Oskar Matzerath, confined to a mental institution, narrates his life story: he decided at age three to stop growing, received a tin drum he never stopped beating, and possessed a glass-shattering scream. Through his unreliable eyes, we witness the rise of Nazism, the destruction of Danzig, the postwar German economic miracle. Grass's prose is exuberant, grotesque, and blackly comic. The novel scandalized Germany upon publication and made Grass famous overnight. It remains one of the most ambitious attempts to reckon with German guilt through fiction.