Crabwalk

Rating:
Summary: The Cycle of History
Review: "Crabwalk" starts slowly but soon weaves a hypnotic spell as the reader is yanked backwards and forwards through the history of modern Germany. It is with a sense of disgust that we watch events unfold - first the horrific sinking of a ship full of refugees, then the hardening of a survivor into a true believer, then a man's disassociation with all that has come before and finally the next generation's embracing of fascistic ideals of martyrdom and national revenge.

The ending of "Crabwalk" shows how the German people's willed amnesia has created yet another underclass to fear.

Chilling stuff.

Rating:
Summary: Deus ex libra
Review: Authors placing themselves in their own books tread on shaky ground. Few can negotiate the path with success. Grass, who has succeeded with so many other innovative efforts, accomplishes this feat with his usual mastery. Grass has lived through many January 30s, including Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933 and the sinking of the "Wilhelm Gustloff" in 1945, near the finale of that power. The date threads through the book in the figure of Paul Prokriefke, born on the latter date and the story's narrator.

Paul is an unwilling narrator, goaded into revealing hidden events by his mother and the unnamed "He" who intrudes on his idleness. Paul is beset on one side by Tulla, his mother who was on board when the Gustloff was torpedoed. On the other is Grass who restrains what he may write while persisting in his demand that the story be told. Paul is repeatedly confronted by his inadequacies. The greatest failure is his son, Konny, who has turned into a Nazi sympathiser and manages a Web site extolling the ship and the "martyr" for whom it was named. The stress Paul endures is palpable. Through it all, however, he comes to manifest what Grass wants him, and us, to see. Western history has ignored the world's greatest sea disaster in the loss of some nine thousand lives, mostly women and children, in the closing days of the Third Reich.

Grass, always a masterful prose exponent, has excelled even the superb works he's previously blessed us with. Using the metaphor of a crab's "scuttling from side to side", he moves between characters, time and events with unmatched ease and clarity. In just over two hundred pages, he exhibits absolute control of the narrative. No word is out of place, nothing omitted and the focus remains tight throughout the story. The theme is sorrow - the tragedy of so many dead, the horrors of war's pointlessness, the failure of the world to understand what has happened and why it must never be repeated. Grass makes us aware that people, ignorant of what war imposes on individuals, can be led to make the same mistakes again. This book helps us understand what we must do to learn the truth and what steps we must take to prevent recurrence. Otherwise, his final words will express the results of our failure: "It doesn't end. Never will it end". As his readers, we must refute that conclusion by assuming our responsibilities. The "ghost in the book" must be our chosen mentor, a role Grass undertakes gladly so long as we listen. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Rating:
Summary: An important, wonderful read........
Review: Every so often I am very pleased to find myself in the middle of a novel that is a pleasure to read. This is Crabwalk. Grass' narrative voice is intimate, and although he makes frequent, apologetic references to the 'scuttling' back and forth in his storyline, the story is actually very readable.

Yes, simply as an historical account of a tragic event, especially his description of the actual sinking of the ship is riveting. Yet, so is the unfolding of the tragic relationship between father and son...the sense of loss, and of history repeating itself....a main theme in the story.

Fantastic. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent view of contemporary Germany
Review: Gunter Grass, born in Danzig, has seen Germany emerge from the rubble of the Second World War, through its division and reuinification, into the 21st century as one of the leading powers in the European Union. "The Tin Drum" explored repressed Nazi episodes, "Too Far Afield," the persistent wounds of the Cold War, and now, in "Crabwalk," how Germany attempts to come to terms with this tumultuous half century and move on. The story span three generations of Germans, but one sentence sums up the contemporary mindset of the country: "The Germans keep flushing and flushing, but the sh*t keeps coming up."

Rating:
Summary: Enlightening, but a difficult read
Review: I've not picked up a novel by Gunter Grass since I plowed through (and enjoyed) "Cat and Mouse", "The Tin Drum" and "Dog Years" a couple of decades ago. Prior to reading this novel, I was completely ignorant of the catastrophic sinking of the German ship Wilhelm Gustoff by a Russian submarine in the Baltic Sea in the last few months of the second world war. As presented by Gunter Grass, this incident was the result of many fateful events, each one of which may not have been deadly, but when combined resulted in a horrible tragedy.
I found this novel very difficult to read. Grass aptly titled the book "Crabwalk" because the story does not unfold in simple chronological order. Instead the story, as told in the first person by Paul Pokriefke, wanders back and forth over more than half a century. As I read the novel I was flipping back through the pages I'd already read trying to figure out who a particular character is, or to recall a given event. I had to get halfway through the novel before I could recall all of the main characters and events. My knowledge of German is fair, and I found it helpful in understanding location names and some of the peculiar sentences. A good atlas is helpful to have when reading this novel because a map of the region where most of the events in the novel take place is not included.
I'd recommend this book, but it does require some effort on the part of the reader. It's not a poolside read.

Rating:
Summary: A lot to digest
Review: In January 1945, the German cruise ship Wilhelm Gustloff was sunk by a Russian submarine in the Baltic Sea, and took some 9,000 refugees with her to their deaths. In the late 1990s, journalist Paul Pokriefke, born to a survivor while the great ship was still sinking, decides to write about the sinking, which killed more people than any other maritime disaster and yet is invisible in most history books. But Paul must crabwalk through the story, scuttling between the past and the present, to look at the tragedy of the past and the echoes that are still ringing through Germany today.

I must admit that this is one of the most fascinating, and disquieting, books that I have read in a long time. Part of the book is history, which is both informative and heartrending (5 stars). The other part of the book deals with Germany, and the way that World War II affected Germany and still affects it today. It shows how many people did and still deal with the memory of the war, some praising and some damning what happened, and all trying to come to grips with it. This other part is gripping and highly thought provoking (also 5 stars).

I wish I could say more about this book. It is a lot to digest, and is resistant to any quick and easy analysis. Overall I thought that this is a great book, and I highly recommend it to you.

Rating:
Summary: Historically/politcally important, yet potentially dangerous
Review: Other reviewers have covered the plot of this book in great detail, so I will discuss the book's importance and its success, both in terms of polemics and literature.

Along with W. G. Sebald's "A Natural History of Destruction" and Joerg Friedrich's "Der Brand," "Crabwalk" is one of the three books shaping the most important debate going on in contemporary German intellectual circles. Grass, an old Leftie, makes the argument that by not addressing the topic of *German* victimhood (at the hands of the Allies) during World War II, mainstream German society has abandoned the topic to the political Right, including neo-Nazi groups.

On face value, this argument has a great deal of validity. Sebald provides much more detail on how academics and writers have avoided the topic altogether or have addressed it in an insufficient manner. HOWEVER, this argument has a serious weakness.

By re-focusing German debate on German victimhood during the war, there is a very serious risk of obscuring the victimhood of other groups (notably Jews and conquered nations). There is a precedent: The so-called Historians' Debate of the 1980s shocked and polarized German society as Stalin's crimes were compared with Hitler's crimes in a relativizing manner.

In other words, if this debate is not conducted very carefully, millions of people (not just Germans) will argue, "We were all victims of the war: Jews and Germans, Allies and Axis. Is there any difference?" There will be a radical relativization or radical leveling of victimhood. There is a real risk that Germans and others will lose sight of who started the war and who murdered millions of Europeans as part of a war of racial conquest. This line of logic already has many proponents in German society, and not just among the political Right. Radical pacifists among the political Left share this view. The German World War II memorial, Kaethe Kollwitz's Pieta sculpture in Berlin, is dedicated "to all victims of war and violence," including the poor German soldiers who fought the war for the fascists. (Yes, there is now a memorial expressly dedicated to Jewish victims.)

Thus, Grass's argument is interesting, and it is worth discussing, but it is potentially explosive and self-serving.

As literature, this book is clumsily written. (Nobel Prize-winner John Cotzee shared this opinion in his "New York Review of Books" review of "Crabwalk.") The "crabwalk"-style of narration (moving backwards or sideways to move forward) can make the story hard to follow at times, but it is not a major hindrance. The prose is not elegant, even though Grass is a Nobel laureate himself. The story is told by a first-person narrator, Paul Pokriefke, whose mother appears in several of Grass's novels. Unfortunately, Paul -- as a mouthpiece for the author -- was insufficient for the author. He inserts himself in the novel as a minor character! The author writes that Paul's friend "Grass" cannot tell the story, so he has asked him to tell it. This seems to be a very weak psychological device. Grass should either have told the story himself or have let Paul tell it. In the first case, his moral stature and renown would have given him the right to tell it. In the second case, the reader could have figured out that Paul speaks for Grass the author. There was no need for "Grass" the character in the novel.

In sum, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in German history, in German literature, or in the debates in German politics. However, read this book (and swallow its underlying message) with a grain of salt.

Rating:
Summary: Missing notes in the scale?
Review: The events surrounding the biggest naval disaster in history and its tragic outcome are not an easy topic to bring to the attention of the reader of fifty-some years later. "Why only now?" is a good question and one that starts CRABWALK. The Wilhelm Gustloff, a "Strength through Joy" cruise ship turned refugee carrier, sank after a Soviet submarine attack on January 30 1945 leading to the death of more than 9,000 people, half of them children and infants. Although the details of the sinking have been known since then, there has been reluctance to publicize them. Grass has found a way to break the silence. At least one aspect of his motivation for doing so revolves around the disaster's aftermath in today's society and emerges clearly towards the end of the book.

Tulla Pokriefke, one of the survivors of the tragedy, cannot find words to describe what she saw on the ship as the torpedoes hit: "There's no notes in the scale for it..." Nevertheless, for years she has been insisting that her son write it all down - the way she remembers it. Paul Pokriefke, a second-rate middle-aged journalist, born on one of the rescue ships at the time of the sinking, reluctantly takes on the "job". He's pressured into it by the major background player, Grass himself. Paul timidly argues with Him about the format, scope and depth of his book. He is in favour of a neutral documentary on the ship, its history and its namesake, a Nazi "martyr" and hero. His disinclination to take on this project at all speaks volumes about his generation's reluctance to relive and confront all aspects of the German past. Paul is typical in other ways too... But He nags and guides Paul through the details: take the central theme of the sinking of the ship and trace its history; bring out the lives of the people directly connected with it; don't forget Tulla, yourself and your son - make it personal. The outcome is a description of historical characters like Wilhelm Gustloff, the Nazi activist, David Frankfurter, the German Jew who killed him in 1936, and Alexandr Marinesko, the submarine captain who sank the vessel, interwoven with Paul's and his family's life, from then to now. Three generations of Pokriefkes, deeply influenced by the disaster, have to deal with it and the wider Nazi history in their individual way. None of them is comfortable with their present-day life.

It takes a specially gifted writer and authoritative critic like Gunter Grass to make this tragedy public in a format that is meaningful today. Having referred to the sinking of the Gustloff in previous novels, "it seems that He knew Tulla when she was young", he had been reluctant to expand on it until he had identified the right fictional frame in which to embed the facts. He found it in the strong character of Tulla, 18 at the time of the disaster and turning completely white on that day, who epitomizes the successful survivor and practical realist of her generation. She remains in the East, seemingly switching allegiances without effort to the Stalinist regime, defending it long after the Wall has crumbled.

Gunter Grass' language and literary skills are undeniable; but his often difficult language (at least in German) and his complex imagery and use of metaphor have brought him admirers as well as critics. In CRABWALK, both the language and the imagery do not present any difficulty for the reader. In fact, the text flows relatively smoothly: it reads fast despite the subject matter. Walking sideways like a crab and "scuttling backwards" to move forward describes the flow of the story. Slowly the characters come into view and the different strands merge to form a comprehensive picture. Paul's more or less ongoing commentary about his writing efforts, his reactions to family and Him, his jumping back and forth in the story, results, at times, in a somewhat lighter, more conversational tone.

Grass deliberately uses the structure of a traditional `novella' (not specified in the English version) to convey the historical events and their impact on his group of Germans. An addition to being a `short novel', a novella is usually more tightly structured and focused on a single major event. It often comprises a didactic angle or moral message. All of these elements can be found in CRABWALK. Grass' message in particular addresses the after-war generation(s). He integrates into the story the recurrent problem of young neo-nazis, skinheads and the danger of hate websites on the Internet characterized through Paul's son Konny. He reflects on the inability of the parent generation to come to terms with the children as well as their own reality. He criticizes the lukewarm attitudes towards politics and history by many Germans of Paul's generation. He is concerned with what the future holds. The German word `Krebs' - CRAB also means cancer. Although not stated directly the reader of German cannot avoid reflecting on this connotation. Like cancers, totalitarian and fascist systems infect society, then go into remission, come and go. Can we be wholly cured of them? CRABWALK is on many levels an important book, which leaves you with ample food for thought. [Friederike Knabe, Ottawa, Canada]

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding novel from a modern master
Review: The suffering of ordinary Germans during the Second World War is a topic that for many years has been virtually off-limits for discussion. There have been several books recently, both fiction and non-fiction which however have tackled this subject head on and Crabwalk is one of them.

Set nominally in the present day, the narrater of this novel is Paul Pokriefke, an unsuccessful middle-aged journalist, with a failed marriage behind him. His mother, Tulla, was a passenger on the cruise liner Wilhelm Gustloff, sunk in January 1945 by a Soviet submarine in the Baltic with the loss of 9,000 lives, as it carried mainly civilian refugees away from the advancing Red Army. Paul himself is born on that fateful night after his pregnant mother is rescued. After being asked to write about this incident, he comes across a right-wing website dedicated to the memory of the liner and its namesake, a Nazi official murdered by a Jewish student in 1936. He discovers the website is run by his alienated son Konrad and is subsequently forced to deal with the effects that traumatic night has had on three generations of his family.

The crabwalk of the title refers to the erratic, unpredictable path back and forth in time which Paul must take in trying to reach an understanding of the war-time events which have shaped his and his family's existence. The narrative therefore flits between several storylines. There is Paul's own investigations on the internet and the strange relationship he discovers between his son and his main online antagonist, who calls himself "David", after the name of the Jewish student who assassinated Gustloff. There is the story of the Russian submarine commander who is fated to be responsible for the sinking of the liner and its massive loss of life. There is his mother's story, one of the few survivors of the sinking, who after the war remains in East Germany as a committed socialist yet who defines herself in terms of her experiences during the Nazi era and is determined to exert influence over her grandson Konrad. And there is Paul himself, an aimless, un-ambitious individual, a second-rate journalist whose life has been overshadowed by events outside of his control.

This is a powerful and thought provoking novel, yet written in a relatively unemotional style and very elegantly structured. It is a short novel yet wonderfully constructed and executed. The central theme is of course the denial of Germany's suffering during the war, or rather the suffering of ordinary individuals. The sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff is possibly the worst maritime disaster in history, yet it has been excised from western popular culture, replaced, as is pointed out at one stage, in the public consciousness by films such as Titanic and so forth. The failure of Germany's post war generation, exemplified by Paul, to collectively deal openly with the guilt and suffering of their wartime parents is seen to drive younger generations towards the dark side of the equation. Post war Germany sought refuge in economic progress and reconstruction, its people seeking to exorcise the Nazi era by rebuilding a bright new European nation over its ashes. Paul is an example of someone falling by the wayside, unable to forget his wartime heritage and get on with life along with the rest of society. Consequently, as his career and family life is one of disappointment and failure he is unable to guide his son properly, who by himself inevitably ends up being drawn to the negative implications of Germany's defeat. Konrad seeks revenge on the Jews and demands that Wilhelm Gustloff's "martydom" is properly recognised.

The ending of the book is bleak. Failure to deal with the war is leading a new generation to repeat old mistakes with the danger arising of an unending cycle of violence and recrimination. Konrad is the example, unable to place the terrible suffering of his grandmother in its proper context and therefore learn from history. With the Tin Drum and Too Far Afield, Gunther Grass became the master of the Zeitgeist novel and a masterful commentator on his native Germany. He succeeds again with Crabwalk.

Rating:
Summary: A brilliant book on a little known tragedy
Review: This book describes the history of a ship and its influence on the history of a family. The ship is the Wilhelm Gustloff that was named after a Nazi who was killed in Davos, Switzerland in 1936. After its use as a cruise ship for the Nazi Kraft durch Freude movement, a floating hospital and a training ship, the Wilhelm Gustloff was torpedoed to the bottom of the sea on 30 January 1945 with on board between 6000 and 10000 (nobody knows the exact number) German refugees. On board is also the very pregnant Tulla Prokriefke, who goes into labour when the ship goes down. In the end her son Paul is born on board of a rescue boat.

Paul is divorced, mediocre journalist, who has, to say it mildly, a difficult relationship with his mother. One day he finds a site on the Internet that describes the ship that determined his life (his mother cannot talk about anything else). He finds that the site, with neonazi characteristics, is made by his son Konnie. And then the story goes almost inevitably to its dramatic conclusion.

The book is called Crabwalk because the story of the ship and the family are not told in chronological order, but by walking sideways. Still, the story goes forward, just like a crab walks. This is also because Paul tells the story of the Wilhelm Gustloff working with the information that he finds on the internetsite of his son.

This is a brilliantly written book, because one never gets lost between or within story lines despite the large number of considerable time leaps. Also, this book describes a little known ship tragedy (more than 5 times the numbers of death as the Titanic!) and gives an insight into the distorted minds of German neonazi's. An excellent read.