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My Century and Crabwalk. The 1999 book My Century (Mein Jahrhundert) was an overview of the 20th-century's many brutal historic events, conveyed in short pieces, a mosaic of expression. In 2002, Grass returned to the forefront of world literature with Crabwalk (Im Krebsgang). Grass is struggling with the collective guilt of the German people. The narrator of the story is a hack journalist who is reluctantly drawn into researching the unusual circumstances of his birth, In a lifeboat, after the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff by a Russian sub in 1945.

'Crabwalk'

(Reviewed by Mary Whipple AUG 24, 2003)

Like the movement of a crab, this new novel by Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass 'scuttl[es] backward to move forward,' telling the story of the World War II sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff on January 30, 1945, and its long-term effects on three generations of one German family. In what was probably the greatest maritime disaster of all times, nine thousand men, women, and children perished when the ship was torpedoed on a trip to Norway.

Moving, crab-like, back and forth among details of the disaster, stories of the three characters involved in events leading up to it, and the on-going saga of the novel's speaker and his family, Grass brings his story and characters to life, expanding our view of the war and its aftermath, and showing how Germany's sociopolitical thinking changed (or didn't change) from the war to the present. Wilhelm Gustloff, for whom the fateful ship was named, was a party functionary in the early days of the Reich, recruiting thousands of Nazi members until 1936, when he was assassinated in Switzerland by a Jew, David Frankfurter. Nine years later, in 1945, Aleksandr Marinesko, a Soviet submarine captain, launched the torpedos which sank the Wilhelm Gustloff, named for the 'martyr' of 1936.

This disaster achieved a dramatic, almost mythic influence on three generations of the Pokriefke family. Slowly revealing this family's life, Grass introduces us to Tulla, the grandmother, who gave birth to her son Paul in a lifeboat as the Gustloff was sinking; Paul, the novel's speaker, who is a free-lance journalist, covering the 50th anniversary of the ship's demise; and Konrad, Paul's seventeen-year-old son, who is operating an internet chat room devoted to the Gustloff and its history. But just as Gustloff, Frankfurter, and Marinesko represent different political and military interests during World War II, each generation of the Pokriefke family represents a different political outlook and view of history after the war. Tulla, who remained in the Russian sector of Germany after the war, has always been a committed Socialist, a supporter of Stalin and Lenin; Paul, after escaping to West Germany, has steered a middle course in his life; and Konrad, influenced by his grandmother's activism while rejecting her politics, reflects a far right, neo-Nazi viewpoint.

Telling the story obliquely, Grass actively engages the reader in deciphering the characters, their relationships, and their political philosophies. As the speaker mines his memory for information and recalls stories told to him by his mother and others, his memories come in random order, as in real life. Sometimes they are incomplete, requiring the reader's patience and intuition in unfolding the story, and sometimes one event produces information related to several different strands of story. When Paul discovers the Comrades of Schwerin web site and deduces that it is his son who is operating it, for example, the reader gains significant information, not only about Konrad, and Paul's relationship with him, but also about the death of Gustloff and the events surrounding the eventual sinking of the ship.

Though the sinking of the Gustloff really happened, and resulted in many times the number of deaths that the Titanic did, it never received any publicity. The war was winding down, and the German Reich thought it would demoralize the German citizenry in the final days of the war if they knew the magnitude of the disaster. It is in Grass's intense and moving description of the sinking of the Gustloff, however, that this book comes most vividly to life. The majority of people aboard the ship were ordinary citizens taking part in the Strength Through Joy program, in which, for a very small sum, they could cruise in Norwegian waters, an unheard of luxury during the war's final, devastating days. Thousands of women and elderly men, four thousand infants and children, nine hundred sailors, many wounded, and almost four hundred members of the women's naval auxiliary were aboard, approximately ten thousand passengers in all. When disaster struck, most of the dead turned out to be 'women and children; men were rescued in embarrassingly large numbers, among them all four captains of the ship,' the men being the ones who could operate the lifeboats. Nine thousand people drowned or were frozen to death.

The passage of time, and its effect in dimming a country's collective memory remains a major focus here, as it is in other books by Grass. Paul comments on the fact that major figures during World War II, such as Robert Ley, the master of propaganda who invented the 'Heil, Hitler' greeting, among other things, have become virtually unknown to the present generation, despite their 'importance' only sixty years ago. 'Who still recalls the name of the leader of the German Labor Front?' he wonders. 'Along with Hitler, those whom people mention nowadays as all-powerful are Goebbels, Goring, Hess. On a television quiz show, if questions came up about Himmler or Eichmann, some contestants might have heard of them, but most would draw a total historical blank…'

Paul, who grew up in the generation after the war, continues to wonder how the German Labor Front was induced 'not only not to protest but even to cooperate, and soon to engage in mass rejoicing on command?' His son has no such concerns. And whereas his mother keeps the memory and story of the Gustloff alive, Paul, the speaker, believes his life would have been vastly different-and improved-'If I had disembarked at Flensburg perfectly normally, and Mother had given birth to me there.' When Paul views his son's web site and watches him skirmishing on-line with an opponent thought to be Jewish, he is appalled to discover the depth of hatred existing among contemporary young people like his son. 'As the sinking of the ship was dredged up for a new generation [on-line], the long-submerged [anti-Jewish] hate slogan…bubbled to the surface….Good God! How much of this has been dammed up all this time, is growing day by day, building pressure for action.'

The past and its influence on our present, our changing definitions of 'martyr' and 'hero,' the nature of punishment and atonement, and the impermanence of monuments and memorials in a changing political climate, are all major themes here, related both to the sinking of the Gustloff and to the events in the lives of the Pokriefke family. The lingering effects of Nazism on the populace at large through three generations raises questions of the rightness of Paul Pokriefke's approach, that of avoiding commitment: 'I steered a middle course, never slid all the way to the right or the left, didn't cause any collisions, swam with the current, let myself drift, kept my head above water…But then my son kicked up a storm.' As the nature of the 'storm' is revealed in this insightful and cautionary novel, Grass brings his themes full circle, boldly examining the social and political climate of contemporary Germany. His final assessment of the current generation is both startling and alarming in its implications.

• Amazon readers rating: from 31 reviews

Bibliography: (with links to Amazon.com)

• The Tin Drum (1959)*
• Cat and Mouse (1961)*
• Dog Years (1963)*
• Local Anaesthetic (1969)
• From The Diary of a Snail (1972)
• The Flounder (1977)
• The Meeting at Telgte (1979)
• Headbirths: Or, The Germans are Dying Out (1980)
• The Rat (1986)
• Show Your Tongue (1988)
• The Call of the Toad (1992)
• Too Far Afield (1995, 2000 in US)
• My Century (1999)
• Crabwalk (2002; 2003 in US)
• The Box: Tales from the Darkroom (2008; 2010 in US)
  

*Referred to as the Danzig Trilogy

Nonfiction:

• Speak Out!: Speeches, Open Letters, Commentaries (1969)
• On Writing and Politics (1985)
• Peeling the Onion (2006; 2007 in US)
• From Germany to Germany: Diary 1990 (November 2012)

Related:

• Fisherman and his Wife: Günter Grass's the Flounder in Critical Perspective (1983)
• The Narrative Works of Günter Grass (1983)
• Günter Grass's Use of Baroque Literature (1995)
• Günter Grass Revisited (Twayne's World Author Series) (1999)
• The Life and Work of Günter Grass: Literature, History, Politics by Julian Preece (2001)

Movies from Books

• The Tin Drum (1979)

Book Marks:

• Kirjasto page on Günter Grass and his complete works
• Nobel Prize on Günter Grass
• The New York Times feature on Günter Grass includes many reviews & articles
• Guardian Unlimited on Günter Grass
• No Beginning or End of War, an article by Günter Grass (January 2003)
• Bold Type excerpt from The Tin Drum
• The New York Times review of My Century with Chapter Excerpt
• The New York Times review of Crabwalk
• MostlyFiction.com review of The Box: Tales from the Darkroom

About the Author:

Günter Grass was born in Danzig, Germany (now Gdansk, Poland) in 1927 of Polish-German parents. In the 1930s, he joined the Hitler Youth and was drafted into the army at 16 and wounded in battle in 1945. In the same year he was imprisoned in Marienbad, Czechoslovakia by American soldiers. Freed in 1946, Grass supported himself by working on farms, in a potash mine, and as a stonemason's apprentice. He enrolled at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art to study painting in sculpture in 1948 and then the State Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin (1953-55). From 1956 to 1960 he worked as a sculptor and writer in Paris, at which time he wrote his novel The Tin Drum, which when published in 1959 was an immediate commercial success, and was translated into many languages. It remains one of the most important novels of the twentieth century.

Günter moved to West Berlin in 1960 and became active in politics, participating in election campaigns on behalf of the Social Democrat party and Willy Brandt. As a graphic artist, Grass has often been responsible for the covers and illustrations for his own works. - President of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin 1983-86, active within the German Authors' Publishing Company and PEN.

He was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize 'whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history' and 'will remain one of the 20th century's lasting literary works' - has sealed his reputation as one of the forefront European writers and Germany's most famous literary figure.

Crabwalk

Crabwalk, published in Germany in 2002 as Im Krebsgang, is a novel by Danzig-born German author Günter Grass. As in earlier works, Grass concerns himself with the effects of the past on the present; he interweaves various strands and combines fact and fiction. While the murder of Wilhelm Gustloff by David Frankfurter and the sinking of the ship the Wilhelm Gustloff are real events, the fictional members of the Pokriefke family bring these events into our own time.

• Title1
• Plot summary2
• Characters3
  • Konrad Pokriefke3.1
  • Tulla Pokriefke3.2
  • The old one3.3
• References4

Gunter Grass Poems

Title

The title, Crabwalk, defined by Grass as 'scuttling backward to move forward,' refers to both the necessary reference to various events, some occurring at the same time, the same events that would lead to the eventual disaster. Crabwalk might also imply a more abstract backward glance at history, in order to allow a people to move forward. The protagonist's awkward relationships with his mother and his estranged son, explored via the crabbed process of scouring the wreckage of history for therapeutic insight, lends appropriateness to the title.

Plot summary

The narrator of the novella is the journalist Paul Pokriefke, who was born on 30 January 1945 on the day that the Strength Through Joy ship, the Wilhelm Gustloff, was sunk. His young mother-to-be, Tulla Pokriefke (born in Danzig, and already known to readers from two parts of the Danzig Trilogy, Cat and Mouse and Dog Years), found herself among the more than 10,000 passengers on the ship and was among those saved when it went down. According to Tulla, Paul was born at the moment the ship sank, on board the torpedo boat which had rescued them. His life is heavily influenced by these circumstances, above all because his mother Tulla continually urges him to fulfill his 'duty' and to commemorate the event in writing.

In the course of his research, the narrator discovers by chance that his estranged son Konny has also developed an interest in the ship as a result of Tulla's influence. On his website ('blutzeuge.de') he explores the murder of Gustloff and the sinking of the ship, in part through a dialogue in which he adopts the role of Gustloff, and that of David Frankfurter is taken by another young man, Wolfgang Stremplin.

The two eventually meet in Schwerin, Konny's and Gustloff's hometown. Wolfgang, though not Jewish, projects a Jewish persona. He spits three times on the former memorial to Gustloff, thus desecrating it in Konny's eyes. Konny shoots him dead, mirroring the shooting of Gustloff by Frankfurter; after the deed he hands himself in to the police and state that, 'I shot because I am a German'; Frankfurter had said, 'I shot because I am a Jew'.

The narrator is eventually forced to realise that his imprisoned son has himself become a new martyr, and is celebrated as such by neo-Nazis on the Internet.

Characters

Gunter Grass Cat And Mouse

Konrad Pokriefke

Konrad (known as 'Konny') is the son of Paul Pokriefke and Gabi; after his parents' divorce, Konny is brought up by his left-wing mother and has little contact with his father. Highly intelligent, he is characterised as a 'loner' by his parents. He has a very good relationship with Tulla, who tells him stories of the ship, and with whom he eventually goes to live. Via his website he forms a love-hate relationship with Wolfgang: divided by their political views, they are nevertheless connected by similar characters and a love for table-tennis. At his trial he claims that he has nothing against Jews themselves, but that he considers their presence among Aryan populations to be a 'foreign body'; his father considers that he has a 'slow-burning' hatred for the Jews.

Tulla Pokriefke

Tulla is short, thin, white-haired since the sinking of the ship, and attractive to men even into old age. Politically she is difficult to classify, except as an extremist: on the one hand she repeatedly praises the 'classless society' of the Strength Through Joy ship and supports her grandson even after the murder; on the other hand, she becomes a model functionary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany in East Germany, weeping on the news of Joseph Stalin's death.

Tulla speaks with a strong accent (a form of Low German described by the narrator as 'Langfursch', after the part of Danzig she is from). She seeks at every opportunity to put the story of the ship into the public domain, because it was the subject of silence for so long. When her attempts to persuade her son to write about the disaster fail, she turns her attention instead to her grandson. She also supplies Konny with the weapon which he uses in the murder, after he is threatened by neo-Nazi skinheads.

The old one

The mysterious figure of the old one stands between Grass and the narrator Paul. Belonging to the generation of those who fled west after the end of the war, he encourages Paul to write of the sinking as a substitute for his own failure to do so. The narrator refers to him as his 'employer' or 'boss'. The possibility of identifying him with Grass serves to prevent the equation of the narrator with the author.

References

• Crabwalk. Transl. from the German by Krishna Winston. Orlando; Austin; New York; San Diego; Toronto; London: Harcourt: 2002. ISBN 0-15-100764-0

Crabwalk Gunter Grass Analysis