Crabwalk Read online

  Crabwalk

  Guenter Grass

  Günter Grass has been wrestling with Germany's past for decades now. In this new novel Grass [examines a subject that has long been taboo — the suffering of Germans during World War II.

  It is the story of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, J a former cruise ship turned refugee carrier, by a Soviet submarine in January 1945. Some 9,000 people, most of them women and children fleeing from the advancing Red Army, went down in the Baltic Sea, making it the deadliest maritime disaster of all time.

  Grass's narrator is one of the few survivors, a middle-aged journalist who lives in Berlin. Born to an unwed mother on a lifeboat the night of the attack, Paul Pokriefke tries to piece together the tragic events. While his mother Tulla sees her whole existence in terms of that calamitous moment, Paul wishes their life could have been more normal, less touched by the past. For his teenage son Konrad, who dabbles in the dark, far-right corner of the internet, the Gustloff embodies the denial of Germany's wartime agony.

  Günter Grass

  Crabwalk

  Translated from the German by Krishna Winston

  “Why only now'“ he says, this person not to be confused with me. Well, because Mothers incessant nagging. Because I wanted to cry the way I did at the time, when the cry spread across the water, but couldn't anymore… Because for the true story… hardly more than three lines… Because only now.

  The words still don't come easily. This person, who doesn't like excuses, reminds me that I'm a professional had a way with words at a young age, signed on as a cub reporter with one of the Springer tabloids, soon had the lingo down pat, then switched over to the Tageszeitung, where Springer was the favorite whipping boy, later kept it short and sweet as a mercenary for various news agencies, and eventually freelanced for a while, chopping and shredding all sorts of subjects to be served up as articles: something new every day. The news of the day.

  True enough, I said. But that's about all I know how to do. If I really have to settle my own historical accounts now, everything I messed up is going to be ascribed to the sinking of a ship. Why? Because Mother was nine months pregnant when it happened, because its sheer coincidence that I'm alive.

  And already, again, I'm doing someone else's bidding, but at least I can leave myself out of it for the time being, because this story began long before me, more than a hundred years ago, in Schwerin, the ducal seat of Mecklenburg, nestled amid seven lakes, priding itself on postcards of its Schelfstadt district and a castle bristling with turrets, and outwardly left unharmed by the wars.

  Initially I didn't think a provincial burg that history had crossed off long ago could attract anyone besides tourists, but then the starting place for my story suddenly acquired a presence on the Internet. An anonymous source was posting biographical information, complete with dates, street names, and report cards, a treasure trove for someone like me who was under pressure to dig up the past.

  I'd bought myself a Mac, with a modem, as soon as these things came on the market. For my work I need to be able to snare information wherever it may be wandering around the world. I got pretty good at using the computer. Soon terms like browser and hyperlink were no longer Chinese to me. With a click of the mouse I could haul in stuff that I might use or might end up throwing in the trasii. Soon, out of idleness or inclination, I began flitting from chat room to chat room, also responded to the most idiotic spam, checked out a couple of porno sites, and after some aimless surfing finally landed on sites where old unregenerates but also freshly minted neo-Nazis were venting their venom on hate pages. And suddenly — entering the name of a ship as a keyword — I clicked my way to the right address: www.blutzeuge.de. In Gothic script the “Comrades of Schwerin” were strutting their stuff. Something about a martyr. Dredging up the past. More ludicrous than disgusting.

  In the meantime it's become clear which martyr is meant and what he's supposed to have shed his blood for. But I'm still not sure how to go about this: should I do as I was taught and unpack one life at a time, in order, or do I have to sneak up on time in a crabwalk, seeming to go backward but actually scuttling sideways, and thereby working my way forward fairly rapidly? Only this much is certain: Nature, or to be more precise, the Baltic, said yea and amen more than half a century ago to everything that will have to be reported here.

  First comes a person whose gravestone was smashed. After getting through school — the commercial track — he apprenticed at a bank, finishing up without attracting undue attention. Not a word about this phase on the Internet. On the Web site dedicated to Wilhelm Gustloff, born in Schwerin in 1895, he was celebrated as “the martyr.” The site did not mention the problems with his larynx, the chronic weakness of the lungs that prevented him from proving his bravery in the First World War. While Hans Castorp, a young man from a good Hanseatic family, received orders from his creator to leave the Magic Mountain, and on page 994 of the novel was left to fall as a volunteer on Flanders Field or to escape into a literary no-man's-land, in 1917 the Schwerin Life Insurance Bank took the precaution of shipping its industrious employee off to Davos in Switzerland, where he was supposed to recover from his illness. That locales remarkable air restored his health so completely that death could get at him only in another form, for the time being, he did not care to return to Schwerin and its lowland climate.

  Wilhelm Gustloff found a job as an assistant in an observatory. When this research station was converted into a Helvetian foundation, he was promoted to recording secretary of the observatory, a post that gave him time to supplement his income by working as a door-to-door salesman for a company that offered household insurance. Through his moonlighting, he became familiar with all the Swiss cantons. Meanwhile his wife Hedwig was not idle either; as a secretary in the office of an attorney named Moses Silberroth, she did her job without experiencing any sense of dissonance with her Aryan loyalties.

  Up to this point, the facts offer a composite portrait of a solid bourgeois couple. But, as will become apparent, the Gustloffs' way of life merely appeared to be consistent with Swiss notions of gainful employment Secretly at first, later openly — and for a long time with his employers tacit approval — the observatory secretary exercised his inborn organizational talent” he joined the Nazi Party, and by early '36 had recruited about five thousand new members among German and Austrian citizens living in Switzerland, had established local chapters all over the country, and had had the new members pledge their loyalty to someone whom Providence had thought up as the Führer.

  Gustloff himself had been appointed Landesgruppenleiter by Gregor Strasser, the man in charge of Party organization. Strasser belonged to the left wing of the Party, and two years after resigning all his posts in '32 to protest his Führers cozy relationship with industry, he was included in the Rohm Putsch and liquidated by his own people; his brother Otto saved his own skin by fleeing Germany At that point Gustloff had to find someone else to emulate.

  On the basis of a question posed in the Graubunden cantonal parliament, an officer from the Swiss Aliens Police interrogated Gustloff as to how he envisioned carrying out his duties as NSDAP Landesgruppenleiter in the Helvetian Confederation. He is said to have replied, “In all the world, I love my wife and my mother most If my Fuhrer ordered me to kill them, I would obey him“

  On the Internet this quotation was challenged as apocryphal In the chat room sponsored by the Comrades of Schwerin, this and other lies were characterized as fabrications by the Jewish writer Emil Ludwig. It was claimed that, on the contrary, the influence of Gregor Strasser on the martyr had remained in force. Gustloff had always put the socialist element in his worldview ahead of the nationalist element. Soon battles raged between the right and left wings of the chatters. A virtual Night of the Long Knives to
ok its toll

  But then all interested users were reminded of a date that allegedly proved that the hand of Providence had been at work. Something I had tried to explain away as a mere coincidence elevated the Party functionary Gust-loff to a participant in a celestial design: on 30 January 1945, fifty years to the day after the martyrs birth, the ship named after him began to sink, signaling the downfall of the Thousand-Year Reich, twelve years — again to the day — since the Nazis' seizure of power.

  There it stands, as if hewn into granite, that damned date on which everything began, later to escalate murderously, reach a climax, come to an end. I, too, thanks to Mother, began on that repeatedly unlucky day. She, however, lives by a different calendar, and grants no power to coincidence or any similarly blanket explanation.

  “Don't get me wrong!” exclaims this woman, whom I never refer to possessively as “my mother” but only as “Mother.” “That ship could've been named after anyone, and it still would've gone down. What I'd like to know is, what was that Russki thinking of when he gave orders to shoot them three whatchamacallums straight at us…?”

  She still rambles on this way., as if buckets of time hadn't flowed over the dam since then. Trampling her words to death, putting sentences through the wringer. In her idiom, potatoes are bullwen, cottage cheese is glumse, and when she cooks cod in a mustard sauce, she calls it pomuchel. In typical Low German fashion, she also pronounces mostg's likey's. Mothers parents, August and Erna Pokriefke, came from the area known as the Koschneiderei, and were referred to as Koshnavians. She, however, grew up in Langfuhr. She considers herself a product not of Danzig but of this elongated suburb, which kept expanding into the open countryside. One of its streets was Eisenstrasse, and to the child Ursula, who went by Tulla, it must have been all that was needed in the way of a world. When Mother talks about “way back when,” even though she often recalls pleasant days on the nearby Baltic beaches or winter sleigh rides in the forests to the south of the suburb, she usually draws her listeners into the courtyard of the apartment house at 19 Eisenstrasse, and from there, past Harras, the chained German shepherd, into a carpentry shop, filled with the sounds of the circular saw, the band saw, the lathe, the planer, and the whining finishing machine. “When I was just a little brat, they let me stir the glue pot…” Which explains why, as the story goes, wherever she stood, lay, walked, ran, or cowered in a corner, the child Tulla had that legendary smell of carpenters glue clinging to her.

  It was thus not surprising that when they housed us in Schwerin right after the war, Mother decided to train as a carpenter in the Schelfstadt district. As a “resettler,” the term used in the East, she was promptly assigned an apprenticeship with a master carpenter whose shack, with its four workbenches and constantly bubbling glue pot, was considered long established. From there it was not far to Lehmstrasse, where Mother and I had a tar-paper roof over our heads. If we hadn't gone ashore in Kolberg after the disaster, if the torpedo boat Löwe had brought us instead to Travemünde or Kiel, in the West, that is, as a “refugee from the East,” as they called it over there, Mother would certainly have done an apprenticeship in carpentry, too. I consider it a coincidence, whereas from the first day she viewed the place where we were compulsorily placed as preordained.

  “And when did that Russki, the captain of the U-boat, I mean, have his birthday? You're the one who usually knows that kind of thing…”

  No, in this case I don't have as much information as about Wilhelm Gustloff, which I got off the Internet. All I could find online was the year of the Russians birth and a few other facts and conjectures, the stuff journalists call background.

  Aleksandr Marinesko was born in 1913, in the port of Odessa, on the Black Sea. The city must have been magnificent at one time, as the black-and-white images in the film Battleship Potemkin demonstrate. His mother came from Ukraine. His father was a Romanian, and had signed his papers “Marinescu” before he was condemned to death for mutiny. He managed to flee at the last minute.

  His son Aleksandr grew up near the docks. And because Russians, Ukrainians, and Romanians, Greeks and Bulgarians, Turks and Armenians, Gypsies and Jews all lived there cheek by jowl, he spoke a mishmash of many languages, but must have been understood by his youth gang. No matter how hard he tried later on to speak Russian, he never quite succeeded in purging his fathers

  Romanian curses from his Yiddish-seasoned Ukrainian. When he was already a ship's mate on a trading vessel, people laughed at his linguistic hodgepodge; but in later years many must have discovered that there was nothing to laugh about, no matter how comical the U-boat commander's orders may have sounded.

  Lets rewind to an earlier period: at seven, young Aleksandr is said to have watched from the overseas pier as the last White Russian troops and the exhausted remnants of the British and French troops that had been sent into the fray fled Odessa. Not long after that he saw the Reds march in. Purges took place. Then the civil war was as good as over. And several years later, when foreign ships were allowed once more to dock in the harbor, the boy is supposed to have shown persistence and soon real skill at diving for the coins that elegantly dressed passengers tossed into the brackish water.

  The trio is not yet complete. We are still missing one. It was his deed that set in motion something that would exert a powerful undertow, and prove unstoppable. Because he unwittingly transformed the man from Schwerin into the movement's martyr, and the youth from Odessa into the hero of the Baltic Red Banner Fleet, he will be on trial for all time to come. Greedy now, I extracted this and similar indictments from that Web site, which I always found by searching under the same phrase: “A few fired the shots…”

  As I have meanwhile learned, a polemical work brought out by the Franz Eher publishing house, Munich, 1936, and written by Party member and official speaker Wolfgang Diewerge, made the charge less equivocally. The Comrades of Schwerin, following the irrefutable logic of insanity, could proclaim, more definitively than Diewerge was yet in a position to know, “Without the Jew, the greatest maritime disaster of all times would never have taken place in the navigation channel west of Stolpmünde, which had been swept for mines. The Jew was the one… Its all the Jew's fault…”

  Certain facts could nonetheless be gleaned from the exchanges stirred up in the chat room, some in English, some in German. One of the chatters knew that not long after the war began Diewerge had become manager of the Reich radio station in Danzig, and another had information on his doings in the postwar period: as the crony of other Nazi bigwigs, such as Achenbach, who became a Free Democratic member of the Bundestag, Diewerge allegedly infiltrated the liberal party of Nordrhein-Westfalen. And a third chatter added that in the seventies the former Nazi propaganda expert ran a discreet donation-laundering operation for the Free Democrats, in Neuwied am Rhein. Finally, questions about the assassin of Davos rose above the din in the crowded chat room, and were shot down with sharp replies.

  In 1909, four years before Marinesko was born and fourteen years after Gustloff was born, David Frankfurter came into the world in the West Slavonian town of Daruvar, the son of a rabbi. Hebrew and German were spoken in the home, and in school David learned to speak and write Serbo-Croatian, but he was also subjected to the hatred directed against Jews that was part of everyday life. His efforts to come to terms with it must have been futile, because he was constitutionally incapable of putting up a robust defense, and on the other hand he despised the very notion of accepting life as it was.

  David Frankfurter had only one thing in common with Wilhelm Gustloff: as the latter was initially handicapped by weak lungs, the former suffered from childhood on from chronic osteomyelitis. But whereas Gustloff managed to overcome his illness by going to Davos, and served the Party diligently once his health was restored, the doctors could not help David. He underwent five operations, but without success: a hopeless case.

  Perhaps it was because of his illness that he took up the study of medicine, which he did in Germany, on his family'
s advice. His father and grandfather before him had studied there. Apparently he had trouble concentrating, because he was always ailing, and he failed the preclinical examination as well as subsequent examinations. But Party member Diewerge asserted on the Internet, in contrast to the writer Ludwig, whom Diewerge insisted on calling “Emil Ludwig-Cohn,” that the Jew Frankfurter had been not only a weakling but also a lazy and shiftless student, a dandy and chain-smoker who frittered away his father's money.

  Then began — on that thrice-cursed date — the year of the Nazi takeover — recently celebrated on the Internet. In Frankfurt the chain-smoker David got a taste of what was in store for him and other students. He witnessed the burning of books by Jewish authors. Suddenly a Star of David appeared at his station in the laboratory. Hate, now taking a physical form, was closing in on him. He and others were pelted with insults by students raucously proclaiming their membership in the Aryan race. This he could not put up with. It was unbearable. He fled to Switzerland, continuing his studies in Berne, seemingly a safe haven — where he again failed to pass various examinations. Nonetheless he sent his parents cheery, even confident letters, wangling more money out of his father. When his mother died the following year, he gave up his studies. Perhaps in hopes of gaining support from relatives, he risked a trip back to the Reich, where he stood by without lifting a finger while his uncle, a rabbi like his father, had his reddish beard pulled on a street in Berlin by a young man who shouted, “Hepp, hepp, Jew!”

  Any account along these lines can be found in Murder in Davos, a fictionalized version by the best-selling author Emil Ludwig, brought out in 193Ć by Querido, a publishing house founded in Amsterdam by German emigres. Again the Comrades of Schwerin had a different story on their Web site; they took the word of Party member Diewerge, because he quoted what the rabbi, Dr. Salomon Frankfurter, purportedly told the Berlin police when they interrogated him: “It is not true that an adolescent boy pulled me by my beard (which in point of fact is black, not red), shouting, 'Hepp, hepp, Jew!'“