I was going out with my parents, and my father turned on the radio.
"A plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center," the broadcaster began to announce.
"Turn it off," I told my dad. "Turn it off right now."
It hit me that 9/11 was an event that made me feel uncomfortable. I wanted to repress any feelings associated with it, but I couldn't. It was something that we attempt to forget about, but know we shouldn't. I realized that this was the type of event Grass and Marquez criticizes humanity for repressing. It's the events that impact us in a way that's almost unreal, and even though we may not have taken part directly in them, we still have a duty to remember them.
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I feel like the natural human instinct is to deny, deny, deny. In the case of 9/11, the reaction is to reject that the traumatic event ever even happened. Whether the blame lies on another community or their own, the suffering still falls on people who feel the effects of violence. Some people want to push pain and suffering to the back of their minds, while others want revenge against the perpetrators instead of first healing themselves. In The Tin Drum, however, the German people were both the perpetrators and the "ones to blame." What results is guilt and self hate that not only forces them to hide the memories of the war, but also to never be able to heal the wounds that people from the same community inflicted on others among with their own community.
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