Guenter Grass - Crabwalk

At issue was the plebiscite that followed the annexation of Austria to what was now the Greater German Reich. German and Austrian citizens living in England were to be given an opportunity to cast their votes. The voters embarked at the Tilbury docks, and the voting took place outside the three-mile limit. This event occasioned a debate between Wilhelm and David. Back and forth, Ping-Pong-style, went their playful argument about the election. Wilhelm insisted that a secret ballot was ensured by the presence of voting booths; David replied disdainfully that of the almost two thousand voters, a total of four had voted against the Anschluss: “We've seen this before, these 99.9 % yes-votes'“ Quoting the Daily Telegraph of 12 April 1938, Wilhelm countered, “No pressure was exerted' And that, my dear David, was affirmed by Englishmen, who never miss an chance to portray us Germans in a bad light…”

I found the absurd chat-room bickering amusing. But then one of Wilhelms rejoinders made me smell a rat. This sounded familiar' To blunt David's mockery, he had the temerity to say. “Those democratic elections you glorify are driven by the interests of the plutocrats, of world Jewry! The whole thing is a swindle”

Something very similar had been offered up recently by my own son. On a visit I had tried to start a conversation by mentioning, with paternal casualness, the story I was doing on the upcoming elections in Schleswig-Holstein; the response I got was, “The whole thing's a swindle. Whether on Wall Street or here: the plutocracy drives everything; money rules “

After the first cruise to Madeira, during which Captain Lubbe died, so that in Lisbon Captain Petersen had to take over for the rest of the voyage, the summer trips to Norway began, with Captain Heinrich Bertram now in command. There were eleven of these cruises in all, each lasting five days, and so popular that they quickly sold out. They were also on the Strength through Joy schedule the following year. And it was for one of these last cruises to the fjords — I assume the next-to-last one, in mid-August — that Mothers parents were on board.

The local Party headquarters in Langfuhr had actually picked the master carpenter Liebenau and his wife for a trip to Norway because the master owned a German shepherd named Harras, and in the kennels of the Free States constabulary this Harras had succeeded in covering a bitch whose litter included the Fuhrers favorite dog, Prinz, a gift to Hitler from the Gauleiter. For this reason the canine sire Harras was mentioned several times in theDanztgei Vorposten. Mother had sung me this tale since my childhood: her novel-length dog story, complete with pedigree. Any reference to the dog brought the child Tulla into the picture. For instance, when Mother was seven and her brother Konrad drowned while swimming m the Baltic, she supposedly spent a week in the dog kennel in the courtyard of the carpentry shop, during which time she spoke not a word. “I even ate out of his tin bowl Entrails' You know, the stuff dogs are fed. That was my week in the doghouse, where I didn't say one blessed word, that's how awful I was feeling about our Konrad. He was deaf and dumb from birth, you know…”

But when the dog owner Liebenau, whose son Harry Mothers cousin, received the offer of a trip to

Norway on the universally beloved Strength through Joy ship, he regretfully turned it down, because his carpentry business was booming: expansion of the barracks out near the airport. He suggested to the Party Kreisleiter that his hardworking helper August Pokriefke, an assiduous Party member, be sent in his stead, along with his wife Erna Pokriefke. Liebenau would cover the cost of their cabin and the already discounted round-trip tickets to Hamburg, using company funds.

“If we still had the photos they snapped on the Yustloff, I could show you all the stuff they saw in those few days…” Tulla's mother declared herself particularly taken with the Folk Costume Lounge, the Winter Garden, the morning sing-alongs, and the onboard band that played every evening. Unfortunately the passengers were not allowed to go ashore from the fjords, possibly because of regulations designed to prevent any hard foreign currency from leaving the Reich. But one of the photos, lost along with the album and all the other snapshots, “when the end came for the ship,” showed a laughing August Pokriefke dancing with a group of costumed Norwegian folk dancers who had been allowed on board. “My papa, who was basically always full of fun, raved about that ship night and day after he got back from Norway. He supported the Party two hundred percent. That's why he wanted me to join the German Girls League. But I didn't want to. Not then and not later, either, when we was brought back home into the Reich, and all the girls had to be in the BDM…”

Mother's version was probably accurate. She wasn't one to let others organize her life. Whatever she did had to be voluntary. But even as a member of the Socialist Unity Party and the fairly successful leader of a carpentry brigade that produced bedroom furniture by the ton for the Russians and later usually exceeded its quota during the interior work on the concrete-slab apartment complex in the suburb of Grosser Dreesch, she got herself into hot water by charging that she was surrounded by revisionists and other enemies of the working class. Yet she was also not happy that I had chosen to join the Free German Youth: “Ain't it enough that I'm out here breaking my back for them no-goods?”

My son seems to have a lot in common with Mother. It must be in the genes, as my ex-wife claims. At any rate, Konny never wanted to join anything, not even the Ratzeburg Rowing Club or — Gabis suggestion — the Boy Scouts. To me she complained, “He's your typical loner, averse to socialization. Some of my colleagues at school say Ronnys fixated on the past, no matter how much interest he appears to take in technological progress — computers and modern forms of communication, for instance…”

Yes, of course! It was Mother who gave my son a Mac with all the bells and whistles, not long after the survivors' reunion in Damp, the Baltic coastal resort. He was barely fifteen when she got him hooked. Its her fault and hers alone that things went so wrong with the boy. At least Gabi and I agree on this much: the whole business began when Konny was given that computer.

I've never felt comfortable with people who stare at one spot until it smolders, smokes, bursts into flame. Gust-loff, for example, whose Führers will was his command, or Marinesko, who in peacetime practiced only one thing — sinking ships — or David Frankfurter, who in actuality wanted to shoot himself, but then riddled someone else's flesh with four shots to give his people a sign.

In the late sixties the director Rolf Lyssy made a film that had as its subject this man of the sorrowful countenance. I've played the video at home; the black-and-white original has been gone from the theaters for years. Lyssy presents the facts quite accurately. We see the medical student, initially wearing a beret, later a hat, smoking despairingly and downing pills. When he buys the revolver in Berne's Old Town, two dozen bullets cost him three francs seventy. Unlike my version, even before Gustloff enters his study in street clothes, Frankfurter puts on his hat, moves from the armchair to a straight chair, then fires with his hat on. After turning himself in at the Davos police station and reeling off his confession emotionlessly, like a memorized poem recited in school, he places the revolver on the counter as proof.

The film does not tell us anything new. But it has an interesting feature: clips from newsreels that show the coffin, draped in a swastika flag, moving slowly through falling snow. All of Schwerin is snowed in when the funeral procession gets under way. Contrary to the actual reports, only a few civilians salute the coffin with raised right arms. At the trial, the actor playing Frankfurter looks fairly small, standing between two cantonal policemen. He says, “Gustloff was the only one I could get at…” He says, “My intention was to strike the bacillus, not the person…”