3 - Bildung, Heimat, and Gendered Modes of German Memory in The Tin Drum

Summary

IN THE TIN DRUM, memories are embodied, and bodies are gendered. To explore the many implications of this basic insight is the focus of this chapter. Here I examine the protagonist Oskar's corporeal memories with an emphasis on his male gender and his heterosexual masculinity. The previous chapter showed that the narrative treats Oskar's corporeal memories, and the underlying trauma they reveal, as potential resistance to the hegemonic public memory of the Adenauer era. Disrupting and transforming how Germans remembered their collective past also affected how they would imagine their national identity. As I suggest in this book's introduction, gender played a significant role in these processes.

As the introduction also shows, the complex, gendered discourses on Bildung (education or formation) and Heimat (homeland) have been part of how Germans have imagined their cultural and national identity going back to the eighteenth century. During the West German Adenauer era, both Bildung and Heimat remained relevant as people attempted to draw on German traditions that could help pave a way forward for the nation, while they also longed for a seemingly more innocent time and tried to cope with wartime losses of many kinds. At this time, when Grass wrote The Tin Drum, the gendered social constructs Bildung and Heimat would have simply appeared as something natural to many readers. Consequently, as a talented male writer, Grass was in a position to use his “male privilege” and appropriate this gendered discourse, with implications both for how readers would view the German nation and for how they would view him. In this chapter, beginning with the relation of male-coded Bildung to Oskar's narrative and then turning to femalecoded Heimat, I will explore how Grass employed both of these constructs in The Tin Drum to influence how Germans would remember and understand their recent past and national identity.

The Tin Drum and the Bildungsroman in the Adenauer Era

With The Tin Drum, Grass intervened in the cultural politics of West Germany, putting himself on the path toward eventually becoming a German icon, a nationally representative author who would be discussed for a time as the “mascot of the republic” and the “conscience of the nation.”