Fiction: German history, with its many ghosts and secrets, continues to stalk the fiction of Günter Grass, one of the world's great storytellers. His career is proving almost as fantastical as his early work. The influence of his début, The Tin Drum, explosive on its publication in 1959, is still felt throughout the literary world, writes Eileen Battersby.
Grass, the Nobel Prize literature laureate in 1999 (not 2000, as his publisher states) has continued - through works such as Dog Years (1963; English, 1965), The Flounder (1977; 1978), The Rat (1986; 1987) and on into his mid-70s - to create, to listen and to lament.
Within weeks of the Nobel announcement, My Century, a colourful gathering of 100 interlinking short stories, one representing each year of the 20th century, was published. It is a deft performance, with Grass making terrific use of colloquial speech and the spoken voice, without a surreal trick in sight. An earlier work, Too Far Afield (1995), finally appeared in English in 2000. A hefty treasure trove of a narrative, 658 pages long, with wonderful digressions and set pieces, it centres on two old friends wandering around Berlin on the eve of reunification. Human, loud, angry and very funny, it suggested that there was much more to follow. Grass's new book, Crabwalk - sharp, conversational and personal - confirms this.
Again drawing on Germany's past, Grass looks this time not at war crimes, but at ordinary civilian suffering. For all that has been written about the Third Reich's evil genocide, scant attention has been expended on the grief of the German people. It is as if the world has only been prepared to judge German mistakes, not mourn German victims.
With his 1999 essay, 'Air War and Literature', which examined the horrors of the Allied bombing of German cities, the late W.G. Sebald won the gratitude of his countrymen, a people finally ready to mourn themselves. Grass also considers German suffering in Crabwalk, placing German civilian loss in the context of a specific event, the torpedoing of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a converted cruise-liner carrying refugees. It has been described as the worst tragedy in maritime history, yet it is all but forgotten. Why?
Few could doubt the imaginative energy of Grass the showman, more artist than intellectual, yet sometimes his deliberate versatility is overlooked. Born in Danzig in 1927, he is seen as a fabulist, the writer who took the pioneering style of Cuban master Alejo Carpentier (1904-80) a stage further.
It was Grass who shaped the work of the early Salman Rushdie and Angela Carter. Whatever about the subsequent Rushdie, for whom Grass is not responsible, Grass himself has succeeded in adapting and changing - even writing a love story, The Call of the Toad (1992) - while ever remaining true to the fierce passion that makes his books exciting, distinctive and vital to read. He is capable of change while always remaining consistent.
Invariably, his titles reveal a great deal. Crabwalk is a wickedly effective way of referring to the approach used not only by Germans, but by people in general, to history. A sideways shuffle is easier than direct confrontation. Never having been afraid of criticising his country, a country he obviously loves, Grass this time looks back at a near- forgotten wartime tragedy that claimed the lives of ordinary Germans. Torpedoed by a Russian submarine of German design, the Wilhelm Gustloff sank at the end of January 1945 in freezing conditions in the Baltic Sea.
The vessel had begun life as a cruise ship, but war changed this. Transformed into a refugee carrier, her luxury interior was gutted to make her capable of carrying as many people as possible. Almost 10,000 souls were crammed on to her; all but 500 died. Aside from a small number of soldiers in transit, the victims were women and children.
Paul Pokriefke, Grass's narrator, is a world-weary journalist whose life has been dominated by Tulla, his larger-than-life, master-carpenter mother. Urged by her to write the story of the Wilhelm Gustloff, he admits that it is an episode he has always avoided. Not only is his mother a survivor of the disaster, but it was while fleeing the sinking ship that she gave birth to him in a lifeboat amid all the chaos and death. Small wonder he has always ignored his birthdays.
Mother sees the story in general, and hers in particular, as heroic. She values her part in it as a survivor, while her son wishes he had had nothing to do with it. Aside from his robust mother whom he has never felt close to, Pokriefke is divorced from his wife and even more seriously estranged from his remote teenage son, Konrad, who has taken to both the Internet and the facts of German history with a vengeance.
Unlike so many writers who seem to seize on history merely as a way of telling a story, Grass instead allows history to become part of whatever tale he is telling. In this book, the story is really that of a middle-aged man whose life has been spent in the role of an uncomfortable son and who, in time, has become an uncomfortable father. His journalistic career appears to have been fed less by fire than by pragmatic need. He informs the reader of his ability to take facts and make a report tailored to whatever newspaper is printing it. He has no illusions - how could he? His defeated air renders him likeable.
His mother has bypassed him, and instead focuses her mad attentions on her grandson, Konrad, named after her long-dead brother. His wife, Gabi, has become a stranger.
Pokriefke, having gone through life without a father, aware that there are any number of men who may have fathered him, is a study in lonely despair. Grass has given him a saving sense of humour and a matter-of-fact, rather laconic delivery. The result is a narrator the reader believes in.
Concerned about the influence Tulla is having on his son - it was she who gave the boy the damn computer - Pokriefke makes the heartfelt statement that sums up his life and his feelings: "She's the one who infected him. For that, Mother, and also for giving birth to me as the ship was sinking, I hate you. I keep having these episodes of hating the simple fact that I survived, for if you, Mother, had gone overboard like thousands of others . . ."
Reluctantly agreeing to research the sinking, Pokriefke then discovers an active website also dedicated, albeit from a different angle, to the story. The website is the work of his increasingly fanatical son. Rhetoric takes over from reason as the boy sinks deeper into a strange world created by his romanticised view of his grandmother's past and his selective response to history.
Parallel to his fears about his son and his dread of his mother are the results of Pokriefke's research. Slowly, using written and film sources, he reconstructs the night of the sinking 50 years earlier, independent of his mother's various versions.
Among his regrets is the fact that he could not have changed places with a baby who was saved. "I would like to have been: a foundling without parents, the last survivor of the Wilhelm Gustloff . . ."
It is a great story, Germany's equivalent of the Titanic suffering a far heavier human loss than that of the fabulous doomed liner that hit an iceberg in 1912. Throughout Crabwalk, Grass sustains a thoughtful, if edgy tone, interrupted by the occasional stab of sharper anger. The mother/son relationship is well drawn: Pokriefke cringes at the sight of his mother, while Tulla, the definitive survivor, is indifferent to him. Tulla's vivid characterisation, including her well-used fox fur, never quite becomes a caricature; she is the girl who gave birth at 17 during a disaster, and whose hair turned snow white at exactly that moment.
At 70, she remains that jaunty girl, tough, unforgiving, relentless and surrounded by men. She is also a Stalinist.
Grass leaves little out. The final showdown between two computer-buff boys - one his son, who says of himself "I am a German", and the other whohas assumed a Jewish persona - is shocking, But it is also true to Grass's genius for evoking the echoes, parallels and wilful reverberations of guilt that continue to haunt German history.
At present, Germany is telling the world about the horrors of making war, and no modern country has a deeper, more devastatingly real grasp of war's legacy. The Tin Drum is, in my opinion, the greatest novel of the 20th century. Grass has always been able to make his protests and his polemic sing loud and clear, while also remaining true to his art. Crabwalk is a sharp, punchy and profound novel about pain and truth, both public and private.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Crabwalk. By Günter Grass, Translated by Krishna Winston, Faber, 234pp, £16.99