Guenter Grass - Crabwalk

I'm sure that Mother didn't have a lover on board, or any of my possible fathers. It's not out of the question, however, that even in her advanced state of pregnancy she attracted men from the ship's personnel — that was her way, and still is: she possesses an internal magnet that she refers to as “a certain something.” As the story goes, the anchors had hardly been weighed when one of the naval recruits, in training for U-boat duty — ”A pale fellow with pimples all over his face” — escorted the pregnant girl to the top deck. She was feeling too restless to stay put. I would reckon the sailor was about Mothers age, seventeen or barely eighteen. He carefully guided her on his arm across the sundeck, which was slippery as glass, because it was completely iced over. And when Mother looked around, with those eyes that never missed a thing, she noticed that the davits, blocks, and mountings of the port and starboard lifeboats and their cables were coated with ice.

How many times have I heard her comment: “When I saw that, my knees went weak”? And in Damp, as she stood there, lean and all in black, surrounded by older gentlemen and initiating my son Konrad into the myopic world of the survivors, I heard her saying, “I realized then there was no way we could be rescued with them boats iced over. I wanted to get off. I screamed like a maniac. But it was too late already…”

The film I saw with Aunt Jenny in a theater on Kantstrasse showed none of this — no lumps of ice on the davits, no ice-coated railing, not even ice floes in the harbor. Yet in Schön's account, as well as in the paperback report by the Englishmen Dobson, Miller, and Payne, we read that on 30 January 1945 the weather was frigid — minus 18 0Celsius. Icebreakers had had to clear a channel in the Bay of Danzig. Heavy seas and squalls were predicted.

When I let myself wonder nevertheless whether Mother might not have left the ship in time, the basis for this essentially pointless speculation can be found in the established fact that soon after the Gustlojf pulled away from the dock, a coastal steamer, the Reval, suddenly materialized out of the driving snow, heading straight for the Gustloff. Crammed with refugees from Tilsit and Königsberg, the ship was coming from Pillau, the last harbor in East Prussia. Since there was not enough room below decks for all the passengers, they were packed in tight on the open deck. As would become clear later, many had frozen to death during the crossing but remained upright, held in place by the standing block of ice.

When the Gustlojf stopped and let down a few rope ladders, some survivors managed to scramble to what they thought was safety on the large ship; they found crannies in the overheated corridors and stairwells.

Couldn't Mother have gone in the opposite direction by way of a rope ladder? All her life, she has known when to turn back. This would have been her chance!

Why not leave the doomed ship for the Reval ? If she had ventured down the ladder, in spite of her big belly, I would have been born somewhere else — who knows where — but certainly later, and not on 30 January.

There it is again, that damned date. History, or, to be more precise, the history we Germans have repeatedly mucked up, is a clogged toilet. We flush and flush, but the shit keeps rising. For instance, this accursed thirtieth. How it clings to me, marks me. What good has it done that I have always avoided celebrating my birthday — whether as a schoolboy or a university student, as a newspaper editor or husband, whether among friends, colleagues, or family members? I was always afraid that at a party someone might pin the thrice-cursed significance of the thirtieth on me — in a toast, for example — even when it looked as though this date, once force-fed to the point of bursting, had slimmed down over the years, becoming innocuous, a day on the calendar like any other. By now, after all, we Germans have come up with expressions to help us deal with the past: we are to atone for it, come to terms with it, go through a grieving process. But then it seemed as if on the Internet flags had to be displayed — still, or again — on the thirtieth, the state holiday. At any rate, my son highlighted the day of the Nazi takeover as a red-letter day, for all the world to see. In the housing project in Grosser Dreesch, built of concrete slabs, where he had been living with his grandmother since the beginning of the new school year, he continued his activity as Webmaster. Gabi, my ex, had not wanted to interfere with our son's desire to exchange left-leaning maternal lecturing for grandmotherly brainwashing. Even worse, she had shrugged off all responsibility: “Konrad s going to be seventeen soon, old enough to make choices for himself.”

No one thought to ask me. The two of them parted “amicably,” I was told. The move from Mölln's lake to Schwerins took place quietly. Even the change of schools supposedly went smoothly, “thanks to his above-average record,” although I had a hard time picturing my son in the stagnant atmosphere of the Ossie schools. “Your prejudices are showing,” Gabi commented. “Konny prefers the structured environment there to our more lax one.” Then my ex put on a show of detachment: although as an educator who advocated freedom of choice and open discussion she was disappointed, as a mother she had to support her son's decision. Even Konny s girlfriend — that was how I learned of the shadowy existence of the dental assistant — could understand the step he had taken. Rosi herself planned to stay in Ratzeburg, but looked forward to visiting Konrad as often as possible.

His partner in dialogue, too, remained faithful. David, the invented or real-life provider of cues, did not object to the move, or remained unaware of it. At any rate, when the subject of the thirtieth came up in my son's chat room, he resurfaced after a fairly long absence, still spouting his antifascist sentiments. In general, the chatting had become polyphonic: protest-laden or blindly assenting. At times the babble was deafening. Soon the appointment of the Führer to the chancellorship was not the only subject of contention; now Wilhelm Gustloff's birthday was thrown into the mix. Disagreement raged over the “dispensation of Providence,” as Konny insisted on calling it, that had caused the martyr prophetically to come into the world on the very date that would later mark the takeover.

This historical sleight of hand was presented to all the chatters as evidence that the events in question were predestined. Whereupon the actual or merely invented David mocked the Goliath who had been stopped dead in Davos: “So I suppose it was also Providence when the ship named after your puny Party functionary began to sink with all hands on board, on his birthday — which was also the twelfth anniversary of Hitlers putsch — and in fact at the very minute when Gustloff was born; it was exactly 9:16 in the evening when the three blasts occurred…”

They played their roles as if it had all been rehearsed. Yet I was becoming increasingly dubious about my assumption that the David who clicked into the chat room from time to time was an invention, that a homunculus was jabbering preprogrammed statements such as, “You Germans will always have Auschwitz on your brow as a mark of shame…” or, “You're a clear example yourself of the evil that is coming to the surface again…” or sentences in which David hid behind the plural: “We Jews are condemned to neverending lamentation,” “We Jews never forget!” To which Wilhelm would respond with statements straight from the primer of racism, asserting that the “world Jewish conspiracy” was everywhere, but particularly powerful on New York's Wall Street.

The conflict raged relentlessly. But now and then the two would fall out of character, for instance when my son, as Wilhelm, praised the Israeli army for its toughness, while David condemned the Jewish settlements on Palestinian soil as “territorial aggression.” It could also happen that they suddenly agreed with each other as they expertly discussed Ping-Pong tournaments. Thus their individual utterances, sometimes harsh, at other times chummy, revealed that two young people had found each other in cyberspace who, for all their hostile posturing, might have become friends. For example, when David logged on with something like this: “Hello there, you bristly Nazi swine! This is your Jewish sow, ripe for the slaughter, with some tips on how you might celebrate the Nazi takeover today: first put on your broken record…” Or when Wilhelm attempted to be witty: “That's enough Jewish blood spilled for today. Your favorite German chef, who loves whipping up a nice kosher brown gravy for you, is going to say bye-bye for now and log out.”