The Migrant Vision in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum

“The telling of stories, the real telling, must have been before my time. I never heard anyone tell stories.”

- Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Salman Rushdie once claimed that Günter Grass “is a figure of central importance in the literature of migration” (277). However, Rushdie’s assertion—more than a quarter of a century old—has not yet been given the attention it deserves, and the role of migration in Grass’s works is yet to be explored more methodically. This article, with its focus on The Tin Drum (1959), seeks to alleviate this neglect by examining the distinctive “migrant’s vision” (Rushdie 280)—that is, the Weltanschauung or world-view—that Rushdie sees underlying Grass’s work in general, permeating every aspect of his novels’ thematic framework and formal design.

The work of Grass is deracinated historiography, history written by the uprooted and the displaced. Grass’s novels are populated by migrant characters and thus deal thematically with issues of rootlessness, exile, memory, and nostalgia. In general, the novels are preoccupied with the impurities and transformations of personal, national, and cultural identity, and these identities “happen” in a historical time primarily characterized as chaotic and catastrophic and in a territorial space defined by collisions, hybridities, and segmentations. On the formal level the migrant vision can be detected in the novels’ hybrid language as Grass mixes Polish, Cassubian, and German just as his characters often speak specific dialects of those languages (a feature not always manifest in the English translations). The Grassian heteroglossia plays an important role in the novels’ intercultural constitution: The different languages relativize each other, and together they make up a contrapuntal space of divergent worlds and world views. In addition, the overall narrative form can be characterized as an expression of what Georg Lukács termed “the transcendental homelessness of the idea” (121)—that is, the underlying migrant vision entails a literary form that has a dynamic and fluid character because unable to find conclusive rest in a transcendental home (e.g. God, the nation, marriage, or love).

However, this article concentrates neither on language nor on overall narrative form but on the enunciatory strategies with specific regard to the narrator’s position and point of view in The Tin Drum. The principal question that this article will pursue is how the narrator contributes to the migrant vision in Grass’s novels, and it will do so by first setting up a theoretical framework comprising Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno’s reflections on the storyteller and the narrator, second by introducing other novelists’ narrative strategies and thereby situating Grass within the historical traditions of the novel, and, third, by analyzing key passages in The Tin Drum.

Benjamin believed that storytelling was coming to an end during the period of modernity. It seemed to him as if we no longer possessed the ability to exchange experiences, which was due to the fact that the value of experience had decreased. When Benjamin looked at the contemporary and the nineteenth-century literary landscape, his eyes fell on writers such as Gustave Flaubert, the demolisher of the (Goethean) Bildungsroman, and Rainer Maria Rilke, who never heard anyone tell a story. In that light what Benjamin wrote in the mid-1930s about storytelling’s demise does not seem far-fetched. To him, the story (as opposed to the novel) is characterized by a particular usefulness and wisdom, something that the storyteller is able to pass on to the listener because he knows how to give a practical advice or a morale. In short, the storyteller knows how to counsel: he knows how to tell a story in which the listener is able to sense the contours of a universal truth—moral or practical. Benjamin did not believe that this specific potential of storytelling is part of the novel’s constitutive features because it no longer seemed possible to communicate the kind of counselling that characterizes the story: “The earliest indication of a process whose end is the decline of storytelling is the rise of the novel at the...