Summary Of The Tin Drum By Günther Grass

There is one scene in Günther Grass’s ‘The Tin Drum’ (1999, 338–-339) that makes for a great preamble to this chapter’s discussion of the will-to-not-know, the name under which I condense the mechanisms that allow the bourgeois to remain unmoved by the spectacle of violence. During Bebra theatrical troupe’s wartime tour of the Normandy Atlantic Wall line of German defence, Oskar, Grass’ main hero, and his fiancée compose a little sarcastic poem that sums up the situation of the German soldiers and, more generally of the liberal population in times of war. Despite living in concrete fortifications and among barbed wire; despite extreme violence and death becoming mundane events, the bourgeoisie continues to dream of landscaped gardens, refrigerators
and the happy hours bestowed by an electric plug. Even during the open display of atrocity, the poem concludes, the thought of comfort is like a drug and the trend is towards bourgeois-smug.
The grotesque placing side by side of a homely list of bourgeois desires with the brutality of war is a classical avant-garde derision of the modern order. However, today’s subjects could easily recognize themselves in a trend towards bourgeois smugness that equates being with fetishistic fantasies of comfort, refrigerators, and electric plugs. At the end of Grass’ vignette, we are shown the Bebra troupe gluttonously devouring an obscenely opulent picnic, while a group of nuns collecting crabs around the fortifications to feed the children in their kindergarten are massacred pre-emptively by the German forces. The troupe plays the gramophone loudly (‘The Great Pretender’ by The Platters) to cover the machine-gun noise and, probably, the absurdity of the violence they witness. Their ability to pretend that this typically modern massacre is not happening depends on getting engrossed to the level of autism in the bourgeois comforts of music, food, chat and play. Vice-versa, deriving enjoyment from these habits depends on one’s ability to ignore that in the process of producing bourgeois comfort, the modern dispositifs produce
massacres.
It will be seen that the typical modern conducts that end up in the mortification and/or annihilation of others and sometimes of oneself are so resilient and addictive not because of ignorance, that is, lack of education, experience, knowledge or information, but because the bourgeois extracts enjoyment from them. Obtaining enjoyment in this manner does involve a choice, but one that the bourgeois struggles to forget. The consequences for a politics of radical anticapitalist transformation are important, since the will-to-not-know neutralizes the customary liberal argument that modern evils are due to certain people’s lack of education, an argument that the contemporary left eagerly imitates. While the purpose of this book is not to propose tactics, it is to signal that it is never soon enough for experimenting with new political-libidinal forms.