SOURCE: "Live with Matzerath?" and "Don't Ask Oskar," in Günter Grass, translated by John Conway, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1969, pp. 1-12, 67-84.

In the following excerpt, Tank discusses the reaction of European critics to The Tin Drum. He also examines Grass's working methods, the process of the novel's composition, and the book's main themes.

In Oskar, the tin drummer, Günter Grass has succeeded in creating a peculiar and indeed original figure, at once very simple and highly complex. It is a figure which invites the most varied and contradictory interpretations—and yet which resists all interpretations, preserving its secret like a figure in a fairy tale while calling forth other figures from fairy tales and folk rhymes: a witch master whom the Black Cook of the nursery rhymes bewitches and dominates, who can shatter glass by singing and work wonders, wonders that we believe of him...