Crabwalk

Grass builds the novel around a real catastrophe barely known outside Germany: the Wilhelm Gustloff, a former Nazi cruise liner packed with fleeing refugees and wounded soldiers, was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine in January 1945 and sank with a death toll estimated well above nine thousand, several times the Titanic's, in a matter of minutes. That the disaster went largely unmentioned in German public life for decades is the book's real subject as much as the sinking itself; Grass has his narrator, the journalist Paul Pokriefke, argue that postwar Germany's justified focus on the crimes it committed left no acceptable public language for describing what was also done to it, and the novel's title names its own method for approaching that silence, moving crabwise, sideways and backward, rather than head-on.

Paul's mother Tulla survives the sinking and gives birth to him that same night aboard the rescue vessel, which makes Paul, by his own account, a man literally created by the catastrophe he then spends decades reluctant to write about, only finally doing so under pressure from his estranged son Konrad, who has discovered the story online with none of his father's inherited caution. The novel tracks the same history refracted three times, Tulla's raw survivor's memory, Paul's professional, defensive distance, and Konrad's unmediated, internet-fed obsession, to argue that a story left officially untold doesn't disappear, it just waits for whoever finds it next to tell it with the least context and the most ideology attached.

Konrad's radicalization plays out largely on a website devoted to Wilhelm Gustloff, the Nazi official the ship was named for, assassinated in Switzerland in 1936 by the Jewish student David Frankfurter, and Konrad, posting under Gustloff's name, finds himself in an increasingly heated argument with a user posting as Frankfurter's defender. Grass stages the entire ideological collision inside a chat window, generations of unresolved history compressed into an anonymous online debate that neither side treats as historical anymore, before Konrad carries the argument out of the forum and into an act of real violence against the boy on the other end of it, a resolution Grass frames as the direct, literal cost of history that's been allowed to fester unaddressed rather than examined.