Rereading Günter Grass'sDie Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1959) a few years ago along with a group of students engaged on a module comparing this, Grass's hugely successful debut novel, with his 2006 memoir Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion), I was struck by several lines coming just after Oskar demonstrates his glass-breaking skills: “Aus bloßem Spieltrieb, dem Manierismus einer Spätepoche verfallend, dem L'art pour l'art ergeben, sang Oskar sich dem Glas ins Gefüge und wurde älter dabei” (Succumbing to the mannerism of a late period, a devotee of l'art pour l'art, out of pure playfulness, Oskar sang glass back to its original structure, and grew older as he did so). As I looked back from somewhere close to the end of Grass's life (he was born in 1927), these words seemed to me to raise interesting questions about the way we routinely associate growing older with a mannerism of artistic and personal freedom from convention. These questions went beyond what Grass probably intended in Die Blechtrommel, but looking back from his own “late period,” I wondered whether they might still offer a useful way into the author's “old-age writing” and perhaps even a way of rereading his earliest texts, including Die Blechtrommel. What relationship, if any, might there be between an artist's biological age and his or her “style”? Is mannerism the only (or at least most likely) “old-age style”? What does old-age style do, that is, to what end is it deployed, or perhaps performed?