Gunter Grass as One of Germanys Most Successful Authors - Essay Example

28 May Crabwalk Analysis Gunter Grass is one of Germany's most successful and widely-known the winner of a Nobel Prize amongst other awards. Born in 1927, Grass was part of the German army during the Second World War, and it is clear that the guilt from being a cog in the Nazi machine has stayed with him. Crabwalk, written in 2010, is very much a part of Grass's writing career in more ways than one. Tulla, the protagonist's mother, featured in two of Grass's earlier novels (Cat and Mouse, 1961, and Dog Years, 1963), for example; on a grander scale, Crabwalk plays into Grass's overarching theme of German responsibility for Nazism and World War II. As in earlier novels, Grass uses Crabwalk to ask whether subsequent generations of German citizens have adequately dealt with the horrors of the Third Reich. The nation's policy of remorse does not provide the analysis and the assumption of personal responsibility which Grass thinks is necessary. In the deftly-woven plot of Crabwalk, shortsightedness and regret characterize modern Germany, but this vision is far more bleak than the reality. This essay will look at the protagonist Paul Pokriefke – namely his relationships with his mother and son – as well as the significance of the sinking of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff. Germany's reaction to its past is an issue which has not been left dormant over the seventy years since the war. The Reader, written by Bernhard Schlink in 1995 and made into a film in 2008, is just one other of the Vergangenheitsbewaltigung genre, in which German writers struggle to come to terms with their collective past. The problem to be resolved is that different factions of society obviously have different solutions for how to deal with the repercussions of the Third Reich. One part of German repentance for Nazism was the vast amount of war criminals who were fairly tried for their crimes: the Nuremberg Trials, in which nineteen major war criminals were sentenced to imprisonment or death, provided an excellent precedent of the nation taking responsibility by sentencing key players in the war to appropriate punishments. However, this is not enough for Grass, who portrays Paul Pokriefke as part of a generation which fails to properly explore their cultural inheritance with the damning consequence that their children flock back to the ideology contemporary to their grandparents. The first step of this process is portrayed in Tulla's relationship with her son. Paul refuses to believe his mother's statement that she went into labor with him when the ship MV Wilhelm Gustloff began to sink, attributing this to her sense of drama rather than actual fact. The repercussions of Paul's secret disbelief of his mother will be discussed below. In general terms, Tulla's demand of Paul that he write a history of the capsizing reflects her generation's incapability to deal with Nazism, and the way this responsibility was handed off to a generation who felt equally as unable, as well as far less culpable. In The Reader, Bernhard Schlink expresses the reaction of the second generation as a complete laying of the blame on the silent parents, regardless of whether they had actually been personally involved in the Nazi regime. This approach is just as untenable and unfair as Grass's insistence that the blame should be taken on the shoulders of subsequent generations. Paul's relationship with his mother portrays the uneasy dysfunction between those who lived through Nazism and those who came immediately after it. Tulla's silence, coupled with her wish that her son break that silence for her, creates an unhappy family and an unhappy country. This silence, borne of shame, means that following generations will not fully understand the evil of Nazism – the oft-repeated and almost clicheic statement that “those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it” (George Santayana) is wholly appropriate in the case of Konrad. Grass's antagonist is Konrad Pokriefke, Paul's estranged son, whose close relationship with his grandmother secretly mutates into a neo-Nazist idealization. While Paul fails to do his 'duty' by writing the story of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff's capsize, Tulla turns to her grandson, who misinterprets her experience by focusing on the ship's namesake rather than his grandmother's story. When the only groups of people talking about such a traumatic event are the extremists, the generation twice removed from the reality of what happened gain a skewed and not entirely accurate picture of history. In this sense, Konrad's affinity for neo-Nazism is almost understandable – or, if not understandable, not entirely his fault. For example, Paul's reaction to the slow-dawning realization that his son is the webmaster of the neo-Nazi website he has been researching is hence typical of his generation – or, at least, typical of Grass's depiction of the first post-war generation. His listless hurt is completely unproductive, just like his initial reaction to his mother's insistence that he write about the capsizing of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff. Even when Konrad acts out in an attempt to understand Germany's past, his elders fail to rein him back in. The seminal event of the novel is the sinking of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff, an actual event which took place on 30 January 1945 – interestingly, this date was the anniversary of its namesake's birth, as well as (in a way more immediately relevant) the anniversary of Hitler's swearing in as Chancellor of Germany twelve years previously. Tulla was one of the few people to have been saved that night from the greatest maritime disaster in history, and claims to have borne Paul that night, having been sent into labor by the shock. That Paul does not quite believe this is reflective of a greater creeping disbelief of the Nazi period – what germinated in Paul as a quiet doubt that his mother was entirely truthful about the date and circumstances of his birth, whether it was a simple mistake or not, sprouted in Konrad as a fully-fledged conviction that the human rights abuses of the Fascist regime were not abuses at all. The ship was named after Wilhelm Gustloff, an anti-Semitic scientist who was murdered in 1936 by a Jewish student (by the name of David Frankfurter), and who thereafter was officially named a martyr of the Nazi cause. The significance of this becomes evident in the final section of the book, when Konrad shoots Wolfgang Stremplin, and directly echoes the earlier shooting by adapting Frankfurter's explanation – “I shot because I am a Jew” – to “I shot because I am a German.” In a mirror-like reflection of Gustloff's death and martyrdom, Konrad is thereafter hailed a martyr for the neo-Nazi cause – an uncomfortable realization for his father. The direct line from Tulla to Konrad via Paul suggests awkward truths about Paul's struggle to come to terms with history. One of the major problems with looking at Crabwalk, or indeed at any of Grass's work, as a didactic guide to dealing with the after-effects of World War II in Germany, is that Grass provides no alternative. The reader is left floundering hopelessly, asking oneself what one should do if Paul's research is not enough. Modern German people cannot take any responsibility, because the vast majority of them had not even been born when Hitler came to power, let alone those who had but were not old enough to know or understand or influence the country's direction at the time. Furthermore, we are seventy years away from the war now – Grass's similar work in the 1960s was more relevant and had more potential to influence, as the people reading his novels were the very people he was writing about. In 2010, he is still repeating his message of fifty years before, using awkward plot devices like a semi-estranged family with a barely believable relationship between grandparent and grandchild to attempt to make the old complain relevant in the twenty first century. Although extremist right-wing movements are a problem in every country, Germany has specific laws designed to protect the nation from a repeat of Nazism, and information about the Holocaust has not been silenced or oppressed in any way. Foreign visitors to Germany often report being stopped in the street by older men and women, who apologize for the war and their part in it. Crabwalk is (hopefully) Grass's last attempt at beating out a message which people have stopped listening to. Read More