Item 7 Crabwalk Gunter Grass Acceptable Book 0 Hardcover - Crabwalk Gunter Grass Acceptable Book 0 Hardcover. Ratings and Reviews. 1 product rating. 0 users rated this 5 out of 5 stars 0. 1 users rated this 4 out of 5 stars 1. Dec 06, 2014 While feeling generous Gunter Grass referred to it more simply as a “crabwalk”; meaning “scuttling backward to move forward.” While in his protagonist’s point-of-view he elucidated it as such: History, or to be more precise, that history we Germans have repeatedly mucked up, is a clogged toilet. We flush and flush, but the shit keeps. Crabwalk by Gunter Grass is the story of a man who is searching for information about the boat that sank the night he was born. His research opens his eyes to both truths about his family and the. Mitigating humor comes from Paul’s decision to “sneak up on time in a crabwalk, seeming to go backward but actually scuttling sideways,” often teasing the reader by veering off at climactic moments to ratchet up the tension before coming to his bleak conclusion: “Never will it end.” Grass as lucid, sardonic, and unsparing as always.
Books
Günter Grass, one of Germany's most significant post-war authors, passed away on April 13. Outspoken and controversial, he impacted the way Germany dealt with its past. Here's what you should add to your reading list.
'The Tin Drum' (1959)
In this masterwork of magic realism - and the first in his Danzig Trilogy - Grass weaves both allegory and contemporary themes to create what is widely considered a 20th-century classic.
'The Tin Drum' is the 'memoires' of the often surreal life and universe of Oskar Matzerath, the indomitable drummer gifted with a shriek that can shatter glass. Identifying himself as a 'clairaudient infant,' Oskar's growth is stunted into that of a three-year-old body. However, this doesn't hold him back from the fantastical pilgrimage which directs the narrative of this impressive novel.
Oskar's story already complicated by having what he sees as two fathers (one Polish and the other a German Nazi), Grass guides us through a world of vaudeville, humor, violence, and absurdity as we follow the triumphs and tribulations of Oskar the lover, dwarf entertainer, messianic gang leader, Nazi brute, jazz star and alleged murderer - and backed up by a outlandish supporting cast of characters.
Tracing Europe's entry into World War II and recovery from it, 'The Tin Drum' is a sometimes confounding, but always dazzling novel whose significance has never decreased with age.
'Cat and Mouse' (1961)
The second work in Grass' Danzig Trilogy, 'Cat and Mouse' is again set in his native Danzig (now Gdansk in Poland) during World War II. The famous Oskar Matzerath only makes a fleeting appearance in 'Cat and Mouse,' which instead tells the story of a character known as The Great Mahike.
Typical of Grass' style, most of the story is set on an abandoned shipwreck - a Polish navy minesweeper - where a group of friends loiter and scavenge for anything worth selling. Grass employs the techniques of an unreliable memoir, frequently - and often frustratingly - shifting the narrator's perspective (both time and place) and leading readers through a sometimes perplexing narrative.
'Dog Years' (1963)
Grass further paints in dense detail the inhabitants and the features of the city of Danzig in the last book of his trilogy. Once again, legends and historical facts become indistinguishable through dark magical realism. The work is divided in three sections integrating different narrative perspectives, inspired by the experimental syntax of the likes of Martin Heidegger and James Joyce.
DW recommends
'Dog Years' starts in the early 1920s with the story of a friendship between two boys, Walter Matern and Eduard Amsel, a half-Jew who creates spectacular scarecrows. The book brutally depicts Nazism and goes beyond the war into the 1950s, where West Germany's new booming economy is terrifyingly filled with fraud and hypocrisy. When it was published in English in 1965, the critic of the New York Times wrote: 'In places it is turgid. But it contains scenes more powerful than those by any other contemporary novelist.'
Crabwalk Gunter Grass Quotes
'The Flounder' (1977)
Grass had a penchant for fairytale classics and 'The Flounder' - his first novel not associated with World War II - is loosely based on the fairytale of 'The Fisherman and His Wife.'
During the 1970s, the author was intensely involved in domestic German politics and actively supported the Social Democratic Party and Chancellor Willy Brandt, who famously became the first German leader to kneel before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising memorial. It was an era when Germany was dealing with its Nazi past, but also left-wing terrorism, a booming economy and women's rights.
'The Flounder' opens with a fisherman in the Stone Age who catches a talking fish. Both are immortal and the story traces their tale throughout the ages, focusing on the relationship between food, women and war. By bringing a variety of women into the story - composed in nine chapters as an ode to pregnancy - he hones in on numerous aspects of emancipation and the age-old war of the sexes.
'Crabwalk' (2002)
Before turning to his memoirs, Grass wrote one more short novel on Germany's struggle with its collective guilt which would become his biggest international bestseller since the Danzig Trilogy. The story is centered on the sinking of a German cruise ship, 'Wilhelm Gustloff,' which was carrying German refugees fleeing from the invading Russians in 1945.
'Crabwalk' was the first book in which Grass dealt with the touchy issue of German refugees from the eastern European regions of what is now Poland and Czech Republic. His previous works had mainly focus on German guilt rather than Germans in the victim role. 'Wilhelm Gustloff' sank after being torpedoed by a Russian submarine, killing over 9,000 passengers.
Grass interweaves an anti-chronological, multilayered structure, inspired by the crab's way of 'scuttling backward to move forward.' Here, too, fact and fiction are meshed: Though the sinking of the ship is based on real events, the journalist who narrates the story and his family are fictional.
'Peeling the Onion' (2006)
In 'Peeling the Onion,' the Nobel Prize winning author works his way through the different layers of his memory and identity, digging deep into the past.
Crabwalk Gunter Grass Pdf
Grass covers in the autobiographical book the period of his life before he wrote 'The Tin Drum' and uses the work to reveal his biggest secret: As a 17-year-old in Nazi Germany, he had briefly been a member of the Waffen-SS, the armed wing of the Nazi party.
The revelation shocked the country. Grass had been vehemently anti-Fascist and one of the most influential voices in helping Germany work through its guilt and establish its post-war identity. Now Grass was also tainted by guilt and embodied a paradox that many Germans from his generation could personally identify with.
DW recommends
In a novel that has already attracted attention on both sides of the Atlantic, Nobelist Grass (Too Far Afield) employs a compelling vehicle for his latest excursion into Germany's tortured past. The Wilhelm Gustloff was a Nazi cruise ship refitted to rescue German refugees from the approaching Russian army in the waning days of WWII. The vessel was torpedoed by a Russian sub in the Baltic Sea, resulting in the deaths of 9,000 people and becoming the largest maritime disaster of the 20th century. Grass's unlikely narrator is second-rate journalist Paul Pokriefke, whose mother gave birth to him while the ship was collapsing. Pokriefke's irreverent narrative, couched in colloquial language, moves back and forth through the history of the incident, starting with the story of Gustloff, a Nazi functionary who was shot in 1936 by a Jewish medical student named David Frankfurter. Grass also weaves in details about the Russian sub commander, Aleksandr Marinesko, but the decidedly modern touch is the inclusion of Pokriefke's son, Konrad, an unbalanced loner who becomes deeply involved with the Web site dedicated to commemorating Gustloff's 'martyrdom' and the vessel Hitler named after him. Though the elliptical narration and multiple subplots intentionally impede dramatic momentum, this is one of Grass's most accessible novels, and the closing chapters about the rescue of Pokriefke's mother are simply riveting. The final irony is the fate of Konrad, who, in search of revenge, goes after a man posing as Frankenfurter on the Web site. Grass has covered many of these issues in earlier novels, but this time he addresses the suffering of German civilians during and after the conflict. A writer who refuses to avert his eyes from unpleasant truths, he remains an eloquent explorer of his country's troubled 20th-century history. (Apr.)
Release date: 04/01/2003
Genre: Fiction