Crabwalk by Günter Grass

First published:Im Krebsgang: Eine Novelle, 2002 (English translation, 2003)

Type of work: Novella

Type of plot: Narrative

Time of plot: Early 1930’s to the end of the twentieth century

Locale: The Baltic and East Germany

Principal characters

• Paul Pokriefke, a journalist
• Tulla Pokriefke, his mother
• Konrad “Wilhelm” Pokriefke, Paul’s son and a right-wing propagandist
• Wolfgang “David” Stremplin, critic of right-wing propaganda
• The Old Man, a former citizen of Danzig, who encourage Paul’s writing

The Story:

For years, Paul Pokriefke has resisted the urging of his mother, Tulla, to write down the fateful story of the Wilhelm Gustloff, an oceanliner whose sinking in the Baltic by a Soviet submarine near the end of World War II almost took Tulla’s life. As a journalist, Paul is well qualified for such a writing task. He overcomes his reluctance to delve into the past only when he finds right-wing propaganda on the Web that exploits the maritime disaster.

Pushed along by the old man, an unnamed former citizen of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland) with a keen interest in the story, Paul reluctantly begins to research the history of the ship, which was named after Wilhelm Gustloff, a German Nazi Party functionary who, in 1936, had been assassinated by the Jewish student David Frankfurter in Switzerland. Gustloff had become a martyr for the Nazi cause.

Although Tulla barely survived the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff and even gave birth to Paul during the perilous rescue operation, she still has fond memories of the ship that before World War II was used by the Nazis for recreational purposes to promote their concept of a classless society. Paul, however, comes across a debate on the Web in which a person named Wilhelm (as in Gustloff) and one named David (as in Frankfurter) engage in virtual reincarnations of the two historical characters.

Paul writes a detailed report about the Wilhelm Gustloffand its prewar voyages, but he is concerned about the exploitation of the ship’s fate by right-leaning circles. He is even more shocked when he discovers that his son, Konrad, uses the pseudonym Wilhelm on his Web site.

In jumping from the past to the present, Paul writes that when World War II broke out in 1939, the Wilhelm Gustloff was first converted into a hospital ship and then into floating barracks for sailors in training in a harbor near Danzig. Paul then reports on two meetings among the survivors of the Wilhelm Gustloff disaster; at the second of these meetings, which took place after the reunification of Germany, Tulla extended her efforts to disseminate the legend of the ship by enlisting the services of her grandson, Konrad, who was eager to help.

By January, 1945, Paul writes that the demise of the Third Reich is imminent. The Wilhelm Gustloff sails westward, carrying about ten thousand passengers, mostly German refugees from East Prussia and Danzig fleeing from the advancing Soviet Red Army. Among the passengers are more than four thousand babies, children, and adolescents, and also some military personnel. The vast majority perish in the icy waters of the Baltic Sea after the torpedoes of the Soviet submarine under the command of Captain Alexander Marinesko find their target. More than fifty years later, in 1996, Wilhelm and David continue to debate whether the sinking of the ship was a war crime or just retribution for the suffering of the Soviet population and of the victims of the Holocaust.

After Tulla and her newborn are put on dry land by their rescuers, Paul writes that they continue their flight and end up in Schwerin, a city that after World War II became part of the Soviet occupation zone and later the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany. Schwerin also happens to be the birthplace of Gustloff, in whose honor the Nazis erected a monument that was then razed by the Soviets.

Wilhelm and David, writes Paul, continue their debate; the former invites the latter to visit Schwerin to engage in a dialogue. Wilhelm guns down his guest when David contemptuously spits on the remaining traces of the Gustloff monument. Because he is a minor, Konrad is sentenced for manslaughter rather than murder and is sent to a juvenile detention facility. As it turns out, David, whose real name is Wolfgang Stremplin, is not Jewish at all; he identifies with all things Jewish to atone for the sufferings of the Jews in Nazi Germany. The parents of both Konrad and Wolfgang try to determine how they might have contributed to the aberrations of their respective sons.

Konrad appears to have overcome his infatuation with the Wilhelm Gustloff when, while in prison, he smashes a model of the ship that he had crafted. However, when Paul comes across a Web site in which his son is declared to be a martyr for a right-wing cause, he realizes that there is no end to neo-Nazi propaganda.

Bibliography

Braun, Rebecca, and Frank Brunssen, eds. Changing the Nation: Günter Grass in International Perspective. Würzburg, Germany: Königshausen & Neumann, 2008. A collection of essays by Grass scholars from various countries who examine his fiction with an emphasis on the international stature of his work.

Hall, Katharina. Günter Grass’s “Danzig Quintet”: Explorations in the Memory and History of the Nazi Era from “Die Blechtrommel” to “Im Krebsgang.” New York: Peter Lang, 2007. Presents an interesting examination of Grass’s central themes of history and memory through Crabwalk. Hall uses the term “quintet” rather than “sextet.”

Krimmer, Elizabeth.“’Ein Volk von Opfern?’ Germans as Victims in Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel and Im Krebsgang.” Seminar 44, no. 2 (May, 2008): 272-290. Argues that Grass acknowledges the suffering of Germans without denying their culpability as perpetrators.

Mews, Siegfried. Günter Grass and His Critics: From “The Tin Drum” to “Crabwalk.” Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2008. Offers a descriptive as well as analytical and evaluative overview of criticism devoted to Grass’s fiction. Chapter 15 provides a succinct overview and assessment of the reception of Crabwalk.

Moeller, Robert G. “Sinking Ships, the Lost Heimat, and Broken Taboos: Günter Grass and the Politics of Memory in Contemporary Germany.” Contemporary European History 12, no. 2 (2003): 147-182. Takes issue with Grass’s implicit and explicit assumptions that victimization discourse had previously been ignored by writers and others.

Veel, Kristin. “Virtual Memory in Günter Grass’ Im Krebsgang.” German Life and Letters 57, no. 2 (2004): 206-218. Analyzes the significance of the Web, which, Veel argues, tends to blur the actual and the imaginary and thus present a type of danger to its users.