Representation, Subversion, and Eugenics in Günter Grass's The Tin Drum
Author | : Peter O. Arnds |
Publisher | : Camden House |
Total Pages | : 200 |
Release | : 2004 |
ISBN-10 | : 1571132872 |
ISBN-13 | : 9781571132871 |
Rating | : 4/5 (72 Downloads) |
Book excerpt: In structure and content Grass's novel connects the persecution of degenerate art to the persecution and extermination of these "asocials," for whom the persecuted dwarf-protagonist Oskar Matzerath becomes a central metaphor and voice. This comparative study reveals that through intertextuality with the European fairy-tale tradition, the picaresque novels of Rabelais and Grimmelshausen, and through an array of carnivalesque figures Grass creates an irrational counterculture opposed to the rationalism of Nazi science and its obsession with racial hygiene, while simultaneously exposing the continuity of this destructive rationalism in postwar Germany and the absurdity of a Stunde Null, that putative tabula rasa of 1945."--BOOK JACKET.