In his latest book, Crabwalk (published in Germany in 2002 as Im Krebsgang), Grass has been caught in the trap set by two historians, one now deceased, the other very much alive. The late W.G. Sebald, in a lecture series at the University of Zurich, and in a subsequent publication of that series with additional material, accused German writers of ignoring the bombing of Germany in WWII. By doing so, he claimed, they ignored the consequent suffering of the German people at the hands of the Allies. Historian Jörg Friedrich published a book, Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940-1945 (which translates as The Fire: Germany during the Bombardment 1940-1945), shortly after Grass' Crabwalk appeared. He details even further the effect bombing had on cities and individuals in Germany than his colleague, Sebald, had done.

What is so horrifying about both books and authors is not that they showed what effect bombing had, but that they did so without putting the bombings into a historic or political context. I will be reviewing Der Brand later, so I do not want to say too much here, but it is important to note that at one time Friedrich spent most of his scholastic efforts on detailing the Holocaust, and it seems that his mind may have snapped under the weight of horror. To escape it, he appears to have found a way reminiscent of psychotics, namely claiming that the victimizers were actually the victims. Sebald did very much the same by avoiding the political and historic context, and by taking on the language that had, until his lecture series, been reserved for the Holocaust.

In Crabwalk, Grass does exactly what a crab does, he moves sideways, and sometimes backward, to go forward. He is honest in his description of the approach he has taken in this fairly short novel. And it has to be said to his credit that it evokes today's Germany with great accuracy. But, he has been trapped by Sebald, whose words seemed to have made him feel it is necessary to find reason, even excuses, for the xenophobic traits his fellow countrymen and women carry within them. While some readers may be surprised by the way he speaks of hatred bubbling up, the actions of the general German population in both East and West Germany over the past five decades should always have been obvious to a serious observer. <'>"Good God! How much of this has been dammed up all this time, is growing day by day, building pressure for action." These are words written by a writer who, despite his constant writing about the past, must have spent a great deal of time buried in the sand, like those side-winding crabs he uses as metaphor for his novel's title and process of writing.

Crabwalk is a book about three generations of a family, and includes an unrelated shadowy old man in the background, who never speaks directly to us. Grass chooses in this book to bring back a minor character from his Danzig Trilogy, Tulla Pokriefke. She is the influencing mind behind some disturbing events in the present, and the reason for disclosing events around the sinking of the German ship, The Wilhelm Gustloff, on January 30, 1945, a date that arouses very mixed feelings in Germans. It was also on a January 30, in 1933, that Hitler took power and changed the world for the worse.

Without a doubt, the sinking of the Gustloff was a major event. It had the greatest casualties of any ship that has ever sunk on any ocean throughout history. Just how many is disputable. Some say as many as 9,000 died that day, but since there are no records of the passengers on the doomed vessel, it is mere conjecture. In a way, that number has now been fixed in the German consciousness just as the six-million-figure has been fixed into the minds of people of Jewish faith, even though that figure actually includes non-Jews in excess of one million. Once such numbers are published, it is hard to eradicate their mythological effect and to keep them in perspective. In a way, they echo Grass' final words in Crabwalk.

So, what about the Gustloff and Tulla? The book opens with these words: "Why only now?" HE SAYS, THIS PERSON NOT TO be confused with me. Well, because Mother's incessant nagging . . . Because I wanted to cry the way I did at the time, when the cry spread across the water, but couldn't anymore . . . Because for the true story . . . hardly more than three lines . . . Because only now . . ."

Here we have Paul, the son of Tulla, speaking to us. As the narrator of this story he is always with us. Paul was born on a lifeboat that saved his teenaged mother as the Gustloff sank behind her survivors. The Gustloff sank because it had been deliberately torpedoed. We need to know that Paul is a journalist of mediocre abilities, who has been hired by 'THIS PERSON' to write about the fate of the Gustloff.

There is no doubt, that this unknown old man is actually Grass who has chosen to use this character to give voice to his thoughts, and in some ways, Paul is also Grass' voice. So, when we read <'>". . .that the old man is breathing down my neck . . ." we can be very certain that it is Grass, who is urging himself on to continue his tale of the Gustloff, to reveal the story of the Russian submarine captain, Aleksandr Marinesko, who disobeyed orders and downed the vessel in a vain effort to gain glory, and to tell the story of Herr Wilhelm Gustloff. Grass is also urging on his narrator to bring the story into the present. This involves the use of the Internet, so he speaks in this novel to a new generation by revolving the story around events that are shaped by this technology.

The third generation, and person of importance in this book, is Konrad, or Konny as his father, Paul, calls him. He is, in some ways, a computer nerd. This 17-year-old, unlike his father, is under the thrall of grandmother Tulla, although he does not follow her East German left-wing politics (she became converted to Communism after the war). Estranged from both his mother and father—they are divorced—Konny has gone his own way and fallen into the hands of— emotionally though not physically—right-wing German skinheads. His is the split personality that represents present-day Germany. He is a portrayal of a young population that knows virtually nothing about the years 1933-45, and so goes about searching for answers. The result is that they often find the wrong ones because fanatics have filled the void that Tulla's generation refused to fill by accepting, revealing, and putting into perspective the complicity of the average German in the Nazification of Germany.

It has to be mentioned here that the Gustloff was named for a minor German Nazi official, whose job it was to recruit adherents to the party in Switzerland. He was assassinated in Davos in 1936 by a young man, David Frankfurter, who being Jewish, objected to the misguided ideology that Gustloff disseminated. Here Grass also moves sideways to explore Frankfurter's life, and what happened to him after the assassination.

Since Hitler and his Gang needed heroes and martyrs, they made Gustloff the latter and then named the flagship of a string of vessels known as 'Strength through Joy Fleet' after him. The fleet offered cheap vacations in the Baltic Sea to lower party ranks. As the war progressed, the Gustloff was turned into a floating barracks and then into a hospital ship, and lastly became also a refugee ship as people desperately tried to escape from the eastern part of Germany as the Russians advanced with menacing certainty.

The novel's story really does move like a crab, sideways to go forward. There is a great deal of detail about the Hitler years, about life in East Germany following the end of WWII, it even brings in the notorious German Holocaust denier, Ernst Zündel, who is still awaiting deportation from Canada. While Grass calls him a German Canadian, it must be stated here that Zündel, who came to Canada from Germany in 1958 as a 19-year-old, was never granted full citizenship. He left Canada for the USA in the 1990s and was deported from there back to Canada in 2003.

In some ways, Crabwalk is a history lesson, but it is also a book that shows an aging writer, Grass, pulling back from some of his earlier views, not necessarily to his best interest. Worst of all, he is comparing apples with oranges. This is something one would not have expected of him.

He makes a point of bringing up the Titanic and its fame, compared to the relative unknown facts surrounding the sinking of the Gustloff. He writes at one point, ". . . but it still seems as though nothing can top the Titanic, as if the Wilhelm Gustloff had never existed, as if there were no room for another maritime disaster, as if only the victims of the Titanic could be remembered, not those of the Gustloff."

Had Grass compared the sinking of the Gustloff to that of the Lusitania, there might be some reason for the comparison, though not for the whining. But, as we all know, the Germans no more acknowledge the deliberate torpedoing of the Lusitania by a German submarine on May 7, 1915 with a loss of 1,201 lives, many of them women and children, than they do that of the Gustloff. Nor are there any glamorous movies made about the Lusitania, but only the odd documentary, the same fate that has befallen the Gustloff. Further, unlike the dishonor that befell the Russian, Marinesko, the German U-boat captain was celebrated as a hero on his return to Germany. That is something that a conscientious writer—as one expects Grass to be—should consider. Besides, one wonders about him calling the sinking of the Titanic and the Gustloff an "Unglück" as he does in the German version—the translator chose to give us "marine disaster" for what he actually called an "accident" or "mishap". One would hardly describe the torpedoing of a vessel a mishap, nor is it a  a marine disaster, although for the individuals caught on board the ship it was a personal disaster, a tragedy. As far as the sinking of the ship is concerned, that was an act of war, just as the sinking of merchant marine ships during the Battle of the Atlantic was and the much earlier sinking of the Lusitania. We cannot describe them as either marine disasters or mishaps. The Titanic's sinking was, however, a true marine disaster caused by man's folly and nature's might. Fine distinction of language is so important in describing an event, or in making a point.

Grass closes his novel with these simple words: "It doesn't end. Never will it end." He is, with these words, underlining his sense of what his own generation's attitudes ignored, especially those on the left. He succumbs to despair because he knows his generation left a hole in German history through avoidance that is now being filled by the ultra-right, causing a never-ending spiral of false information. What is so sad about this book is that it raises questions, but offers no solutions. Perhaps that has always been Grass' problem. In years to come, his books will, like Thomas Mann's Dr. Faustus, be read only by scholars because his satire, his fabulist tendencies will not be understood for what they attempt to express about Germany and the German attitude that led to such a sad period in history. His books will never reach the stage that Jonathan Swift's social satire reached with Gulliver's Travels, to give an example.

One last note about Crabwalk. The translation is by Krishna Winston, who also translated Grass' Ein Weites Feld, which she wrongly called Too Far Afield. While she makes Crabwalk less of a pain to read than she did Too Far Afield, she ends up flattening Grass' prose, the characters and their story, much to the book's disadvantage. Too Far Afield, which I enjoyed in its original language because I understood the history and the reference to the past, and know the works of Theodor Fontane, and had no axe to grind about the unification of East and West Germany—a subject which made the book so disliked by many Germans—I had to force myself to continue reading the English translation. Why, one wonders, did the publishers choose the same translator for Crabwalk? Prof. Winston, who teaches German language and literature at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, to me does not appear to be the right choice for this task.

To get further insight into past and current events in Germany, click here to read about Stasiland by Australian writer, Anna Funder

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