5 - Oskar as Fool, Harlequin, and Trickster, and the Politics of Sanity

Summary

The clown may dare to challenge the nomos of the gods as did the hero in Greek tragedy but, like the hero of tragedy, he must not eventually get away with such freedom. While the hero suffers his catastrophe in grand style, the clown is chased around the ring before an applauding audience. What a spectacle, what a twofold pleasure, to experience vicariously the assault on order and to witness simultaneously the reduction to nothingness of the transgressor!

The Politics of Sanity

InDie blechtrommel Grass harks back to the Grimms' international vision of the folk-tale and revives the Kunstmärchen, the literary tales by Wilhelm Hauff. He revives the grotesque in the dwarf tale that the Nazis suppressed or misinterpreted and makes use of a key theme in the literary history of the dwarf tale. The dwarf is typically seen as not only physically disabled but, because he looks like a child, as mentally less developed, even insane as well. It is interesting in this context that Oskar Matzerath is not only persecuted by the Nazis, but also locked up in an institution in the postwar years. It is from within this institution that he tells his whole story. In Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault has traced the archaeology of madness in the West, from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when insanity was still a part of everyday life, when all sorts of mad people populated the streets of Europe, to the time when such people began to be considered as a threat, asylums were built, and a wall was erected between the insane and the rest of humanity (MC).