On his third birthday, at three feet tall, Oskar decides to stop growing. On the same day, he receives his first tin drum. Together with his piercing scream, he wields his drum as an anarchic weapon, drawing forth memories from the past and passing judgement on the horrors, injustices and eccentricities he observes through the long nightmare of the Nazi era. Oskar participates in the German post-war economic miracle, working variously in the black market, as an artist's model, in a troupe of travelling musicians, yet he remains haunted by the deaths of his parents and afflicted by his responsibility for past sins.