Crabwalk
Author	Günter Grass
Original title	Im Krebsgang
Country	Germany
Language	German
Genre	Novel
Publisher	Steidl
Publication date	2002
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN	3-88243-800-2
OCLC	231972684

Apr 05, 2004 Grass clearly agreed. Briefly summarised, Crabwalk is the story of a fictional German teenager, Tulla, who gives birth to a boy on the ship that has rescued her from the sea. After the war she settles in East Germany, and becomes an enthusiastic Stalinist. 'Crabwalk' was the first book in which Grass dealt with the touchy issue of German refugees from the eastern European regions of what is now Poland and Czech Republic. 'Scuttling backward to move forward,' Crabwalk is at once a captivating tale of a tragedy at sea and a fearless examination of the ways different generations of Germans now view their past. Winner of the Nobel Prize.

Crabwalk, published in Germany in 2002 as Im Krebsgang, is a novel by Danzig-born German author Günter Grass. As in earlier works, Grass concerns himself with the effects of the past on the present; he interweaves various strands and combines fact and fiction. While the murder of Wilhelm Gustloff by David Frankfurter and the sinking of the ship the Wilhelm Gustloff are real events, the fictional members of the Pokriefke family bring these events into our own time.

Title[edit]

The title, Crabwalk Wheel loader komatsu 510 repair manual. , defined by Grass as 'scuttling backward to move forward,' refers to both the necessary reference to various events, some occurring at the same time, the same events that would lead to the eventual disaster. Crabwalk might also imply a more abstract backward glance at history, in order to allow a people to move forward. The protagonist's awkward relationships with his mother and his estranged son, explored via the crabbed process of scouring the wreckage of history for therapeutic insight, lends appropriateness to the title.

Plot summary[edit]

The narrator of the novella is the journalist Paul Pokriefke, who was born on 30 January 1945 on the day that the Strength Through Joy ship, the Wilhelm Gustloff, was sunk. His young mother-to-be, Tulla Pokriefke (born in Danzig, and already known to readers from two parts of the Danzig Trilogy, Cat and Mouse and Dog Years), found herself among the more than 10,000 passengers on the ship and was among those saved when it went down. According to Tulla, Paul was born at the moment the ship sank, on board the torpedo boat which had rescued them. His life is heavily influenced by these circumstances, above all because his mother Tulla continually urges him to fulfill his 'duty' and to commemorate the event in writing.

In the course of his research, the narrator discovers by chance that his estranged son Konrad (Konny) has also developed an interest in the sinking of the Wilhem Gustloff as a result of Tulla's influence. On his website ('blutzeuge.de') he explores the murder of Wilhelm Gustloff and the sinking of the ship, in part through a dialogue in which he adopts the role of Gustloff, and that of David Frankfurter is taken by another young man, Wolfgang Stremplin.

The two eventually meet in Schwerin, Konny's and Gustloff's hometown. The meeting takes place on 20 April 1997, a date full of symbolism as Hitler was born on 20 April 1889.^[1] Wolfgang, though not Jewish, projects a Jewish persona. He spits three times on the former memorial to Gustloff, thus desecrating it in Konny's eyes. Konny shoots him dead, mirroring the shooting of Gustloff by Frankfurter; after the deed he hands himself in to the police and states that, 'I shot because I am a German'; Frankfurter had said, 'I shot because I am a Jew'.

The narrator is eventually forced to realise that his imprisoned son has himself become a new martyr, and is celebrated as such by neo-Nazis on the Internet.

Characters[edit]

Konrad Pokriefke[edit]

Konrad (known as 'Konny') is the son of Paul Pokriefke and Gabi; after his parents' divorce, Konny is brought up by his left-wing mother and has little contact with his father. Highly intelligent, he is characterised as a 'loner' by his parents. He has a very good relationship with Tulla, who tells him stories of the ship, and with whom he eventually goes to live. Via his website he forms a love-hate relationship with Wolfgang: divided by their political views, they are nevertheless connected by similar characters and a love for table-tennis. At his trial he claims that he has nothing against Jews themselves, but that he considers their presence among Aryan populations to be a 'foreign body'; his father considers that he has a 'slow-burning' hatred for the Jews.

Tulla Pokriefke[edit]

Tulla (short form of Ursula) is short, thin, white-haired since the sinking of the ship, and attractive to men even into old age. Politically she is difficult to classify, except as an extremist: on the one hand she repeatedly praises the 'classless society' of the Strength Through Joy ship and supports her grandson even after the murder; on the other hand, she becomes a model functionary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany in East Germany, weeping on the news of Joseph Stalin's death.

Tulla speaks with a strong accent (a form of Low German described by the narrator as 'Langfursch', after the part of Danzig she is from). As someone who represents a line of continuity with Pokriefke's family's lost Heimat of Danzig and well as the 'lost world' of the Kashubian people, whom she is descended from, she has mysterious and almost magical powers of persuasion.^[2] Several critics see Tulla as a siren type of character with the power to tempt other people, especially men over to her views.^[2]

For her, the cruise ship Wilhelm Gustloff, built in 1937 to put the Volksgemeinschaft (people's community) into practice by allowing ordinary Germans to take free vacations abroad, was a floating utopia where for a brief moment a 'classless' society existed where everyone was loved and cared for.^[2] Most Germans could not afford a vacation abroad in the interwar period ownig to the undervalued Reichmark, so a voyage abroad the ship was considered to be a great privilege. After the ship was launched, a number of German families who were considered Volksgenossen ('National Comrades'-i.e people who belonged to the Volksgemeinschaft) were allowed to take a free vacation abroad the Wilhelm Gustloff. The people selected for a voyage on the ship were never Gemeinschaftsfremde ('Community Aliens', i.e those who not belong to the Volksgemeinschaft). The Volksgenossen families selected were meant to provide a good cross-section of German society with families who were working class and middle class; Catholic and Protestant; and from northern and southern Germany all sailing together on the ship to provide proof that German society under the Nazi regime had indeed become one. For Tulla, the ideal of the Volksgemeinschaft with German society becoming a gigantic extended family of sorts where everyone was loved and happy is her ideal society, which for her was achieved with the Wilhelm Gustloff.^[2]

The fact that people considered to be Gemeinschaftsfremde were excluded from the Volksgemeinschaft does not seem to be relevant to her way of thinking. Tulla's views are those of the 'Hitler Youth generation' who came of age in the 1930s who remembered their youth as a blissful and happy time, and often seemed not to understand why others had more jaundiced and unhappy memories of the period. Thus, she moans not only the loss of life that resulted when the Wilhelm Gustloff went down on the night of 30 January 1945, but also what the ship represented.^[2] Somehow paradoxically, she also sees East Germany as another model of her favorite utopian society where everyone wa

Crabwalk Gunter Grass