The beat of the drum

WHEN he was young, Günter Grass was taken by his mother to see “Tom Thumb” at the Stadttheater in Danzig. It delighted him. The Grimm Brothers’ tiny boy, unseen, tricked and adventured his way through life, a gadfly getting into places nobody else could. He crept into a horse’s ear, rode in triumph on the brim of a hat, was eaten by a cow, and in the end reappeared grinning from the belly of a wolf.

Tom also lodged in Mr Grass’s brain; and in 1959 he reappeared as Oskar Matzerath, the diminutive hero of his first and most celebrated novel, “The Tin Drum”. Oskar, at three, refused to grow any more, and became a small, irritating, persistent witness to 20th-century events that most Germans wished to forget. Crouched under a rostrum in 1933, he watched brownshirts and blackshirts at a rally. Hidden in a toyshop corner in 1938, he saw the Jewish owner abused and taken away, the shop smashed and fouled and the dolls disembowelled. In September 1939, curled asleep in a basket of letters in Danzig’s Polish post office, he heard and felt the shelling as the Nazis invaded.