Crabwalk

Crabwalk (2002), published in German as Im Krebsgang, is a novel by German author Günter Grass, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. Born in 1929 in the Free City of Danzig (now known as Gdańsk, Poland), Grass explores the effects of the past on the present: in this novel, he interweaves various strands and combines fact and fiction in exploring the lack of attention to German victimhood in their losses in World War II.

He uses fiction to explore the lasting influence of such major events as the early 1945 sinking of the ship Wilhelm Gustloff by a Soviet submarine, in which more than 9300 people died, most civilians and thousands of children. He believes that the failure to recognize the cost of such losses as the ship sinking to the Germans helped create a rise of neo-Nazi movements.