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Title: Crabwalk by Gunter Grass, Krishna Winston ISBN: 0-15-602970-7 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 05 April, 2004 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.78 (18 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A lot to digest
Comment: 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: 5
Summary: Echoes and Ripples -- Reliving and Reimagining the Past
Comment: Crabwalk is the first great book I have read that was written in the 21st century.
Why Crabwalk? Here's a definition of "crab:" "to move sideways, diagonally, or obliquely, especially with short, abrupt bursts of speed." Crabwalk's structure is similar. Grass offers a clue in referring to "scuttling backward to move forward."
Paul Pokreife, a journeyman journalist, narrates several parallel tracks: his life, his mother's (Tulla), his son's (Konrad), his ex-wife's, the ship Wilhelm Gustloff, the Nazi Wilhelm Gustloff (and his monument and remains), Gustloff's assassin (David Frankfurter), the Soviet submarine commander who sunk the ship (Marinesko), and Konrad's online challenger (Wolfgang "David" Stremplin) and his parents. Sometimes Mr. Grass jumps sideways sharing several stories at that time. Other times he jumps forward or backward to a different time or story. . . and then goes sideways to other stories. It's like stream of consciousness narration except it's finished prose and dialogue. . . rather than thought fragments.
This structure establishes many connections between one person and another to show an interconnected fabric of German society and consciousness since 1933 in the context of a few events, a family and a few other characters. I felt like I had just absorbed the richness of War and Peace . . . except in a relatively short and simple book.
Crabwalk can be read at several levels of meaning. The most compelling story relates the terrible tragedy of the sinking of the German refugee ship, Wilhelm Gustoloff, in January 1945 on the frigid Baltic by a Soviet submarine. More than 1200 survived while most others (estimated between 6,600 and 10,600) died from explosions, equipment faults, rescue mistakes, freezing, drowning, or the icy waters. Of these, more than 4,000 were probably children. There were only 22 lifeboats on board, and only one was launched properly. You'll have to read Crabwalk to appreciate the tragedy, but it dwarfs the Titanic. Yet it's a little-known event. The Germans made no announcement then to help maintain civilian morale. The Soviets were embarrassed and hid the event. Post-war Germany has kept a code of silence around any German civilians suffering as a result of the war, seeming to reflect the national guilt for starting the war.
Paul's being born the night of the sinking, aboard a rescue ship, links him to the Nazi past (through the anniversaries of the Nazi rise to power and Gustloff's death), the consequences of the sinking on the survivors, and the sinking's effect on the next generation of Germans. This connection is the bridge to other ways to read the book.
At another level, it's a story of a dysfunctional family: A woman who wasn't sure who the father is of her only son; a son estranged from his mother by her disappointment in him and his rejection of her values; a fatherless son becoming a poor father and failed husband; and a grandson reaching out to a grandmother for the emotional support his father fails to give him.
At a third level, Crabwalk is about the experience of the German nation since January 1933 when the Nazis took over. We go through the economic recovery years as Tulla's parents take a cruise to the Norwegian fjords aboard the Wilhelm Gustloff. Tulla grows up during the war and has a miscarriage while being a streetcar conductor. She becomes pregnant with Paul, and after the rescue are settled in East Germany where she becomes a carpenter and a devoted Stalinist. Paul escapes to the West as a teenager, and the two becomes estranged. Tulla also admires the old Nazis after East Germany falls and tries to fascinate her grandson with the ship's history. She succeeds through giving him a computer, and Konrad runs a Web site about the ship and the man it's named for. At the same time, you find out how Gustloff becomes a Nazi martyr after he's assassinated by a Jewish medical student in Davos. Ironically, Frankfurter's health improves by being in prison. He's released after World War II by the Swiss and heads to Palestine.
At a fourth level, this is a story about how our lives are influenced by our environment (our family, our nation, our history and our ways of perceiving).
At a fifth level, Crabwalk teaches us to think about the consequences of when and where we're born. If Paul had been born a few hours later, he would have spent his whole life in the western sectors of Germany rather than starting in the east. He believes his whole life would have been different . . . and it probably would have.
At a sixth level, Crabwalk explains that history repeats itself through the influences of the earlier generations on another. There are many deliberate ironies in the book as one character acts out variations on what an earlier character did (especially the way Konrad mimics David Frankfurter).
Ultimately, the book is about guilt. Who's guilt is it? And for what? What's to be done to atone? "History, or, to be more precise, the history we Germans have repeatedly mucked up, is a clogged toilet." "We flush and flush, but the [content]. . . keeps rising." In particular, should Germans deny their own suffering in World War II as a means to expiate guilt, or will that denial lead to new guilty actions?
The book profoundly expanded my understanding of the German experience. As a young man in Munich on business, I found my sleep troubled and interrupted by dreams and memories of Nazi marchers on the street outside, death camps in the countryside and murderous attacks on fellow Germans. Some taxi drivers who were old enough to have been in the Wehrmacht looked at me with obvious hate. Clients my age were very punctiliously correct anti-Nazis (we even visited events criticizing the Nazi past together). On the streets, young skinheads passed wearing swastikas. Crabwalk helped me to understand what was happening then and now.
Rating: 4
Summary: Historically/politcally important, yet potentially dangerous
Comment: 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.
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Title: On the Natural History of Destruction by Winfried Georg Sebald ISBN: 0375504842 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 11 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title: My Century by Gunter Grass, Michael Henry Heim ISBN: 0156011417 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 01 October, 2000 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Danzig Trilogy Of Gunter Grass: A Study of the Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, and Dog Years by Gunter Grass ISBN: 0151238162 Publisher: Harcourt Pub. Date: 15 October, 1987 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: The Tin Drum (Vintage International) by Gunter Grass, Ralph Manheim ISBN: 067972575X Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 January, 1990 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Elizabeth Costello by J. M. Coetzee ISBN: 0670031305 Publisher: Viking Books Pub. Date: 09 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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