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Crabwalk
Günter Grass, translated by Krishna Winston
Harcourt
234 pp.; $25

Günter Grass has always polarized his fellow Germans, as he has continuously written about Germany's Nazi past. His literary breakthrough, The Tin Drum (1959), was in fact one of the first German novels that plainly addressed the cruelties of the Nazi regime. For decades, Grass has been regarded as a major European writer who has clearly left his mark on world literature; novelists as various as John Irving and Salman Rushdie have repeatedly expressed their indebtedness to him. Thus it came to hardly anyone's surprise that the prolific German author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.

Now at 75, Grass has remained faithful to his literary mission by writing a novella on a historical incident that had been suppressed for a number of decades. In Crabwalk, Grass revisits the tragedy of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a German ship that embarked from Gotenhafen/Gdingen on January 30, 1945 filled to the brim with thousands of German refugees. Westward bound, as the eastern territories of the Third Reich were under attack by Soviet troops, the Wilhelm Gustloff never reached its destination. When the ship was sunk by Soviet torpedoes, more than 10,000 Germans, among them 4,500 children, were killed—approximately six times the loss of life from the Titanic.

The Nazi regime never released any information about the fate of the ship and its passengers, not wishing to further demoralize Germany's already discouraged soldiers and citizens. After World War II, the incident in the Baltic Sea was hardly mentioned in either West Germany or East Germany. Since West Germans had to come to grips with the stigma of being a society of former perpetrators, war crimes committed against Germans were scarcely dealt with. In communist East Germany the Gustloff incident was seen as a self-inflicted tragedy, as the Soviet submarine had every right to open fire.

Grass was not the first German author to write about German refugees during World War II. A number of writers from East and West Germany, among them Christa Wolf and Walter Kempowski, had already tackled this theme before. However, these incidents were hardly discussed outside of literary circles, as many mainstream politicians viewed them as taboo. Meanwhile, right-wing extremists began to exploit this rather neglected aspect of Germany's past.

When Grass's novella appeared in Germany last year, it rekindled the public debate about memories of war crimes against German civilians. W. G. Sebald's lectures on "Air War and Literature" at the University of Zurich in 1997 triggered highly controversial discussions, which were given new life in 1999 when the lectures were published in Sebald's collection of essays, On the Natural History of Destruction (an English translation of this volume appeared earlier this year). However, Sebald's claim that no German author had written a literary work on the devastating Allied air campaign was exaggerated. Gert Ledig's novel Payback (1956) but also Thomas Bernhard's autobiographical account Gathering of Evidence (1975-1982) prove that Sebald was exaggerating. Nor is it true, as Sebald wrote, that the bombings of German cities "left scarcely a trace of pain behind in the public consciousness." In 1999, Heinrich Breloer published a collection of diary entries by German eyewitnesses that tell a different story. Clearly, many Germans have viewed themselves as victims and not as perpetrators, as Konrad H. Jarausch and Michael Geyer have recently pointed out in their book Reconstructing German Histories.

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May (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47