What happens in Chapter 16 of The Tin Drum?
In "Growth Resumed," Oskar Matzerath faces the physical and psychological effects of his self-imposed stunted growth. After years of intentionally halting his development at the age of three, Oskar realizes he can’t maintain the illusion of childhood forever. This chapter highlights the moment his body starts to reclaim its natural growth — a change he attributes to the death of his presumed father, Alfred Matzerath, during the chaotic Soviet advance into Danzig. With Alfred's body still warm, Oskar tosses his tin drum into the grave and, almost as a reaction to this burial, begins to grow again. This transformation isn’t triumphant or neat: Oskar's spine bends, a hump appears, and his growth is more grotesque than healing. He emerges from the war's wreckage not as a restored man but as something peculiar — a hunchbacked dwarf, a figure whose body embodies the deformities of the era that shaped him. The chapter concludes the Danzig section of the novel and shifts toward the postwar West German world, bringing Oskar's unreliable, sardonic narration along into this new, unfamiliar landscape.
Analysis
Grass engineers "Growth Resumed" as a pivotal chapter, where its craft hinges on the clash between the biological and the symbolic. Oskar’s growth represents not liberation, but mutation—the hump that forms is the novel's most vivid image of how history distorts those who endure it. In earlier chapters, the drum served as a shield against time, but its discarding here indicates that this childish defense mechanism has worn out; Oskar can no longer cling to a stunted childhood now that the adult world has literally buried him.
The tonal shift is stark. The black comedy that has characterized Oskar's narration—the gleeful unreliability, the carnival grotesque—gives way to a more subdued and unsettling tone. Grass lets grief emerge without sentimentality, especially in Oskar's conflicted feelings toward Alfred, whose fatherhood was always debated. The burial scene condenses mourning, relief, and self-reinvention into a single act.
Structurally, the chapter mirrors what it describes: the prose gains a forward momentum after the recursive, looping quality of Oskar's childhood sections. Sentence lengths increase; the present-tense interruptions from the asylum feel less frequent. Grass also uses the hump as an intertextual reference—Richard III shadows Oskar's new image—connecting personal deformity to a long literary tradition of the monstrous body as a political symbol. The chapter avoids simplistic allegory while making it hard to overlook: postwar Germany, too, has resumed growth from a grotesque, unhealed wound.
Key quotes from Chapter 16
“I tossed my drum into the grave. It struck Alfred Matzerath's back, lay still, and did not drum.”
Oskar discards his drum into his father's grave — the act that simultaneously ends his performed childhood and initiates his physical growth.
“I decided to grow. I would at last follow the example of all those who had brought their growth to a conclusion before me.”
Oskar announces his decision to resume growing, framing it with characteristic irony as a belated conformity to the human norm.
“My hump was not long in coming. It grew as Germany grew, and when Germany had finished growing, my hump was finished too.”
Oskar explicitly links his bodily deformity to the trajectory of postwar West Germany, the novel's most direct alignment of personal and national history.