To most British readers, Gunter Grass is synonymous with The Tin Drum (1959). That remarkable first novel propelled him from obscurity to a daunting new role as spokesman for a whole generation of leftist Germans coming to terms with the aftermath of Nazism. The story of the diminutive Oskar Matzerath, who refuses to grow up in protest at the cruelties of German history, represented the struggle of a people trying to cope with an intolerable past. Grass's message, illustrated by Oskar's decision to start growing again at the end of the war, was that they could indeed begin afresh.
More than 40 years on, having won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, Grass has returned to the subject of war guilt in Crabwalk. The central event of the novel concerns the sinking, in January 1945, of the former luxury cruise ship the Wilhelm Gustloff. The ship was being used to carry East Prussian refugees away from advancing Soviet troops when it was hit by a torpedo fired from a Soviet submarine. Between 8,000 and 9,000 passengers, most of them women and children, died that night in the icy waters of the Baltic in what has been called Germany's Titanic.
Few present-day Germans knew - or, more accurately, wanted to know - about this terrible event. Before the publication of Grass's novel in Germany last year, the truth of what happened to the Wilhelm Gustloff was of interest chiefly to neo-Nazis and extreme right propagandists.
Grass had altogether different credentials for returning to the subject. As a man of the left and a pacifist, he was ideally placed to address the theme of Germany's own suffering in the Second World War without provoking suspicion. In a sense, only Grass could have done this.
The British press often refers to the new "German confidence", which is then mistaken for assertiveness. A better way of understanding contemporary Germany is to speak of a new-found, if tentative, ability to confront the recent past without automatically suffering a cultural panic attack. Only in recent years has it become respectable for Germans to speak openly and without embarrassment of the dreadful bombing of Dresden. If it is true that only Grass could have written Crabwalk, it is also true that he could only have written it at this point in time.
The narrator, Paul Pokriefke, is a struggling journalist based in Berlin and one of the few survivors of the Wilhelm Gustloff. Born to an unmarried mother on a lifeboat as the boat was sinking, he is continually being urged by her to write about the extraordinary circumstances of his birth, and the pain and sadness that was to dominate her life. Wishing their lives could have been less disfigured by the past, Paul, in disaffected middle age, finds himself returning again and again to an event over which postwar liberal Germany has apparently drawn a veil. Trawling the internet for fragments of information, he stumbles on a chatroom conversation about the Gustloff between a German right-winger and a Jew. Slowly, he begins to realise that the right-winger is, in fact, his teenage son, Konrad, who, encouraged by his grandmother, is stirring up anger at their society's refusal to confront the full extent of Germany's wartime agony.
What shocks Paul most is the realisation that the atavistic emotions his generation had believed dead have been reawoken in the hearts of their children: "Somehow I could not dismiss the thought that this person incessantly stirring the Nazi pot and hailing the triumph of the Thousand Year Reich like a cracked record was not some has-been like Mother but a young man . . . It couldn't be your own flesh and blood, could it? How could a child who was raised in a more or less liberal setting veer so far to the right?"
Paul's generation had believed in the cleansing power of the new to wash away the stain of guilt. Yet in a grim paradox, it is that most modern medium, the internet, which is being used to perpetuate the worst of the past. His generation have not drained the poison from the national soul; they have turned away from it and left it to their children to look it in the face. "It doesn't end," Paul concludes. "Never will it end."
Grass, with characteristic sophistication, refuses to accept neat solutions or embrace easy optimism. As clear-sighted as he is, this is a novel about turning one's eyes away and the consequences of that. The details of the 1945 tragedy itself cannot be revealed straightforwardly, but piecemeal, with hesitation. "Do I have to sneak up on time in a crabwalk," asks the narrator, "seeming to go backward but actually scuttling sideways and thereby working my way forward rapidly?"
In spite of this intricate structure - or perhaps because of it - Crabwalk is compulsive, leading you towards the final, shattering twist. To reveal much more of the plot would be to spoil it. But the importance of this book - well-translated from the original German by Krishna Winston - surpasses its narrative merits. Grass could scarcely be delving deeper into the German soul and challenging its demons to do their worst.
