The Tin Drum
Oskar’s drum itself seems like an impossibly complex symbol because the instrument is thoroughly integrated into the various thematic lines the narrative pursues. Rather than thinking about what the drum can do, it helps to focus on how Oskar could lose the ability to do those semi-magic things the drum facilitates. Also think about it in context: the rise of fascist Germany. The Nazis stole the childhood of an entire generation of Germans and Oskar’s story is about a revolt against that theft. The drum is representative of every object that has ever been used by any child as protection against the theft of the innocence. (For a frame of reference, think in terms of Linus Van Pelt and how fundamentally different he would be if that blanket were violently ripped away, never to be returned.)
The Onion Cellar
People pay for the privilege of slicing onions for no other purpose than to produce tears. Tears are a symbol of many things, of course, and just exactly what depends on the person. For Nazis, for instance, tears undoubtedly symbolized weakness and further justified the acts of evil they perpetrated upon the weak. For normal human beings, tears are a sign of humanity; if something can make you cry, it is a sign of empathy. The Nazis engineered a state of being that enforced dehumanizing and it could work on a number of levels. If you cry over what you saw, you may wind up getting treated the same way. Learning not to show emotion because of such fear is such an abomination that it might very become an near-permanent state. The onion cellar is symbolic of being human. Of crying. Of feeling empathy. Of feeling.
Oskar’s Scream
It is not just that Oskar develops an inhuman capacity for scream like no one else. The real symbolic value is the consequence, not the action: “when I screamed something quite valuable would burst into pieces.” The ability to shatter not just any glass, but glass that reveals the worth of something is intricately connected to the events of Kristallnacht, also known as the Night of Broken Glass, in which an unprecedented attack Jews in Germany, symbolically and literally destroying their worthiness in the eyes of many Germans who looked on and did nothing.
Oskar
Oskar is two things at once without really ever being either one. His bizarre childlike appearance endows him with expectations of innocence on those who see him. That he is clearly and adult—and a rather deviant one at times—is a revelation of what inevitably happens to the innocent. In essence, despite desperately fighting against becoming an adult, Oskar was never really anything but that. He never really was an innocent, but became capable of projecting it successfully for much longer than normal. Fraudulent innocence and hidden deviance: Oskar is a symbol of those Germans who looked on, did nothing, then told the world they tried to stop it and never really went along of their own will.
Oskar and Klepp’s Photo Montages
Very early in the story, Oskar relates how he and Klepp “bent and folded those little pictures, cut them up with the scissors…pieced old and new likenesses together… creating new, and we hoped happier, creatures.” This mixing and mingling of visual narratives to create an entire new one—one created with a specific purpose and intent—reflects Oskar’s unreliability as a narrator who often retells a story so the end is the same, but the details on getting there cast him in a completely different light. The photo montages and this narrative technique work in tandem together as symbolic representations of the efforts of post-war Germans to recast themselves out of their roles of disinterested observers coerced into a lack of empathy at best and complicit agents of the Nazi ideology at worst. Like Oskar’s completed photo montage featuring bizarre versions of himself with “one eye or three [and] ears for noses, the rebooted German narrative of an entire population trying and failing to stop things just doesn’t seem quite right.
