“Crabwalk” by Günter Grass

Crabwalk: A Novel

By Günter Grass
2004
237 pages
Fiction

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What, oh what, shall we do with Günter Grass? A Nobel Prize winner who died in 2015, Grass spent his entire literary career trying to reckon with the German past and, of course, for Germans of a certain age that means reckoning with your own past as well. There is some speculation and evidence that he was not always entirely truthful or forthcoming about his own life. Regardless, there is no question that he is one of the great chroniclers of a national guilt. In 1959 he wrote The Tin Drum, which not only made him famous but also solidified a reputation that would eventually lead to a Nobel Prize. It has recently been issued in a new English translation, but the book is long and difficult.

So allow me to suggest Crabwalk, Grass’s best in many years. Translated by Krishna Winston, the book centers on the sinking of the ship Wilhelm Gustloff. The ship itself has a complicated history. During the Third Reich it was built to be a cruise ship, then turned into a troop carrier in World War II, and finally became a refugee ship for German civilians fleeing before the onslaught of the Russian army. In 1945 it was torpedoed in the Baltic Sea by the Russians, and around 9,000 people died. It might be the greatest sea disaster ever. But of course Grass is interested not only in the event, but also in its legacy. Consequently, we get the story of three generations of a family who are all in some ways impacted by the event.

Crabwalk? The crab must scurry “backward to move forward.” So Grass will move back and forth between past and present and future. There can be no future without reckoning with the past.

Here is reviewer Jeremy Adler’s fine synopsis of what it is like to read this book:

The narrator’s crabwalking style encourages him to scuttle away from the big issue of crime, guilt and expiation, to which he never devotes quite as much attention as he lavishes on his fetish, the shipwreck, a point implicit in his son’s final gesture – he destroys a toy model of the Gustloff. We are left with the narrator’s own world-weary defeatism: “It doesn’t end. Never will it end.”

This is a short book. Grass writes wonderfully and the book lures you in, in ways a review cannot really convey. You should read it because it is great writing.

Then again, there is a lot of great writing out there. Why do you want to read a book wrestling with German guilt over its Nazi past? That may miss the point. America too has a past – one that we clearly haven’t entirely wrestled with. What does it mean to deal with a national sin? What does it mean to grapple with a past that is never just the past, that keeps intruding day by day and will do so for the foreseeable future? That’s why you should read this book.