drum being one, and Spielberg’s Schindler’s List twenty-four years later was another noticeable one as it dealt directly with the Holocaust.

Teutonic Reflections and Francophonic Refractions

Though the nomenclature of Roman Picaresque escaped me I have seen and been influenced by a picaresque before. The Roman Picaresque tradition is visible in Léolo. It is something, at the time, I could not name, but it is the ragamuffin, rapscallion at the center of each tale that drew me in and the confounding unreliable narrator that makes it so fascinating and easy to revisit.

This film was perhaps, with its plotless dalliances falling just short of vignettes, was one of the first I chose to theorize on. Simply state in my own mind “Oskar is Germany.” He stopped growth as the society did. It’s likely an over-reduction of the some of the complex representations of commentary in the film, but he is Germany of a certain time, of a certain generation. One that refused to grow and gave in to childish impulse and unbounded atrocity and aggression; one that told its sons “If you don’t want to grow, I’ll show you how it’s done.”

There are broad yet cunning satires of many aspects of Nazi Germany within such as the ostracism and elimination of homosexuals as detailed by the infamous Paragraph 175 (illustrated by one of the film’s suicides), the carnival act that was Nazi propaganda is here made literal and quite buffoonish for it. Yet, also, ironic as one of the dwarfs wishes Oskar “Mazel Tov” before his first time on stage (an allusion to Nazis playing loose and easy with rules of Aryanism; most notably Fritz Lang was terrified when he was told “We decide who is Aryan, Mr. Lang.”); Oskar’s affinity for breaking glass with his high-pitched scream can be seen as a parallel to Kristallnacht. Oskar’s involvement in propaganda can be seen as a parallel to Grass’ own divulged-late-in-life involvement with the Nazi party as a young man.

An involvement, by the way, that I don’t think makes Grass’ critics disingenuous. Surely, it’s not only those who never fell for the party line who can find fault with the fantasies and delusions they spread across Germany and the terror they inflicted across the globe.

The commentary on domestic activities are omnipresent and embodied in all characters both large or small. Oskar “die trommler,” borrowing one of Der Führer’s many monikers towards the end of the war is sought by the Gestapo for racial impurities – as his suspected father father (Cousin Jan) is Polish and not Kashubian – a self-professed borderland.

There is a frame created with the rise and fall of the Beethoven portrait. Hitler replaces him on the wall, when the war comes to an end so does Hitler’s exalted status. Beethoven returns to his rightful and immortal place “Beethoven there was a genius.”

The very patriarch of the family who utters that line dies choking on a swastika – emblazoned pin that he is attempting to hide as the Allies descend on Berlin. Echoing film scholar Timothy Corrigan’s observation, Oskar and his younger brother Kurt end up fatherless reflecting the Fatherless Generation moniker post-war German wore whether they liked it or not.

Oskar knowing he is at a crossroads decides as a twenty-one-year-old orphan to bury his drum so that he may grow. As he buries that drum, Kurt (the younger generation) hits him with a rock. In essence Oskar has to face a sort of death before he is allowed to grown. It is commented upon by grandmother that he “Fell down stairs and stopped growing. Now he fell into a grave and wants to grow again.”

Perhaps the most poignant character as commentary is Fajngold. He’s a concentration camp survivor who comes to run the Matzerath grocery store. He still has delusions that his family surrounds him, in a way it’s a variation of a fatherless generation, but this time it’s a vanished generation that will never grace German soil in a significant way again.