12 - Im Krebsgang: Facing a Discourse of Hatred

Summary

IM KREBSGANG (2002) addresses the topic of German wartime suffering, which was for the country's left-liberal consensus a taboo rooted in guilt over the country's past. As I have previously argued, Im Krebsgang was not truly a taboo-breaker. Yet Grass's recent Nobel Prize and his decades of public presence predisposed both critics and the writer himself to receive the novella as a groundbreaking text on the Federal Republic's memory politics. Im Krebsgang portrays layered remembrance of the 1936 assassination of Nazi functionary Wilhelm Gustloff by a Jewish student, David Frankfurter, and relates these entangled memories to the sinking on January 30, 1945, of the ship named after Gustloff. Originally a cruiseship commissioned by the Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) organization, the Wilhelm Gustloff had been converted to serve various military functions and was torpedoed off the Baltic coast by a Russian submarine while ferrying more than ten thousand refugees and soldiers to the West. Im Krebsgang follows Grass's previous post-Wall works in examining characters’ interactions against the background of memorial structures. The teenaged Konny Pokriefke's fascination for the Gustloff's dramatic history leads him to reenact the past on a revisionist website that contains a “discourse of hatred.” The portrayed encounters and conversations on German history mirror Grass's fears that right-wing ideas would gain acceptance after 1990.

Generational Dialogue: Distortions in Cultural Memory

Im Krebsgang suggests that the Third Reich's habits of thought and speech cast long shadows onto post-Wall Germany. Tulla Pokriefke, who first appeared in Katz und Maus, narrowly survived the Gustloff's sinking. This event leaves her understandably traumatized, but her incessant stories of suffering also cause her son Paul, and even more so her seventeenyear-old grandson Konny, to wrestle with second-hand recollections of the tragedy. Konny's shooting of another teenager, whom he takes to be Jewish, in 1997 at the site of a former monument in Schwerin honoring Gustloff exemplifies Grass's fears of a resurfacing of right-wing politics in the wake of unification. This murder, as Grass portrays it, arises from the inability of each of the characters to be heard, in part because their communicative deficiencies irritate and provoke others, in part because they refuse to engage with positions other than their own.