Around the turn of the Twenty-First Century, works focusing on German suffering during the Second World War began to enjoy popular success outside of the academic historical community: W.G. Sebald's The Air War and Literature set the tone for debate; Jörg Friedrich's The Fire: Germany in the Air War provided a wealth of information to sustain it; and eyewitness accounts such as Hans Erich Nossack's The End lent force to the discussion by giving a human face to the anonymous dead. Following in the wake of these powerful and controversial accounts, Günter Grass's Crabwalk reflects upon the question of German victimhood from a new angle. He directs our attention away from well-rehearsed arguments about the firebombing of German cities and instead considers the loss of an estimated nine thousand lives in the sinking of the German refugee ship Wilhelm Gustloff.

As his novel explores this maritime disaster's impact upon the lives of its survivors and modern-day Germans alike, Grass addresses how we remember and interpret history, and how this way of interpreting and remembering impinges on the present. Grass's own interpretation of history is not unreservedly sympathetic with respect to the recognition of German victimhood. Indeed, Grass is careful to portray many of the disaster's victims as blameworthy, for selfish conduct, for military service, for the personal oath they swore to the Führer, and even for their country's role in starting the war that led to countless atrocities. Grass also recognizes that the tallying of Second World War victims did not end in 1945: he traces generations of conflict among those most affected by repercussions from the past, and thus impresses upon us the relevance of historical memory to many of the shocking news headlines we see today.

To illustrate the connections between each of the conflicts in Crabwalk, which together sprawl out across much of the Twentieth Century, Grass employs a middle-aged journalist named Paul as his novel's narrator. Paul tracks the lives of a Swiss Nazi, Wilhelm Gustloff, and a Jewish doctor, David Frankfurter, up to the day that Frankfurter assassinates Gustloff in 1936. While Frankfurter goes to prison and falls into relative historical obscurity, Gustloff is immortalized as a martyr for National Socialism and receives the posthumous honour of having a cruise ship christened in his name. The narrator follows the Gustloff's story from its peacetime role as a cruise ship to its wartime use as a hospital ship, floating barracks, and finally refugee carrier, and imagines from several different vantage points how it was sunk by a Russian submarine in the Baltic Sea on January 30th, 1945. One of these perspectives comes from a fictional character, Tulla Pokriefke, who gives birth to our narrator on the night of the disaster. Irrevocably affected by the trauma she has experienced on the Gustloff, Tulla perpetually bombards both Paul and his son Konrad with stories of her suffering. While Paul eventually responds to his mother by researching the many facets of the disaster to write an article, his son creates a neo-Nazi website under the pseudonym "Wilhelm", fights online for his version of history to be recognized, and eventually meets with and murders his Internet nemesis, "David".

Grass's choice to write a novel with fictional main characters - Paul, Tulla, Konrad, and David - allows him to capture his audience's attention in a way that many other historical mediums cannot. We learn details about Tulla, for example, that make her seem even more human than the real men, women, and children who survived the disaster. Her white hair, turned colourless by the trauma she experiences, is hardly a detail we could find in a typical historical account. Indeed, we may question the biological feasibility of such a sudden transformation, but to Grass's message this is utterly irrelevant. As a symbol of her continuous suffering, Tulla's white hair is a key part of her humanity. As Grass humanizes his characters, he imbues Crabwalk with the force necessary to break into the popular sphere, a realm unknown to most purely factual historical accounts.

In a testament to Grass's popular appeal, Josef Joffe, editor-in-chief of the German weekly Die Zeit, argues that Crabwalk “captures the imagination more than tomes and tomes of historical writing on what happened.” Indeed, as our narrator denounces one of Heinz Schön's books as “written factually but too emotionlessly,” Grass signals that he is aware of the importance of emotion in capturing a reader's attention. Just as his distinctly human characters add an element of emotion to his novel, Grass uses disturbing imagery to capitalize upon our emotional response. The recurring image from Tulla's memory of “all of them little children among the ice flows… their little legs poking up in the air” appears no less than eight times in Crabwalk. A Russian who served on the submarine that torpedoed the Gustloff has nightmares about these children, once he discovers that the ship was not “stuffed to the gills with Nazis,” and David's mother breaks down and cries when she hears about them. Drawing much of its power from widely accepted notions of children's innocence, this gruesome image makes a lasting impression upon survivors, enemy sailors, and modern-day Germans alike.

Grass's novel, however, is far from a sensationalized account of innocent victims forced into pure and virtuous suffering. By contrast, our narrator remarks upon the shameful conduct of many authority figures on the sinking ship who “thought only of themselves.” Further, Paul notes that, as well as mothers and children, the Gustloff carried soldiers and naval women's auxiliaries. In his internet banter, Paul points out that each of the naval women's auxiliaries - to whom his son refers as “maidens in distress” - had “undergone military training and had sworn the loyalty oath to their Führer.” Their support for Germany's role in the war and for the man who brought it to them was certainly not negligible. Grass states this claim from Crabwalk more explicitly in an interview with Kate Connolly of The Telegraph, arguing that Germans were not simply unwilling victims of Adolf Hitler and the Second World War: “Of course they were seduced as well, but many were involved with enthusiasm.” Clearly, Grass is interested in presenting many of the victims on board the Gustloff as blameworthy in key ways.

Grass is equally concerned with his portrayal of the Russian submarine crew. They are not, he stresses, evil or demonic. Though Konrad argues that they are nothing but “murderers of women and children,” Paul points out that, with its military paint and antiaircraft guns, the Gustloff made a somewhat “ambiguous target” for the Russian crew. Indeed, when the narrator informs us that one of the torpedoes to strike the Gustloff was inscribed with the words “For Leningrad,” it becomes very difficult to view the men on board the Russian submarine as one-dimensionally "bad". The ship they targeted was serving the country that broke a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, whose army had recently laid waste to unfathomably vast sections of their homeland, and whose long and destructive siege of Leningrad had been lifted only year before. Though Paul most certainly does not condone the submarine's attack, he nevertheless shows an understanding of the motive and emotion behind it. Unlike Konrad or Tulla, Grass is adamant about the uncertainty and complexity of this matter.

By recognizing the perspective of the Russian submarine crew, Grass distances his novel from the position of extreme right groups who see the incident in Manichean terms. Indeed, in an interview with Alan Riding of the New York Times, he suggests that he intended Crabwalk to be an attack on the extreme right: “They said the tragedy of the Gustloff was a war crime. It wasn't. It was terrible, but it was a result of war, a terrible result of war. It was not a planned act.” Though he attributes the deaths of thousands on board the Gustloff to the submarine crew's actions, Grass refuses to apply the label of "war crime". Indeed, as a “terrible result of war”, the Gustloff's sinking ceases to be the sole responsibility of the men who fired the torpedoes.

Crucially, Grass's refusal to assign full responsibility for the tragedy to the Russian crew enhances and legitimizes his conclusions about German victimhood. Just as the Russian crewmembers are not fully to blame for their actions, neither can the German passengers be completely to blame for theirs. Indeed, though the adult Germans on board the Gustloff are unquestionably blameworthy in many senses, there nonetheless remains room for victimhood. As Germans qua Germans, they may share in guilt for the war, for its terrible consequences in general, and for the Holocaust in particular, but as individuals they cannot be robbed of their status as victims. Assigning himself a role as a minor character in the novel, Grass maintains that “[n]ever… should his generation have kept silent about such misery [specifically, at the hands of the Russians], merely because for years its own sense of guilt was so overwhelming.” Put simply, Grass suggests that it is no contradiction for an individual - and perhaps, by extension, a nation - to be a guilty party and a victim at the same time.

For Grass, however, it is not enough to simply assign victimhood and guilt where they are due and then, with this neatly out of the way, move on swiftly to present affairs. Not only does this ignore the plight of today's remaining survivors, many of whom are so strongly affected as to still feel at war with “Ivan,” but, to Grass, to focus solely on the present is to miss the point entirely. Without constant public recollection of issues like the Gustloff'ssinking, we become more and more detached from the victims of the past, and the group of people to whom we choose to assign guilt shrinks. Grass ridicules this trend in the German mindset:

All past, gone with the wind! Who still recalls the name of the leader of the German Labor Front? …On a television quiz show, if questions came up about Himmler or Eichmann, some contestants might have heard of them, but most would draw a total historical blank, and with a little smirk the perky quizmaster would tally up the loss of so-and-so many thousands in prize money.

As Hitler becomes the only recognizable public face of German guilt, the very meaning of the term is inevitably transformed. Indeed, focussing entirely on the present, our historical memory becomes fuzzier and fuzzier until the raison d'être for the categories of "guilty party" and "victim" lose their meaning, except insofar as quiz contestants on television shows care about their prize money. We may remember history, but it is not the same history that Grass knew. Perhaps partly for this reason the dedication page of Crabwalk contains the two words, “in memoriam”.

There may be no better proof of the importance of memory than the fact that it is constantly revised. Grass provides ample opportunity for reflection upon this tendency. In Russia, the submarine captain, Alexandr Marinesko, is at first denied any recognition for his sinking of the twenty-five-thousand-ton ship, but is rehabilitated in the 1960s, and later even receives honour as a hero of the Soviet Union. In Germany, too, the past undergoes revision. Grass addresses this by depicting monuments as symbols of memory. With a Vonnegut-like shrug, he writes “That's how it goes with monuments. Some of them are put up too soon, and then, when the era of their particular notion of heroism is past, have to be cleared away.” As the monument to Gustloff is neglected and the image of Marinesko is rebuilt, Grass not only shows us the malleability of historical memory, but also hints that it changes to fit the views of a dynamic society.

Grass's novel suggests that just as official historical memory changes from era to era, it also differs between groups of people. Indeed, this seems almost intuitively true: survivors are likely to hold very different memories of a disaster compared with those who directly caused it. Moreover, neo-Nazis and Jewish sympathizers are almost inevitably bound to view any ideologically charged happening in different terms. Such discrepancies in historical opinion become most evident when they come into direct conflict. In Crabwalk, our narrator observes and eventually takes part in this conflict through the medium of the Internet. As the left and right wings of Konrad's neo-Nazi website battle with each other over their particular slant on National Socialism, Paul comments that he is witnessing a “virtual Night of the Long Knives.” We may even read the persistent “sniping” exchanges he observes between members of the site as a subtle reminder of the constant sniping that took place during the Second World War.

The link Grass seeks to illuminate from past struggles to present cyber-battles is more than metaphorical. Paul hears the “irrepressible jabber of the has-beens” like Tulla when he reads the comments of young Germans on his son's website. The old speak through the young in these chat rooms, right down to the types of expressions they use. Instead of “giving” a salute, Konrad's cyber-Nazis “present” a salute, because this was the correct terminology from more than half a century ago. More seriously, the rampant antisemitism of the Third Reich resurges in the far-right corners of the internet, such that Paul notes “Jew-bashing is in season again.” When this conflict spreads outside of cyberspace and Konrad kills his Internet rival, the continuity with the past is unmistakable: in a dramatic inversion of Frankfurter's report of his murder in 1936, Konrad says, simply, “I fired because I am a German.” Grass's message is simple: Germany's past is far from irrelevant to Germans' lives in the present.

Grass expands upon this message in the final pages of his novel. Though, after time in a youth detention centre, Konrad seems to sever his links with the past, Paul learns that his son's actions have earned him a following on the Internet. Konrad is rehabilitated but the ideology he embraced survives through others, just as Germany's de-Nazification failed to eradicate many strains of Nazi thought from the country. Thus, the final two sentences of the novel - “It doesn't end. Never will it end.” - are more than a simple caution as to the tenacity of extreme ideologies. With this statement, Grass shows the gap between the past and the present to be more porous than we might like to think. He warns us that we cannot easily break free from the struggles of previous generations.

Crabwalking from the streets of Davos to the battlefields of war-torn Europe, to the tortured mind of a white-haired woman, and to a new front line in cyberspace, Grass explores a multi-generational conflict over the interpretation of victimhood. He weighs in on this issue by suggesting that Germans - just like other national groups - may be both victims and perpetrators, and leaves us with a powerful sense of why this distinction still matters after more than half a century has elapsed. Most importantly, Grass's novel places the actions of today's neo-Nazis in historical context, alerting us to the inescapable impact of the past on our present.

 

An enormous amount of Holocaust literature is available for those who desire to comprehend the dimensions of the Holocaust. Some are left behind by victims in the form of journals, letters and diaries, while others were written by Holocaust survivors. There are also accounts of resistance and stories of heroic rescues. The most important goal of learning about the Holocaust is to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again.

Here are six classic holocaust-themed books:

1. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

   
   
   A book comprising of excerpts from diaries written by Anne Frank, beginning from her thirteenth birthday in June 1942 which was a mere three weeks before she and her family went into hiding from the Gestapo in a building's tiny room in Amsterdam until their eventual betrayal in August 1944 when they were transported to Bergen-Belsen camp, where she died of typhus in 1945. It provides a glimpse of daily life under the Nazis and her expression of faith in human goodness in the hope of living in a world without hate.

2. Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi

   
   
   Originally titled "Se Questo e un Uomo" (Italian for "If This Is a Man"). This memoir recounts the author's two agonizing years at Auschwitz with his life spared mainly because of his scientific expertise being a chemist by profession, making him valuable to the Nazis. It was written to expose the atrocities perpetrated by the German Nazi regime.

3. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

   
   
   Initially published in 1946 under the title "Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager"(literally "A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp" in German). Viktor Frankl chronicled his three torturous years of experience in Nazi death camps where he lost his wife and parents; and discussed logotherapy, a new psychotherapeutic method developed to assist people find a reason for living, even in the most painful circumstances including suffering and death.

4. Night by Elie Wiesel

   
   
   Originally published in Yiddish in 1956 entitled "Un di Velt Hot Geshvign" ("And the World Remain Silent"). Elie Wiesel, after having endured through four concentration camps, vowed never to speak of his holocaust experience but decided after a decade to finally break his silence when Nobel laureate Francois Mauriac encouraged him to write a memoir about it; and had since written more than 30 works dealing with Judaism, Holocaust and the moral responsibility to battle racism and genocide. It somehow enabled people to understand the horrors of the Holocaust.

5. They Fought Back by Yuri Suhl
   
   

   A book featuring a collection of more than 30 amazing stories, detailing accounts of women including teenagers, wives and widows; and of many Jewish people of diverse political beliefs who courageously conducted anti-Nazi operations in Berlin at the height of the war. It was written to in an effort to dispel the Holocaust myth that Jews did not resist their tormentors, because the truth is, many did.

6. Their Brothers' Keepers by Philip Friedman

   
   
   A scholarly work by the "Father of Holocaust History" for the purpose to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive after more than a decade of extensive research through interviews, eyewitness accounts and official documents. It features objective accounts of many ordinary individuals, who, at great personal risks, displayed great compassion and courage in aiding Jews during the Nazi occupation.

“It is as though both narrator and listener have seen the holocaust through the author's eyes. This translation of Wiesel's book conveys all the terror, anger and despair that the Nobel Peace Prize winner endured as a 15-year-old boy.” (Wysocki 1).

Barbara Wysocki supports my thesis by saying Wiesel has brought the reader into the story by telling his tales of horror. The reason the book is not too harsh on the reader is because this is what really happened. It is not a science fiction book about violence and killing. This is a significant event in the history of the world. The things these prisoners went through were horrifying. Wiesel is telling the story how it should be told.

Lisa Katz, writer from about.com, says “the book is not pleasurable reading” (Katz 1) because of the way Wiesel describes the death camps. The reason the book is not too harsh on the reader is because this is what really happened. I think Wiesel wrote this book with a little bit of horror yet not to the point where it is impossible to read. This is a first hand witness at the scene. Wiesel did not just make this story up to write about violence and killing with no purpose. The way he wrote it really brings the reader into the story and feels like they are witnessing these horrific events.

“Not far from us, flames, huge flames, were rising from a ditch. Something was being burned there. A truck drew close and unloaded its hold: small children. Babies! Yes, I did see this, with my own eyes children thrown into the flames. (Is it any wonder that ever since then, sleep tends to elude me)” (Wiesel 32). This quote is the bottom line to what Wiesel thinks about his experiences at the German concentration camps. Utopia.utexas.edu believes that Wiesel's description of the babies being burned is too disturbing and not enjoyable to read. Wiesel does a very good job describing the babies being killed because it is giving the real truth behind what happened.

Stephanie S. of Teenink agrees with my thesis statement and says Night gives what you need to know. They think that the book won't give you facts, numbers, and pictures of the Holocaust; it just gives you the truth behind the death camps. The book is filled with emotion of all sorts but it is not too depressing because it is what really happened and we all need to know about it.

The point that needs to get across is that Night is not too harsh on the reader. It is good to read a book about the Holocaust like this one because it really brings the reader into the story. The reader feels the pain that Wiesel felt during the time he was in the camp because the way Wiesel writes the book.