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"The Tin Drum" is a novel written by Nobel Prize winner and German writer Günter Grass. It is the first part of his "Danzig Trilogy". In 1980, a film of the same name based on the novel was adapted for the screen and won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. When the Swiss Academy of Literature awarded Grasse the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 1999, it said that "The Tin Drum is one of the most important works of world literature after World War II." The whole book consists of three parts and forty-six chapters. The author uses flashback techniques to allow the protagonist to narrate the events that occurred on the border of Germany and Poland and the Danzig area for more than half a century in the first-person "I" tone on two planes of time and space. The first plane is from 1952 to 1954, when the protagonist Oscar Matzerath squatted in a mental hospital and wrote his memories because he took responsibility for his crimes. The second plane is the content of Oscar's memories: he wrote from the wedding of his maternal grandparents in 1899 until he entered the hospital in 1952.

Professor Alexander is a German widower who returns to his hometown of Danzig to visit his relatives. He falls in love with the widowed Polish artist Alexandra and becomes happily married. After their marriage, they established a German-Polish cemetery company to help young people who left home return to their roots. The number of relocations is increasing day by day. Not only the elderly Danzig returned from Germany and entered a nursing home to spend his old age, but the descendants of the "removed" are also flocking here. They built massively on the former German territory, and villas and golf courses sprung up all over the place. Voices such as "Germans are occupying land in colonial ways" were heard in the Polish Parliament. The Alexanders were driving to Naples to escape the stress and heard the sound of bombe toads on the road - which locals believed was a bad omen.