ZGram - 2/6/2002 - "Crab Walk"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

Copyright (c) 2002 - Ingrid A. Rimland

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

February 6, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Guenter Grass used to be the Darling of the Left.  I heard of him years ago
and always felt a bitter taste in my mouth.  I believe I even read on of
his novels way back in South America, although I cannot be sure.  In any
case, when people mentioned Grass, in my circles at least, it was always
with a tinge of disdain.  We thought of him as a Commie.  He was seen as a
traitor to his people.

Yesterday's Reuters news release, below, is more than welcome news to me,
for it not only shows that one of the chief members of Germany's postwar
literary elite is breaking out of the ghetto of guilt imposed by the Allied
re-educators and tackles the guilt of others, at the same time
commemorating the suffering of his own people in World War II at the hand
of brutal conquerors.

That Guenter Grass is using the form of a historical novel is particularly
satisfying to me, for I have long held that a tragedy so vast, depicting
emotions so raw and suffering to inconceivable, can only be dealt with in
novel form.

I take credit for having written the first such narrative epic from my own
people's point of view in my first novel, The Wanderers, (1977, 78) but
especially in my trilogy, Lebensraum!  (1998)  I predict that the dam will
now burst, and that in the not-too-distant future, dozens of books
detailing this long-suppressed period in German history will appear in
cinemas and television.

The Germans are shaking off their shackles.  Next they will shake off their
chains!

Enjoy - courtesy of Reuters!

[START]

Tuesday February 5 10:48 AM ET

 Novel About 'German Titanic' Breaks Taboo on Past

 By Adam Tanner

 BERLIN (Reuters) - German Nobel Prize winning author Guenter Grass kicked
off a national debate with the publication of a novel on Tuesday focusing
on the suffering of German World War Two refugees fleeing the Red Army in
the east.

 Millions of Germans were expelled from Poland, Russia and Czechoslovakia
after World War Two, losing their homes and roots as ordinary citizens paid
the price for Adolf Hitler's war that left 50 million dead across Europe.

 Their suffering is rarely commemorated in a nation still seeking to
overcome the shadows of Nazi crimes.

 Grass's latest book "Crab Walk" focuses on the plight of the German liner
'Wilhelm Gustloff' carrying thousands of refugees from near Danzig (now
Gdansk in Poland) which a Russian submarine sank in January 1945.

 More than 8,000 people died in what became known as Germany's Titanic -
more than five times as many as the 1,500 who lost their lives when the
real Titanic sank in 1912.

 Yet while the 'Wilhelm Gustloff' is one of the worst disasters in
sea-faring history, its story is scarcely known even in Germany.

 History lessons have avoided the subject, mindful of Germans' role as
aggressors rather than victims in the war, and the fate of the ship has
been the domain of neo-Nazi propaganda.

 "With this book Guenter Grass keeps the tragedy of millions of people who
suffered greatly in the expulsion from the east or who lost their lives
from being forgotten," former Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher wrote
in his newspaper column.

 "Guenter Grass is writing not to settle scores, but to counter forgetting
about the horrors and the distress always associated with the war," he
said.

 About 9,000 refugees and wounded soldiers boarded the Wilhelm Gustloff on
a freezing January 30, 1945, day hoping to escape the rapidly approaching
Soviet army.

 But the ship -- named after an assassinated Nazi official and launched as
the world's largest cruise liner in 1937 -- was hit by Russian torpedoes
that evening.

 "Thousands of people immediately broke into a terrible panic," survivor
Karl Hoffmann wrote later. "They clawed their way upward, pushing and
shoving mercilessly."

 "Those who fell were lost. Children that slipped from their mothers' arms
were trampled to death."

 RAW WOUNDS

 Grass was born in the Baltic city of Danzig and most of his best work has
been set in that port city. He has long served as the voice of a German
generation that came of age in Hitler's war and bore the burden of their
parents' guilt.

 "My mother and I fled over land," widely read columnist Franz Joseph
Wagner wrote in the popular Bild newspaper on Tuesday. "So many of my
relatives died while fleeing."

 "We, the expelled, may cry together. (Grass) I thank you for this," he wrote.

 Yet the suffering of Germans expelled from the east remains a diplomatic
can of worms, especially as the European Union ([56]news - [57]web sites)
prepares to expand to the east in Poland and the Czech Republic. Many
locals there fear Germans will use EU rules to try to claim or buy back
pre-war property once within German borders.

 Conservative chancellor candidate Edmund Stoiber has recently angered
Czech leaders by defending Germans who were expelled from the Sudeten
region now in the Czech Republic.

 When Germany started compensating Nazi-era slave labourers, some Germans
forced to work in Stalin's post-war Soviet Union said they deserved money
too. Germany and Russia ignored them.

 The debate may now intensify.

 "In the likely bestseller, Grass has broken a historical taboo," Die Welt
newspaper wrote in a front-page Tuesday story.

[END]

=====

Thought for the Day:

"The beating of my own heart was all the sound I heard."

(Baron Houghton)