Inner Workings Read online

  The court bends over backward to see Konrad as a puppet of forces beyond his ken. Tulla makes a dramatic appearance on the witness stand to defend her grandson and denounce his parents for neglecting him. She does not tell the court that it was she who gave the youth the murder weapon.

  Surveying the proceedings, Paul is convinced that Konrad is the only participant not afraid to speak his mind. Among the lawyers and judges he detects a smothering blanket of repression. Worst are the dead boy’s parents, impeccable liberal intellectuals who blame no one but themselves and deny any desire for revenge. Their son craved to be a Jew, Paul finds, precisely because of his father’s habit of seeing two sides to every question, including the question of the Holocaust.

  Sentenced to seven years in juvenile detention, Konrad proves a model prisoner, using his time to study for his university entrance examinations. The only friction arises when his request to have a picture of Landesgruppenleiter Gustloff in his cell is refused.

  Tulla Pokriefke, born in 1927, the same year as Günter Grass, first makes her appearance in Cat and Mouse (1961), though Lucy Rennwand of The Tin Drum can be regarded as a forerunner. In Cat and Mouse she is ‘a spindly little [ten year old] with legs like toothpicks’ who goes swimming with the boys in Kaisershafen harbour and is permitted to watch their masturbation contests.2 In Dog Years (1963), now a high school student, she maliciously denounces one of her teachers to the police: he is sent to the Stutthof labour camp and dies there. On the other hand, when a malodorous pall descends over Kaisershafen, it is Tulla alone who utters what everyone privately knows: that the smell comes from truckloads of human bones from Stutthof.

  By the last year of the war Tulla is working as a streetcar conductor and doing her best to get pregnant. Thereafter she disappears from view: in The Rat (1986) the ex-drummer boy Oskar Matzerath, now going on for sixty, remembers her as ‘a very special kind of bitch’ who, to the best of his knowledge, went down with the Gustloff.3

  Tulla’s politics are hard to reduce to any coherent system. A trained carpenter and impeccable proletarian, she has thrown herself into Party affairs in the new East German state and been recognised and rewarded for her activism. An unquestioning follower of the Moscow line, she weeps when Stalin dies in 1953 and lights candles for him. Yet while in one breath she can hail the crew of the submarine that nearly killed her as ‘heroes of the Soviet Union allied to us workers in friendship’, in the next she can describe Wilhelm Gustloff as ‘the tragically murdered son of our beautiful city of Schwerin’ and put forward Kraft durch Freude as a model for communists to follow. (pp. 149, 93)

  Despite her incorrectness, she retains her position in the collective, held in affection by her comrades but also feared. When, after the collapse of the regime in 1989, what Grass calls ‘die Berliner Treuhand’ and his translator ingeniously calls ‘the Berlin Handover Trust’ moves into the old East to buy up state enterprises, she makes sure that she gets her cut. By the end of the book she has managed to work Catholicism into her eclectic belief system: in the living room of her home on Gagarin Street not far from the Lenin monument she has a shrine in which Uncle Joe smokes his pipe side by side with the Virgin Mary.

  Paul sees his mother as the last true Stalinist. What exactly he means by that he does not spell out; but Tulla emerges from his account as unprincipled, canny, scheming, tenacious, impatient of theory, unforgiving, hard to kill, a nationalist first and last, and an anti-Semite, which constitutes a not inaccurate profile of a Stalinist. She also gave birth to a child at sea on a night when she witnessed thousands of dead children floating head down in their ineffectual lifejackets, and heard the collective last cry of the doomed passengers of the Wilhelm Gustloff as they slid overboard. ‘A cry like that – you won’t ever get it out of your ear,’ she says. As if to prove it, her hair turned white that night. Besides being a Stalinist, Tulla is thus also a stricken soul: stricken by what she saw and heard, and unable to get over her grief until the taboo on representing what happened on January 30, 1945, is broken and the dead can be mourned as they deserve. (p. 155)

  Tulla Pokriefke is the most interesting character in Crabwalk –perhaps, after Oskar, the boy with the tin drum, the most interesting in Grass’s whole oeuvre, not only at a human level but also for what she stands for in greater German society: an ethnic populism that survived better in the East than in the West but evades capture by the right as by the left; that has its own story of what happened in Germany and the world in the twentieth century, a story that may be slanted, self-interested, and chaotic, but is deeply felt nonetheless; that resents being banned from polite discourse and generally repressed by the bien-pensants; and that will not go away.

  Ugly though we may consider the Tulla Pokriefke phenomenon to be, Crabwalk presents for scrutiny a considered argument for allowing the Tullas and Konrads of Germany to have their heroes and martyrs and memorials and ceremonies of remembrance. The case against repression, the case for an all-inclusive national history, is one that Paul, faced with the fate of his son, comes to appreciate more and more, namely that if deep-seated passions are repressed they emerge elsewhere in new, unpredictable forms. Refuse to allow Konrad to read his paper to the class and he becomes a killer; lock him away and a new website pops up on the Internet: www.kameradschaft-konrad-pokriefke.de with its blood oath, ‘We believe in you, we will wait for you, we will follow you.’ (p. 234)

  The most personal parts of Crabwalk are those in which Grass or ‘Grass’ looms over Paul Pokriefke’s shoulder and we learn how Paul’s narrative, namely Crabwalk, comes to be written. As a student in West Berlin thirty years ago, Paul attended a course in creative writing taught by ‘Grass’. Now ‘Grass’ contacts him again, urging him to write the Gustloff book, arguing that as the offspring of that tragic night he is peculiarly fitted for the task. Years ago ‘Grass’ collected materials for a Gustloff book of his own, but then decided ‘he’d had it with the past’ and did not write it, and now it is too late. (p. 80)

  People of his generation kept a discreet silence about the war years, ‘Grass’ confides, because their personal sense of guilt was overwhelming and because ‘the need to accept responsibility and show remorse took precedence’. But now he realises that was a mistake: the historical memory of Germany’s sufferings was thereby surrendered to the radical right. (p. 103)

  ‘Grass’ has working sessions with Paul in which he presses him to find words to describe the horrors of the last months of the war, as fleeing Germans perished by the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions. For Paul’s guidance ‘Grass’ even produces a specimen passage (deceptive guidance, however, for the passage describes not what really happened but what he saw in a film about the end of the Gustloff).

  Paul is not inclined to accept the pleas of ‘Grass’ at face value. The reason why ‘Grass’ has not written the book is, he suspects, that his energies have dried up. Furthermore, he suspects, the real pressure comes from the obsessed Tulla behind ‘Grass’, twisting his arm. ‘Grass’ claims to be a mere casual acquaintance of Tulla’s from the old days in Danzig. The truth, he suspects, is that ‘Grass’ was her lover and may be his father. His suspicions are strengthened by a comment that ‘Grass’ makes on his drafts: that Tulla should be given more mystery, more of a ‘diffuse glow’. ‘Grass’ seems still to be under the spell of the witch-woman with the white hair. (p. 104)

  ‘Who sows the wind will reap the storm,’ runs the German proverb. It is not so much in the storm – the atrocities committed upon ethnic Germans in their flight from the east, the Schrecklichkeit of the fire-bombing of German cities, the coldhearted indifference of the Allies to the sufferings of the German population after the war – that the German radical right has found wellsprings of enduring resentment to exploit, as in the silence demanded of those who see themselves as victims or heirs of victims – a silence first imposed by outsiders, then adopted as a considered political measure by Germans themselves.

  This taboo is today being re-ex
amined in an extended national debate. Crabwalk was a best-seller when it came out in Germany in early 2002. This was not because the Gustloff/Gustloff story had never been tackled before. On the contrary, barely a year after Wilhelm Gustloff’s death the popular author Emil Ludwig published, in German though not in Germany, a novel about the affair in which Frankfurter emerges as a hero, a man who by striking down a prominent Nazi hopes to inspire Jews to resistance. In 1975 the Swiss director Rolf Lyssy made a film, Konfrontation, on the same theme.

  The last voyage of the Gustloff was the basis for the film Night Fell over Gotenhafen (1959) by the German American director Frank Wisbar. A survivor of that voyage, Heinz Schön, has year after year been publishing his researches into the fateful event and the identities of those who died. In English there has been The Cruelest Night: Germany’s Dunkirk and the Sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff (1979) by Christopher Dobson, John Miller, and Thomas Payne. Grass himself has referred to the Gustloff in several of his books, starting with The Tin Drum, as well as to the sinking by British planes of another erstwhile cruise ship, the Cap Arcona, carrying concentration camp survivors.

  Thus neither Gustloff nor the Gustloff is forgotten in the sense of having been cut or allowed to fall out of the record. But there is a difference between being part of the record and being part of collective memory. The anger and resentment of people like Tulla Pokriefke grows out of a sense that their suffering has not been given its due, that an event catastrophic enough to be a cause of public mourning has been forced to remain a source of private grief. Her plight, and the plight of thousands like her, is captured most poignantly when, wanting to commemorate the dead, she can find nowhere to put her flowers but on the site of the old Nazi memorial. The question she asks, in its most emotive form, is: Is the reason why we are not allowed to lament, together and in public, the deaths of those thousands of drowned children simply that they were German children?

  Ever since 1945 the question of collective guilt has been a divisive one in Germany, and Grass is at pains to confront it not directly but sideways, crabwise. Crabwalk is billed as eine Novelle, a novella or short fiction; its subject is not the sinking of the Gustloff but the need to write, and the coming to be written of, the story of the sinking of the Gustloff.

  It is here that Günter Grass and the shadowy ‘Grass’ figure come closest to merging: through ‘Grass’, Grass presents his apology for not having written and, sadly, for no longer having it in his power to write the great German novel in which the multitude of Germans who perished in the death throes of the Third Reich are brought back to life so that they can be buried and mourned fittingly, and, the work of mourning having been completed, a new page in history can at last be turned, in an act of remembrance that will still the inarticulate, smouldering resentment of the Tulla Pokriefkes of Germany and liberate their grandchildren from the burden of the past.

  But what does it in fact mean for the story of the Gustloff to be written by a Paul Pokriefke? It is one thing to relive the terrible last hours in the imagination and then render them in words that will bring their terrors home to readers, which is the task that ‘Grass’ seems to set before Paul. But the writing project before which Paul wavers is larger and more taxing: to become the writer who at the present moment in history – the early years of the twenty-first century – chooses to make the loss of the Gustloff his subject, that is to say, who chooses to break the taboo on asserting that a war crime or at least an atrocity was visited on Germans that night.

  Paul’s reluctance to write the greater story, and the crabwise dance he performs in telling the story of his reluctance – a dance during which, by sideways motion, the greater story somehow gets told – is justified. For an obscure journalist named Pokriefke who by lucky or unlucky accident happened to be born on the scene to retell the story means nothing. For the present, stories about the sufferings of Germans during the war remain inseparable from who tells them and for what motive. The best person to tell how nine thousand innocent or ‘innocent’ Germans died is not Pokriefke nor even ‘Grass’ but Günter Grass, doyen of German letters, winner of the Nobel Prize, steadiest practitioner and most enduring exemplar of democratic values in German public life. For Grass to tell the story at the opening of the new century means something. It may even signal that it is acceptable, appropriate, proper for all the stories of what happened in those terrible years to enter the public arena.

  Günter Grass has never been a great prose stylist or a pioneer of fictional form. His strengths lie elsewhere: in the acuteness of his observation of German society at all levels, his ability to access the deeper currents of the national psyche, and his ethical steadiness. The narrative of Crabwalk is put together from bits and pieces that work efficiently in their present order though without any great feel of aesthetic inevitability. The authorial device of tracking the submarine and its prey step by step as they converge on the fatal crossroads as though directed by a higher destiny is a particularly creaky one. As a piece of writing Crabwalk suffers by comparison with some of Grass’s other forays into the Novelle form, notably Cat and Mouse and, most recently, The Call of the Toad (1992), an elegantly constructed fiction hovering between the satiric and the elegiac, in which a decent, elderly couple found an association to allow Germans expelled from Danzig (now Polish Gdansk) to be interred in the city of their birth, only to have their enterprise swept away from under their feet and turned into a money-spinning racket.4

  Ralph Manheim was Grass’s first and best English translator, admirably attuned to Grass’s language. After Manheim’s death in 1992 the mantle was taken over first by Michael Henry Heim and then by Krishna Winston. Though there are one or two points one might quibble over – Tulla owns a master craftsman’s certificate (Meisterbrief), not a ‘master’s diploma’, which sounds too academic; Captain Marinesko is not ‘degraded’ (degradiert) on his return to port but reduced in rank – Winston’s version of Crabwalk is a faithful one, down to the occasional clumsy, Grassian turn of phrase. (pp. 191, 180)

  The main challenge to Winston’s ingenuity is provided by Tulla Pokriefke. Tulla speaks a demotic East German German with echoes of the working-class suburbs of prewar Danzig. Finding an equivalent in American English is a thankless task. Locutions like ‘Ain’t it good enough that I’m out here breaking my back for them no-goods?’ have a quaintly dated feel; but perhaps Germans from the West find Tulla’s speech quaintly dated too. (p. 69)

  (2003)

  10 W. G. Sebald, After Nature

  W. G. SEBALD was born in 1944 in the corner of southern Germany where Germany, Austria, and Switzerland converge. In his early twenties he travelled to England to further his studies in German literature, and spent most of his working life teaching in England at a provincial university. By the time of his death in 2001 he had a solid body of academic publication to his name, mainly on the literature of Austria.

  But in his middle years Sebald also blossomed as a writer, first with a book of poetry, then with a sequence of four prose fictions. The second of these, The Emigrants (1992; English translation 1996), brought him wide attention, particularly in the English-speaking world, where its blend of storytelling, travel record, fictive biography, antiquarian essay, dream, and philosophical rumination, executed in elegant if rather lugubrious prose and supplemented with photographic documentation of endearingly amateurish quality, struck a decidedly new note (the German reading public was accustomed by this time to the crossing and indeed trampling of boundaries between fiction and nonfiction).1

  The people in Sebald’s books are for the most part what used to be called melancholics. The tone of their lives is defined by a hard-to-articulate sense that they do not belong in the world, that perhaps human beings in general do not belong here. They are humble enough not to claim they are preternaturally sensitive to the currents of history – in fact they tend to believe there is something wrong with them – but the tenor of Sebald’s enterprise is to suggest that his people are prophetic, eve
n though the fate of the prophet in the modern world is to be obscure and unheard.

  What is the basis of their melancholy? Again and again Sebald suggests they are labouring under the burden of Europe’s recent history, a history in which the Holocaust looms large. Internally they are racked by conflict between a self-protective urge to block off a painful past and a blind groping for something, they know not what, that has been lost.

  Although in Sebald’s stories the overcoming of amnesia is often figured as the culmination of a labour of research – burrowing in archives, tracking down witnesses – the recovery of the past only confirms what at the deepest level his people already know, as their steady melancholy in the face of the world already expresses, and as, in their intermittent breakdowns or catalepsies, their bodies have all along been saying in their own language, the language of symptom: that there is no cure, no salvation.

  The form that the crisis of melancholy in Sebald takes is well defined. There is a lead-up full of compulsive activity, often consisting of nocturnal walking, dominated by feelings of apprehension. The world seems full of messages in some secret code. Dreams come thick and fast. Then there is the experience itself: one is on a cliff or in an aircraft, looking down in space but also back in time; man and his activities seem tiny to the point of insignificance; all sense of purpose dissolves. This vision precipitates a kind of swoon in which the mind collapses.

  Vertigo (1990), Sebald’s first long prose work, emphasises the apocalyptic dimension of this mental crisis. In the final section of the book the ‘I’ narrator takes a trip to his birthplace, the town of W. There, as he pores over a clutter of objects in a dusty attic, a flood of memories is released, followed by intimations that retribution is about to be visited on the town. Fearing madness, he flees. The homeward trip through southern Germany is eerie. The landscape has an alien air; people at the train station look like refugees from doomed cities; before his eyes someone reads a book that, as his later bibliographical researches prove, does not exist.2