Guenter Grass - Crabwalk

Captain Bertram did not tie up in the harbor, but dropped anchor within view of the city. The gymnasts, male and female, were shuttled to the events in motorized lifeboats. Thus the physical culturists remained under close supervision. No incidents occurred. The documents at my disposal allow one to conclude that this special operation proved successful, furthering the cause of German-Swedish friendship. The coaches of all the branches of gymnastics received special plaques, courtesy of the King of Sweden. On 6 August 1939 the Wilhelm Gustloff steamed into Hamburg Harbor. The KDF cruise program resumed at once.

But then the war really did begin. That is to say, while the ship was on its last peacetime cruise to the coast of Norway, during the night from 24 to 25 August, the captain was handed a radio transmission whose text, when decoded, directed him to open a sealed envelope stored in his cabin, whereupon Captain Bertram, in accordance with Order QWA 7, had the crew abort the cruise and — without alarming the passengers with explanations — steer for the ship's home port. Four days after its arrival, the Second World War began.

That was the end of Strengdi through Joy. The end of holidays at sea. The end of photos and lazy chats on the sundeck. The end of good times and the end of a classless society on board. As a unit of the German Labor Front, the KDF organization devoted itself from now on to providing entertainment for all Wehrmacht units and the growing number, at first slowly, of wounded. KDF theaters became front theaters. The ships of the KDF fleet came under the command of the navy, and that included the Wilhelm Gustloff, outfitted as a hospital ship with five hundred beds. In place of some of the discharged peacetime crew, medics came aboard. A green stripe all around and red crosses on either side of the funnel gave the ship a new look.

Thus made recognizable in accordance with interna-f tionai conventions, the Gustloff set sail on 27 September tfor the Baltic, passed the islands of Sjaelland and Bornholm, and after an uneventful trip tied up in Danzig-Neufahrwasser, across from the Westerplatte, recently die scene of fierce fighting. Immediately several hundred wounded Poles were brought on board, as well as ten wounded crew members from the German minesweeper M-85, which had run over a Polish mine in the Bay of Danzig and sunk; this, for the time being, was the sum total of German casualties.

And how did news of the beginning of the war reach the prisoner David Frankfurter, incarcerated on neutral Swiss ground, the man whose well-aimed shots had involuntarily given his victims name to a vessel that was now a hospital ship? It can be assumed that in the daily routine of 1 September in Sennhof Prison no special events were taken note of; but from then on the behavior of the other inmates toward David Frankfurter apparently reflected fluctuations in the military situation — the stigma the Jew Frankfurter bore or the respect he enjoyed. The percentage of anti-Semites in the prison must have been approximately the same as outside its walls: a balanced proportion, taking the Helvetian Confederation as a whole.

And what was Captain Marinesko doing when first German troops marched into Poland, but then Russian soldiers as well, on the basis of the Hitler-Stalin pact? He was still commander of the 250-metric-ton M-96, and since he had received no orders for deployment, continued to practice rapid submersion in the eastern Baltic with his crew of eighteen. With undiminished thirst, he remained the dry-land boozer he had always been, also got involved with several women, but had not yet been subject to any disciplinary action and may well have been dreaming of a larger U-boat, equipped with more than two torpedo tubes.

Hindsight, they say, is always 20–20. In the meantime I've learned that my son did have casual contact with skinheads. Mölln had some of these types. Because of the local incident that resulted in several deaths, they were probably under surveillance, and chose other venues for opening their big mouths, such as Wismar or the sites of larger gatherings in the state of Brandenburg. In Mölln, Konny probably kept his distance, but he gave a speech in Schwerin, where he spent not only weekends but also part of his school holidays with his grandmother. The good-sized horde of skinheads, which included groups from the surrounding area in Mecklenburg, must have found his speech long-winded, for he was obliged to shorten it as he was speaking. The written text was devoted to the martyr and heroic son of Schwerin.

Yet Konny must have succeeded in winning friends for his topic among some of the local young Nazis, fixated — as usual — on hate slogans and harassing foreigners, for there was a brief period during which a local gang called itself the Wilhelm Gustloff Comrades. As I was able to ascertain later, the gathering took place in the back room of a restaurant on Schweriner Strasse.

The audience of about fifty included members of a right-wing radical party as well as interested middle-class citizens. Mother was not among them.

I am trying to picture my son, tall and spindly, with glasses and curly hair, standing there in his Norwegian sweater among those bald-headed brutes. He, the fruit juice drinker, surrounded by big bruisers armed with beer bottles. He, with his soft adolescent voice, which kept breaking, drowned out by those braggarts. He, the loner, with sweat-drenched stale air wafting around him.

No, he did not try to adapt, remained an anomaly in the midst of a crowd that normally rejected any foreign body. Hatred of Turks, beating up foreigners for fun, hurling insults at anyone not from around here — these things could not be expected of him. His speech contained no call to violent action. When he described the murder in Davos, proceeding to analyze every detail soberly, like a detective tracking down possible motives, he did allude, as on his Web site, to the murderers presumed backers, referring to the “world Jewish conspiracy” and the Jewish-controlled plutocracy, but his manuscript did not contain abusive terms like “filthy Jew” or the exclamation “Death to the Jews!” Even his demand for a commemorative stone on the southern bank of Lake Schwerin, “in the very place where the mighty granite boulder honoring the martyr stood after 1937,” was worded politely in the form of an appeal, drawing on customary democratic practice. Yet when he proposed to the audience that a citizens' petition to that effect be submitted to the Mecklenburg legislature, the response, I am told, was derisive guffaws. A pity Mother wasn't there.

Konny swallowed the rebuff and went on at once to describe the launching of the ship. He dwelt too long on the meaning and purpose of the Strength through Joy organization. On the other hand, his account of the deployment of the reoutfitted hospital ship during the occupation of Norway and Denmark by units of the Wehrmacht and navy commanded some attention among the beer drinkers, especially because several “heroes of Narvik” were among the wounded brought aboard. But then, when after the victorious campaign against France the planned invasion of England, Operation Seal, failed to come off, and instead of being deployed as a troop transport the Gustlojf ended up boringly anchored in Gotenhafen, the boredom communicated itself to the audience.

My son found it impossible to finish his speech. Shouts of “Knock it off!” and “Cut the crap!” as well as the noise of beer bottles being banged on tables caused him to abridge his version of the ship's fateful progress toward disaster; he got only as far as the torpedoes. Konny bore this development with composure. What a good thing Mother wasn't there. The almost-sixteen-year-old probably consoled himself with the thought that he always had access to the Internet. No further contacts with skinheads are documented.