Ragged Soldier-Souls

The section of The Tin Drum between pages 314 and 324 features a change in narrative structure in the novel. In this section Oskar recounts a dialogue he has recorded of a visit he and Bebra’s troupe made to the Atlantic seawall the night before the Allies’ European invasion. The action of writing down this event as a precise dialogue echoes a theme within this section about looking back at the war and returning from the war to civilian life—how do people pick up the pieces? Grass makes connections between the built, concrete landscape (“these pillboxes will still be standing because pillboxes always remain standing, even when everything else collapses” [317]) and the way that memories, particularly those horrific memories of war, remain long after the end.

            The Corporal Lankes presents the strongest example of this theme. Lankes tries to make art out of the drudgery of building pillboxes: “I’m hoping to use my knowledge working with cement when it’s over. Everything’s going to have to be rebuilt back home” (314). This statement presents a complex concept about the outcome of the war. To say that he will use his knowledge of cement when the war is over implies a belief that he will survive, will go on to do a practical everyman’s job—construction. However, to suggest that Germany will need to be rebuilt speaks to a pessimistic outlook on the outcome of the war. As we learn, Lankes is an artist who could never have become part of the Nazi Propaganda Corps because “[his] stuff’s too oblique for present tastes” (316). However, if what Oskar is doing by recording this conversation could be considered art—after all it is part of a Nobel Prize winning novel—then what Lankes is doing is also recording, creating art, by embedding his “Oblique Formations” (318) into the bland, concrete walls of the enduring pillboxes. Lankes describes this art as work that

One fine day a so-called archaeologist will arrive and say to himself, What an artistically impoverished age…then he’ll run across [Bunkers 4-7], he’ll see my structurally oblique formations, and say to himself: Let’s have a look at this. Interesting. One might almost say magical; menacing, yet imbued with striking spirituality. (318)

            The connection Grass seems to make is that Lankes will go on to make art after the war, since he is an artist. Yet he will work art out of the cement that represents this hard, brutal Normandy front, a front where frolicking nuns are mowed down by machineguns, where puppies are filled into the cement out of hardened, superstition and summarize this experience as, “Mystical, Barbaric, Bored” (318). The idea of encasing small, innocent animals into the cement also represents the way in which the soldiers literally build a perilous concrete wall around the soft territory, the homeland they are to preserve and protect, and metaphorically, an impenetrable barrier around that softened vulnerability that makes them human. Grass extends this metaphor when Lankes states, “Most of my comrades are country boys. And even today, when they build a house or a barn or a village church, they feel they have to wall something living” (315). Grass suggests from this statement that this formation, abiotic and heavy, comes back home with these soldiers after the war.

            For Grass to suggest that Lankes wants to put his experiences to work in the form of architecture is to say that the act of making art is as important, as essential as construction to the foundations of civilization. In recording memory, Grass implies that Oskar and Lankes take the oblique formation that is memory in our head and give it solid, visible form. To put this idea within the context of Oskar’s art and within the context of Lankes as an artist thrust into the war, Grass seems to suggest that these ravaged soldier-souls, these images and memories, become a ruthlessly ugly art in themselves.