Crabwalk by GünterGrass
Translated from the German by Krishna Winston

• Buchereien Wein, Vienna, Austria
• Tampere City Library, Finland
• Stadtbibliothek Bremen,Germany
• Cork City Library, Ireland
  

Crabwalk tells the story of the sinking of the 'Wilhelm Gustloff', a former cruise ship turned refugee carrier, by a Soviet submarine in January 1945. Some 9,000 people, most of them women and children fleeing from the advancing Red Army, went down in the Baltic Sea, making it the deadliest maritime disaster of all time.
Grass's narrator is one of the few survivors, a middle-aged journalist who lives in Berlin. Born to an unwed mother on a lifeboat the night of the attack, Paul Pokriefke tries to piece together the tragic events. While his mother Tulla sees her whole existence in terms of that calamitous moment, Paul wishes their life could have been more normal, less touched by the past. For his teenage son Konrad, who dabbles in the dark, far-right corner of the internet, the 'Gustloff' embodies the denial of Germany's wartime agony.
Scuttling backward to move forward, Crabwalk is at once a reckoning with an untold chapter of European history and a reflection on the ways different generations of Germans now view their past.

Günter Grass, born in Danzig, Germany in 1927, is Germany's most celebrated contemporary writer. He is a man of remarkable versatility: novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, and graphic artist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000.