The Tin Drum summarised the 20th century in three words

Whether it's the greatest is open to debate, but one could argue that Günter Grass's The Tin Drum is the great novel of the 20th century. By that I mean it most completely defines the era in all its glories and catastrophes – the moods, atmospheres, manias, streams, currents, histories and under-histories.

First published 50 years ago this week (on 6 October 1959), it is, technically, an incredible piece of art, a melange of bildungsroman, memoir, allegory, grotesquerie and pure reverie. On a superficial level it tells the story of Oskar Matzerath: incarcerated maniac, self-created dwarf, paranoiac, possessor of supernatural gifts, vindictive genius, fallen angel, miniature tyrant, obsessive beater of the titular drum. Oskar is all of these things and none of them; the ultimate unreliable narrator.

The book charts his progress, and that of the independent port city of Danzig/Gdansk, and greater Germany, and the world as a whole. It is odd, profound, sprawling, poetic, often unnerving. But more than this, never have I read something that so exquisitely and lucidly captures the dazed, eerie strangeness of our misfortunate times.

To paraphrase Francis Ford Coppola's line about Apocalypse Now, The Tin Drum is not about the 20th century; it is the 20th century. We begin, after an introductory preamble, with Oskar's grandmother Anna in a Polish potato field, working by hand. (Throughout the novel, Grass uses the leitmotif of how she smelled, not unpleasantly, of "slightly rancid butter"; a reminder, a link back, a sociological memory-trace.) We end after the second world war, when the planet is exhausted, cynical, indifferent, blood-crazed (and Oskar still remembers how his grandmother smelled).

Through the eyes and words of the anti-hero, Grass delineates and gives life to the evolution of the century: from agricultural to industrial, traditional to cosmopolitan, feudal to postmodern. Like Oskar and his family and associates, the reader accelerates toward modernity. The mechanical quickening of industrialisation. Mass production. Science awakened. Commerce invigorated. The world shrinking. The spread of democracy and virus of totalitarianism. Sleek beauty of the machine. Global conflict and conflagration. Hate made productive. Death and automation. Anxiety and modernity. And what we mistakenly believe to be the end of history.

We can take this further, reduce it to a harder point of truth. The most significant influence on the 20th century was totalitarian ideologies, and Oskar both reflects it and pushes against it. Writers from Philip Dick to George Orwell have written of how these ideologies, whether fascist or communist, wanted to step outside of history, leap from the normal current of human affairs, impose their subjective selves on the objective world. They wrote of how unnatural this was, how against life and reason.

Oskar steps "outside" time and history and nature from the moment of birth. The precocious infant decides in his cot to spend his life drumming, as a way of spiting his father's bourgeois ambitions. At the age of three he chooses to stop physically growing "in order not… to be driven… into the grocery business… I remained the precocious three-year-old, towered over by grown-ups but superior to all grown-ups, who refused to measure his shadow with theirs, who was complete both inside and outside." Like the political death-cult that shamed his country, he too is unnatural (Oskar later learns he can break or even inscribe glass by screaming at a high pitch). Yet he also rebels against the Nazi "family": at a party rally, he surreptitiously drums out his own beat, competing with the fascist marching band, confusing and disrupting, and transforms the inhuman rigour of Nazism into a joyful dance of life.

And let us reduce it further: "Chapter 27 – Inspection of Concrete, or Barbaric, Mystical, Bored." A title which says, for me, all that needs to be said about the modern world. Here, Oskar and a troupe of midget acrobats and entertainers visit the German "pillbox" defence posts in northern France, late on in the war, as his country's doom looms large. They meet corporal Lankes, a former artist who now views these brutally efficient standards of war and hatred as genuine, profound artworks.

The pillboxes marked with his graffiti and carvings will last forever, he believes; and archaeologists of the future will marvel at them, describing them thus: "Magic, menacing, and yet shot through with spirituality… In these works a genius, perhaps the only genius of the 20th century, has expressed himself clearly, resolutely and for all time." Lankes names his "installation" piece Structural Oblique Formations, with a subtitle: Barbaric, Mystical, Bored. To which Bebra, leader of the acrobatic troupe, replies: "You have given our century its name."

Barbaric, mystical, bored: here is the last century in summation. A schizophrenic, self-mutilating era in which man flew higher than was dreamed possible and plumbed depths unimaginable; slaughter beyond measure coupled with advances beyond comprehension; collective insanity and individual rationality; atavistic passions and detached irony; terror and humour. The black pall of mechanistic wickedness and the struggling but still-lit spark of humanity: as visceral and concrete as viscera and concrete, but as surreal as can be expected from the 10-decade fever-dream we all shared.

And just as The Tin Drum symbolises and defines the 20th century, so Lankes does the same for The Tin Drum. The corporal and Grass both wrench art, beauty and hope from indescribable ugliness and horror; and like the pillboxes, this book will endure forever.

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