GER 308: Intro to German Literature (Dr. Krick-Aigner)

In the 1950s, stories of German loss and suffering were central to the politics of memory in the Federal Republic, and even in the 1960s and 1970s, as many West Germans focused more on the victims of Germans than on German victims, they never entirely faded from view. In the 1980s, tales of the expulsion that had dominated the 'memory landscape' of the immediate postwar years once again defined a central point of reference in the public remembrance of the war's end. I want to use Im Krebsgang as a starting point to fill in this history, outlining how Germans - particularly West Germans - have remembered the end of the war in eastern Germany in the last fifty or so years and how the larger political context has framed the public articulation of memory. Then I want to speculate about why Grass has chosen to write on this topic now. And, finally, I am interested in exploring how historians can use this book to illuminate the traumatic events that surrounded the end of the Second World War and the categories that have emerged for understanding those events. Im Krebsgang will appear not only on international bestseller lists but also on syllabi for courses in history and memory, on modern Germany, and on the Second World War. It is a riveting read, and Grass's ability to offer multiple perspectives on the same set of events makes it a wonderfully rich source. But I think that it should be only one part of our reading list for the study of the expulsion, and I want to offer a few reflections on some of the questions that teachers and students might want to ask when they read this important book.

Abstract: The re-emergence of the issue of wartime suffering to the fore of German public discourse represents the greatest shift in German memory culture since the "Historikerstreit" of the 1980s. The (international) attention and debates triggered by, for example, W.G. Sebald's "Luftkrieg und Literatur," Gunter Grass's "Im Krebsgang," Jorg Friedrich's "Der Brand" testify to a change in focus away from the victims of National Socialism to the traumatic experience of the 'perpetrator collective' and its legacies. The volume brings together German, English and Israeli literary and film scholars and historians addressing issues surrounding the representation of German wartime suffering from the immediate post-war period to the present in literature, film and public commemorative discourse. Split into four sections, the volume discusses the representation of Germans as victims in post-war literature and film, the current memory politics of the "Bund der Vertriebenen," the public commemoration of the air raids on Hamburg and Dresden and their representation in film, photography, historiography and literature, the impact and reception of W.G. Sebald's "Luftkrieg und Literatur," the representation of flight and expulsion in contemporary writing, the problem of empathy in representations of Germans as victims and the representation of suffering and National Socialism in Oliver Hirschbiegel's film "Der Untergang."

Abstract: Günter Grass's 2002 novella Im Krebsgang is just one piece of historical fiction in a long line of works that deal with German suffering in the context of the atrocities perpetrated by the Germans in the Second World War. This essay analyzes the relationship between the narrative's treatment of the victim-perpetrator binary together with the active-passive postures of its generationally connected characters. The article demonstrates that the story's main character and narrator, Paul Pokriefke, occupies a painful and conflicted stance in the middle of these dichotomies. John Peradotto's work on the Odyssey provides a fitting framework for this approach. He shows how the central figure of the Homeric epic is also caught in a middle voice existence signified by the potential dual translation of his name in the active and passive voices. In his family tale of trauma and disaster, Grass demonstrates Pokriefke's middle position not only generationally, politically and attitudinally, but also by presenting a narrator who cannot always find a place in his own syntax.

Abstract: The publication of Günter Grass's novella Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk) in 2002 signaled the author's return, after thirty-three years, to the subject that had dominated his first four literary works from Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1959), to örtlich betäubt (Local Anaesthetic, 1969): the German wartime past. However, whereas Grass's early works depict everyday life under National Socialism and the involvement of "ordinary" Germans in the regime, Im Krebsgang focuses on the sinking of the former Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) ship the Wilhelm Gustloff on 30 January 1945, and, by extension, on the issue of German wartime suffering. The critic Günter Franzen of the newspaper Die Zeit was not alone in expressing his amazement that Grass, of all people, should address this subject in literary form: for Grass, a writer with impeccable left-wing intellectual credentials, to write on a subject often linked to right-wing discourses of German victimhood "was a surprise bordering on a miracle." In this chapter, I explore Grass's reasons for choosing to tell the story of the Gustloff in Im Krebsgang, interrogating his assertion that the memory of German wartime suffering was taboo in the postwar era, before going on to examine the wider representation of German wartime experience in the work. I argue that, while Grass's emphasis on German suffering as a "memory taboo" is misguided, other aspects of Im Krebsgang's treatment of the topic remain nuanced and thought-provoking.