Günter Grass is a wilfully difficult writer. Not in the same way that Joyce or Pynchon are, by using obscure vocabuary, or obfuscating their characters behind a veil of vagueness, but rather in that he actively tries to disrupt the process of reading. Here’s his opening of Crabwalk:
“Why only now?” he says, this person not to be confused with me.
Who exactly is “he” and “me” in the context of this sentence. Is “me” the actual living and breathing author, Günter Grass? Or is “me” a narrator invented by that living, breathing person. So who is “he’?
Textual questions like this are littered throughout his work – his autobiographical book (it would be inaccurate to call it “an autobiography”) Peeling the Onion does exactly the same sort of thing, and his first and most famous book The Tin Drum (which I’ll be writing about in due course) is a model of the magical realist, post-modern novel.
It’s not to my taste, I must admit. It’s a clever joke, but one becomes tired of it so quickly. When an entire body of work is infected with it in this way, it comes to seem neurotic and mannered.
It’s a shame, because Crabwalk covers a very important subject. Note that I’m not objecting to the idea of novelistic play. Quite the opposite. I’m objecting to this constant and tiresome reminder that we are reading a work of fiction invented by an author. There is already a very easy way to indicate this: just append the words “A Novel” after the title. We’re intelligent enough to take the rest with a pinch of salt, aren’t we?
In 1945, a Russian submarine sank a pleasure steamer called the Wilhelm Gustloff, a former part of the Strength Through Joy fleet. Strength Through Joy – Kraft Durch Freude – was a kind of Nazified Butlins that organised wholesome travel for ‘ordinary’ Germans. But by the end of the war, the German war effort was co-opting every man and every piece of materiel it could lay its hands on for combat operations. As such, the Russians were within their rights to view the former pleasure cruiser as a legitimate target. However, on the night in question, which portentously was the same day as the anniversary of the Nazi assumption of power and the birthday of the Nazi ‘martyr’ that the ship had been named after, the Wilhelm Gustloff was filled with civilians fleeing the besieged city of Danzig.
Hence Grass’s particular interest. Has there ever been an author more closely identified with one city than Grass is with Danzig?
There is a distinct relationship between Crabwalk and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, as J.M. Coetzee points out in an essay on Grass’s novel in Inner Workings: the narrator, Paul Pokriefke, is born at the very moment of the Gustloff’s sinking – indeed his mother has been rescued from the stricken ship. There’s more than a hint of Oskar Matzerath about him too.
As the narrative continues it becomes clear that Pokriefke’s son has become obsessed with the sinking of the Gustloff and, more disturbingly, with the re-emerging far right in Germany. He maintains a website dedicated to the memory of the ‘martyr’ Gustloff, who he imagines himself becoming. This being the early 21st century, Grass attempts to assimilate the jargon of the World Wide Web in a plausible way. He fails miserably, although it is possible that he’s got it perfect in German and has simply been translated badly, but he certainly seems to have got the wrong end of the stick about that bête noir of the tabloids, the chat room.
Crabwalk starts off looking like it will be a reasonably straight (this is Grass, after all, so it was never going to be a conventional narrative) retelling of the night of the tragic sinking of the Gustloff. Instead it shows us how a new generation of Germans are interpreting their nation’s history, for which they are blameless, and of which they are not automatically ashamed. The post-modern tics are, mercifully, kept to a minimum, and what emerges is a powerful and important portrait of how a study of the past does not necessarily lead us to the truth.
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