What happens in Chapter 2 of The Tin Drum?
Chapter 2, "Under the Raft," takes us back to the origins of Oskar Matzerath's grandmother, Anna Bronski, even before Oskar's birth. On a grey October afternoon in the Kashubian countryside, a fugitive named Joseph Koljaiczek—on the run from two gendarmerie officers pursuing him for arson and identity fraud—hides beneath Anna's four skirts as she sits by a fire in a potato field. When the officers question her, she responds with an impenetrable calm that allows Koljaiczek to escape their notice. This moment is also significant in another way: it marks the conception of Oskar's mother, Agnes. Koljaiczek later reappears as a Polish nationalist saboteur, slipping away by diving under a raft on the Motlau River during a patriotic rally. His fate remains uncertain—he may have drowned or fled to America to become a wealthy lumber magnate. The chapter ends on this ambiguous note, with Oskar reflecting that the actual truth of Koljaiczek’s fate matters less than the powerful myth the story conveys.
Analysis
Grass begins his novel's generational saga not with birth but with concealment, a deliberate choice. The four skirts of Anna Bronski serve as the novel's first and most striking symbol: a portable shelter, a womb-before-the-womb, a space where history eludes authority. The fact that Oskar's lineage starts with a man hiding from the law beneath a woman's clothing immediately challenges ideas of origin, legitimacy, and national identity—issues Grass will explore throughout the Danzig trilogy.
The prose already operates at its signature double-time: Oskar narrates from his present in the asylum, yet his voice carries the excitement of a storyteller who knows the story is richer than the mere facts. Grass uses this unreliability not to confuse but to assert that myth-making is, in itself, a historical act. Koljaiczek's final dive under the raft echoes the opening dive beneath the skirts, creating a structural rhyme that frames the chapter as a loop of evasion—this family's foundational act is one of repetition rather than resolution.
The tone subtly shifts from the earthy comedy of the potato-field scene to something more elegiac as Koljaiczek disappears into the river. Grass doesn’t mourn him outright; instead, he presents the competing legends (drowned / lumber baron) with equal deadpan seriousness, teaching the reader early on that The Tin Drum will always favor the creative lie over the sterile fact.
Key quotes from Chapter 2
“My grandmother had four skirts. She wore them one over the other according to some system based on the season and the day of the week.”
Oskar introduces Anna Bronski's skirts as a near-mythological garment before Koljaiczek ever arrives, establishing them as a symbol of shelter and concealment central to the chapter.
“Koljaiczek hid under the skirts and found his way to the spot that all men seek and some find and which, for him, was both a hiding place and a beginning.”
Grass collapses erotic encounter and fugitive concealment into a single sentence, making conception and evasion structurally identical acts.
“Whether he drowned, whether he reached America, whether he built up a lumber business there—all that is uncertain; what is certain is that he dove into the water and did not come up again on the Motlau side.”
Oskar closes Koljaiczek's story with deliberate ambiguity, signalling the novel's preference for productive myth over verifiable history.
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Create an accountSign inVocabulary in Chapter 2
- gendarmerie
- A military-style police force, especially one operating in continental Europe, responsible for law enforcement in rural or regional areas.
- Kashubian
- Relating to Kashubians, a Slavic ethnic group from the region of northern Poland near Danzig, with their own distinct language and folk culture.