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53 of 59 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Echoes and Ripples -- Reliving and Reimagining the Past, June 9, 2003
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.
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18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A brilliant book on a little known tragedy, March 10, 2003
This book describes the history of a ship and its influence on the history of a family. The ship is the Wilhelm Gustloff that was named after a Nazi who was killed in Davos, Switzerland in 1936. After its use as a cruise ship for the Nazi Kraft durch Freude movement, a floating hospital and a training ship, the Wilhelm Gustloff was torpedoed to the bottom of the sea on 30 January 1945 with on board between 6000 and 10000 (nobody knows the exact number) German refugees. On board is also the very pregnant Tulla Prokriefke, who goes into labour when the ship goes down. In the end her son Paul is born on board of a rescue boat. Paul is divorced, mediocre journalist, who has, to say it mildly, a difficult relationship with his mother. One day he finds a site on the Internet that describes the ship that determined his life (his mother cannot talk about anything else). He finds that the site, with neonazi characteristics, is made by his son Konnie. And then the story goes almost inevitably to its dramatic conclusion. The book is called Crabwalk because the story of the ship and the family are not told in chronological order, but by walking sideways. Still, the story goes forward, just like a crab walks. This is also because Paul tells the story of the Wilhelm Gustloff working with the information that he finds on the internetsite of his son. This is a brilliantly written book, because one never gets lost between or within story lines despite the large number of considerable time leaps. Also, this book describes a little known ship tragedy (more than 5 times the numbers of death as the Titanic!) and gives an insight into the distorted minds of German neonazi's. An excellent read.
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
History and human suffering., January 18, 2006
This review is from: Crabwalk (Paperback)
Scuttling sideward or backward, pincers poised, crabs walk defensively. After the collapse of the Third Reich, Germans have, according to Grass, crabwalked through time. Moving about with their feeble crab eyes, post-war Germans see their recent past poorly and defensively. Crabwalk addresses how a people, either while living under a brutal regime that created widespread suffering or as inheritors of that regime's legacy, struggle to come to terms with the past. Although he focuses on Nazi Germany, Grass would equally apply his observations to other national catastrophes, such as those created by Stalin, Mao or Hideki Tojo. Thus he uses the worldwide web to emphasize how evil permeates all human societies. Grass inserts himself into his narrative as a publisher asking Paul Pokriefke, an unaccomplished journalist, to write about the sinking of the "Wilhelm Gustloff". Paul's pregnant mother was on board the "Gustloff," a German ship carrying thousands of other war refugees, mostly women and children, as well as young sailors and military nurses, when the enemy torpedoed it. Almost all on board perished. Paul's mother survived, giving birth on the rescue ship. The "Gustloff's" sinking symbolizes the Third Reich's destruction and becomes a metaphor for Germany's wartime suffering. Grass uses the Pokriefke family to illustrate how different German generations have struggled to accept their country's history. As the novella progresses, the characters crabwalk and reveal their shallow understanding of the Third Reich's history. Tulla Pokriefke, Paul's mother, personifies wartime Germany, choosing to follow strong political personalities. She comically mixes up ideologies, with personal survival as her priority. In one moment, she asserts in high-German such superficial traditional German values as cleanliness, punctuality and industriousness, but suddenly switches to low-German to reveal an ingrained instinct to think in racist categories. She's incapable of understanding the larger consequences of her thoughts. Paul, from the early post-war generation, vacillates among acceptable post-war political beliefs, left and right, with no real commitment or understanding shown for any of them. His politics spring from penance, not reflection. Paul would like to be the foundling rescued from the shipwreck, the history-less child whose mother and father will never be known. Everything German remains tainted. No probing questions about the past are asked, it's just rejected. Konrad, Paul's son, is enthralled with Nazi Germany, demanding that its monuments be restored as legitimate historical relics. He doesn't want to reject his German past, so he becomes obsessed with historical research, collecting statistics and mountains of trivial facts. It's a dehumanized history of outward details. He exhibits what Grass calls a "versachtlicher Haß," or reified hate. (The translator's rendering of "matter-of-fact hate" misses the mark.) Konrad's view of history excludes any human suffering. A lesser writer would have stumbled in creating characters that represent abstract principles, but still should to live and breathe. Grass develops his main characters admirably. Grass' storyline is complex and is set in motion by the actions of three fanatics. Wilhelm Gustloff is a fervent Nazi organizer in Switzerland. He is assassinated by David Frankfurter, a Zionist. Hitler names a luxury cruise ship after Gustloff and the ship is later torpedoed by a Soviet submarine commander, Alexander Marinesko. Grass expresses his discomfort with obsessed people: "I've never felt comfortable with people who stare at one spot until it smolders, smokes, bursts into flame." The actions of these three people exert powerful forces upon the Pokriefke family, making them seem small in comparison. The story shuttles effectively back and forth in time, ending at the trial and sentencing of Konrad Pokriefke. The reader's attention is held by Grass' ability to reveal engagingly new facets of his main characters and his ability to evoke a curiosity about what makes these characters act the way they do. Grass' conclusion evokes at once optimism and pessimism: that while some people may overcome their historical blindness, there remain others who will quickly take their place. To me that seemed a sober way of insisting that confronting the unpleasant lessons of human brutality will be ongoing.
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