Crabwalk (Paperback)

Moving, crab-like, back and forth, following the seemingly random order of speaker Paul Pokriefke's recollections, Grass brings his story and characters to life, expanding our view of the war and its aftermath, and showing how Germany's sociopolitical thinking has changed (or not changed) from the war to the present. Actively involving the reader in deciphering Paul's memories and imposing some order on them, Grass reveals the lives of the historical characters involved in the disaster, provides intense and moving descriptions of the disaster itself, and establishes the on-going saga of Paul and his family, all directly affected by the disaster.

The past and our willingness to learn from it, our changing definitions of "martyr" and "hero," the nature of punishment and atonement, and the impermanence of monuments and memorials are all major themes here, related both to the sinking of the Gustloff and to the events in the lives of the Pokriefke family. As is always the case with Grass, the themes are fully developed, the novel is fascinating for its insights, and it is often dramatic and moving. Grass's assessment of the current generation, as seen through his depiction of the speaker's son, is both startling and alarming in its implications. Mary Whipple

On the night of 30 January, three Soviet torpedoes sunk the liner. Around 1,200 people were rescued. The rest - mostly women and young children - died in the freezing Baltic.

It was the worst maritime disaster in history. And yet, until recently, it was a story that remained largely taboo in post-war Germany. That changed however, when Nobel laureate Günter Grass took on the episode.

In Crabwalk, Grass takes up the story of Tulla Pokriefke, first seen in his earlier Cat and Mouse. Now a pregnant refugee on the ship, she gives birth to a son, Paul, in the midst of the disaster. His life is forever overshadowed by the circumstances of his birth, no matter how hard he tries to ignore his place in history. Then Paul’s own son, Konrad, develops an obsession with the disaster.

The ship had been built as a cruise liner for the nazis’ Strength Through Joy organisation and was named after a nazi ‘martyr’, who had been shot by a young Jewish student. Konrad, banned by his teachers from mentioning anything about the ship and the disaster at school, slides toward neo-nazism as he seeks to tell the story and seek some form of retribution for the deaths.

And so, with an awful sense of inevitability, history begins to repeat itself.

Grass’s premise is partly that, because acknowledgement of the suffering of ordinary Germans during the war was considered less important than breast-beating and guilt, the far right has been gifted an opportunity for propaganda. It is also a criticism of the way that the rise of nazism and the history of the war is taught in German schools, and of what Grass sees as the political correctness that has helped to bury German suffering beneath collective guilt.

But it is also a striking illustration of how the suffering of war knows no boundaries, be they national or ethnic.

Crabwalk is an astonishing, challenging book - harrowing in places - that makes for compulsive reading and is perfect proof, were it needed, that Grass has lost none of his power.

Why Crabwalk? Here's a definition of "crab:" "to move sideways, diagonally, or obliquely, especially with short, abrupt bursts of speed." Crabwalk's structure is similar. Grass offers a clue in referring to "scuttling backward to move forward."

Paul Pokreife, a journeyman journalist, narrates several parallel tracks: his life, his mother's (Tulla), his son's (Konrad), his ex-wife's, the ship Wilhelm Gustloff, the Nazi Wilhelm Gustloff (and his monument and remains), Gustloff's assassin (David Frankfurter), the Soviet submarine commander who sunk the ship (Marinesko), and Konrad's online challenger (Wolfgang "David" Stremplin) and his parents. Sometimes Mr. Grass jumps sideways sharing several stories at that time. Other times he jumps forward or backward to a different time or story. . . and then goes sideways to other stories. It's like stream of consciousness narration except it's finished prose and dialogue. . . rather than thought fragments.

This structure establishes many connections between one person and another to show an interconnected fabric of German society and consciousness since 1933 in the context of a few events, a family and a few other characters. I felt like I had just absorbed the richness of War and Peace . . . except in a relatively short and simple book.

Crabwalk can be read at several levels of meaning. The most compelling story relates the terrible tragedy of the sinking of the German refugee ship, Wilhelm Gustoloff, in January 1945 on the frigid Baltic by a Soviet submarine. More than 1200 survived while most others (estimated between 6,600 and 10,600) died from explosions, equipment faults, rescue mistakes, freezing, drowning, or the icy waters. Of these, more than 4,000 were probably children. There were only 22 lifeboats on board, and only one was launched properly. You'll have to read Crabwalk to appreciate the tragedy, but it dwarfs the Titanic. Yet it's a little-known event. The Germans made no announcement then to help maintain civilian morale. The Soviets were embarrassed and hid the event. Post-war Germany has kept a code of silence around any German civilians suffering as a result of the war, seeming to reflect the national guilt for starting the war.

Paul's being born the night of the sinking, aboard a rescue ship, links him to the Nazi past (through the anniversaries of the Nazi rise to power and Gustloff's death), the consequences of the sinking on the survivors, and the sinking's effect on the next generation of Germans. This connection is the bridge to other ways to read the book.

At another level, it's a story of a dysfunctional family: A woman who wasn't sure who the father is of her only son; a son estranged from his mother by her disappointment in him and his rejection of her values; a fatherless son becoming a poor father and failed husband; and a grandson reaching out to a grandmother for the emotional support his father fails to give him.

At a third level, Crabwalk is about the experience of the German nation since January 1933 when the Nazis took over. We go through the economic recovery years as Tulla's parents take a cruise to the Norwegian fjords aboard the Wilhelm Gustloff. Tulla grows up during the war and has a miscarriage while being a streetcar conductor. She becomes pregnant with Paul, and after the rescue are settled in East Germany where she becomes a carpenter and a devoted Stalinist. Paul escapes to the West as a teenager, and the two becomes estranged. Tulla also admires the old Nazis after East Germany falls and tries to fascinate her grandson with the ship's history. She succeeds through giving him a computer, and Konrad runs a Web site about the ship and the man it's named for. At the same time, you find out how Gustloff becomes a Nazi martyr after he's assassinated by a Jewish medical student in Davos. Ironically, Frankfurter's health improves by being in prison. He's released after World War II by the Swiss and heads to Palestine.

At a fourth level, this is a story about how our lives are influenced by our environment (our family, our nation, our history and our ways of perceiving).

At a fifth level, Crabwalk teaches us to think about the consequences of when and where we're born. If Paul had been born a few hours later, he would have spent his whole life in the western sectors of Germany rather than starting in the east. He believes his whole life would have been different . . . and it probably would have.

At a sixth level, Crabwalk explains that history repeats itself through the influences of the earlier generations on another. There are many deliberate ironies in the book as one character acts out variations on what an earlier character did (especially the way Konrad mimics David Frankfurter).

Ultimately, the book is about guilt. Who's guilt is it? And for what? What's to be done to atone? "History, or, to be more precise, the history we Germans have repeatedly mucked up, is a clogged toilet." "We flush and flush, but the [content]. . . keeps rising." In particular, should Germans deny their own suffering in World War II as a means to expiate guilt, or will that denial lead to new guilty actions?

The book profoundly expanded my understanding of the German experience. As a young man in Munich on business, I found my sleep troubled and interrupted by dreams and memories of Nazi marchers on the street outside, death camps in the countryside and murderous attacks on fellow Germans. Some taxi drivers who were old enough to have been in the Wehrmacht looked at me with obvious hate. Clients my age were very punctiliously correct anti-Nazis (we even visited events criticizing the Nazi past together). On the streets, young skinheads passed wearing swastikas. Crabwalk helped me to understand what was happening then and now.