The fog of war and the fog of history

Everyone reading this review probably understands that war is not simple. However, most would argue that World War II was pretty straightforward when it comes to the question of good and evil despite events such as the Soviet Union’s invasion of Poland in late September 1939 and the American dropping of the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki in August 1945. And, for the purposes of “Crabwalk,” Gunter Grass’ new novel, the sinking of the German cruise liner Wilhelm Gustloff by a Soviet submarine on Jan. 30, 1945 (with the loss of thousands of mostly civilian lives) is another of those disconcertingly complex events for anyone but the moralistically smug.

Grass has constructed a penetrating, scrupulous, imaginative novel from this event by focusing upon the fate of a child born of a mother rescued from the Wilhelm Gustloff who actually gave birth to him on a small rescue boat amid the screams of the dying thousands.

Grass’ novel is important -- which can be code for “boring.” “Crabwalk,” however, is nothing less than, page by page, scintillatingly nerve-wracking, because how dare Gunter Grass, Nobel Prize winner and nearly 76 years old, be so interesting and innovative, so intellectually yet emotionally riveting and alive to this event that is nearly forgotten in history? In Grass’ telling, the story is as vivid and full of ambiguity as the very moment we are all living through as bombs fall on Baghdad and armed soldiers patrol public spaces in the United States itself.

As he did in “The Tin Drum,” “Cat and Mouse” and “Too Far Afield,” Grass has again come up with the key ingredient for his novel: a sympathetic flawed narrator, Paul Pokriefke, that rescued boy who refers to his older self as a “run-of-the-mill journalist, who can do a decent job for short stretches. I used to have big plans -- a book that I never got around to writing was supposed to be called ‘Between Springer and Dutschke’ -- but for the most part my plans stayed on the drawing board.”

Paul receives directions to investigate that cruise liner’s sinking from a voice that bears some resemblance to Grass’ (or at least to that of a person who has written a novel called “Dog Years” and who sees in him “someone scuttling crabwise like me, sniffing for the scents and similar exudations of history”).

“Crabwalk” majestically traces the history of both the ocean liner and the submarine that sank it. Both vessels are stalked in a sure, suspenseful manner with numerous and necessary asides, hesitating only when it comes to what it was actually like on the Wilhelm Gustloff after the three torpedoes hit.

In a brilliant stroke, Grass permits his narrator to refer to the one movie made of the disaster -- so that the real horror is captured by means of an unexpected medium: “And you see children in the film. Children separated from their mothers. Children holding dangling dolls. Children wandering, lost along corridors that have already been vacated.... But the more than four thousand infants, children and youths for whom no survival was possible were not filmed, simply for reasons of expense; they remained, and will remain, an abstract number, like all the other numbers in the thousands, hundred thousands, millions, that then as now could only be estimated. One zero more or less -- what does it matter? In statistics, what disappears behind rows of numbers is death.”

Grass’ narrator investigates on the Internet, seeking information on the sinking that has shaped his entire life. In cyberspace, Paul discovers that his estranged son, Konrad, has a place in a chat room stocked with every variety of political extremist. Paul also discovers the numerous sites devoted to the Wilhelm Gustloff, which luxuriantly lives on both as part of the history of maritime disasters and as a plaything of the neo-Nazi right. (In the spirit of the novel, if a reader Googles the ship’s name, one quickly arrives at an American neo-Nazi Web site and at the desk of Holocaust revisionist David Irving.)

Along with Paul we discover that the ship was named after an organizer of the Nazi movement in Switzerland who, on Feb. 4, 1934, was murdered or assassinated -- depending on your point of view -- by David Frankfurter, a 25-year-old Jewish student. And we discover that Wilhelm Gustloff has become a hero to today’s neo-Nazis and to Konrad -- in fact, Konrad will go in search of someone posing in cyberspace as Frankfurter, who in mundane reality died in 1979 in Israel.

Of course, there is the Wilhelm Gustloff itself, stuffed with thousands of innocent women and children whose deaths became a symbol of Soviet barbarism for the neo-Nazi right. But in the middle of those thousands, such would-be admirers seem to forget, there is the inconvenient presence of numerous soldiers and hundreds of female military auxiliaries -- thus making the ship a military target for a submarine captain, humanized by the book’s narrator as an alcoholic failed father and a subject of a KGB investigation who didn’t know passengers were on the liner (because there were no Red Cross markings on it, to him it was just another German ship).

Grass never loses sight of the individuals: Paul’s mother is unsure of the father of her child and, after the war, lives in East Germany working in a furniture factory; she is a Communist Party activist while her son makes his way to West Germany to become a journalist. Paul marries, has a son and separates from his wife, and it is that son who begins asking questions about that night in January which, because they are not answered by the father, bring us to the riveting center of the novel.

Subtly, Grass moves our interest from Paul to Konrad who, after asking questions about the Wilhelm Gustloff’s sinking, receives no answers from his politically correct mother and father, who cannot break the taboo against talking about German suffering during the war. However, Konrad does listen carefully to his grandmother, who is under no such taboo and offers her vivid memory of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff and of the children’s fates: “They all skidded off the ship the wrong way round, head first. So there they was, floating in them bulky life jackets, their little legs poking up in the air.”

Konrad finds that only the extreme right is interested in German suffering, and he will, in turn, become a victim of that suffering: “History,” Paul declares, “or, to be more precise, the history we Germans have repeatedly mucked up, is a clogged toilet. We flush and flush ... For instance this accursed thirtieth. How it clings to me, marks me. What good has it done that I have always avoided celebrating my birthday ... ?”

Such squeamishness is the result of the distorting burden of guilt for the great crimes of the Nazis that prevented many from acknowledging that even some Germans had been victimized during the war. And this burden plays itself out further in the murderous meeting of Paul’s son with the mysterious “David Frankfurter” and a final snapshot of the aged mother of Paul, who sets this novel in motion with his birth: “She was playing the Catholic and had set up a sort of home altar in one corner of the living room, where, between candles and plastic flowers -- white lilies -- a small picture of the Blessed Virgin was displayed; the photo next to it showing comrade Stalin in dress whites and genially smoking a pipe.”

Both forgetting and remembering can distort the memories that a person possesses, yet there is a strange, tiny, optimistic and aware hope in the last ambiguous lines of Grass’ novel: “It doesn’t end. Never will it end.”