As a young man I tried to read Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum two times and failed miserably both the times. I was not intelligent enough to understand the subtle depths of a novel that narrated the story of a man who had chosen on his third birthday not to grow up any more. His toy tin drum became his best friend or his means of expressing his protest at the political chaos that surrounded him. Eventually he allows himself to be falsely convicted of the murder of the woman whom he loved and ends up in a mental asylum. The pipe was Grass's most abiding companion The novel put me off so much that I never read anything that Grass wrote. Yet I felt sad when allegations of Nazism and inveterate hypocrisy were levelled against him a decade back when he admitted in his autobiography that at the age of 17 he had been drafted into Hitler’s Waffen-SS towards the end of the second World War. He was accused of trying to sell more copies of the book by making the confession, accu
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