“The German Titanic”

SHORTLY BEFORE THE PUBLICATION OF Im Krebsgang, the influential news magazine Der Spiegel published a laudatory cover story-cumreview by Volker Hage (2002a), which featured this new book by Grass. Hage's extensive, favorable essay constitutes a somewhat startling reversal, inasmuch as star critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki had mercilessly panned Grass's novel Ein weites Feld in another Spiegel cover story several years earlier (1995; see ch. 13). Yet in 2002, the same critic extravagantly praised Im Krebsgang in his Solo TV show (Fries 2002), and he celebrated its canonization (H. L. Arnold 2002, 38). Rudolf Augstein (1923–2002), the founder of Der Spiegel and one of postwar Germany's preeminent journalists, who had vigorously opposed Grass's anti-unification stance (Augstein 1990), also acknowledged the text as a significant work (Augstein 2002). Im Krebsgang rapidly rose on the bestseller charts and was eventually translated into more than thirty languages; the work was also discussed in classes in German schools (Fieberg 2003, 34; Pelster 2004). There was an outpouring of reviews: Herman Beyersdorf (2002, 581) counts close to sixty and, later, almost one hundred (2006, 159 n. 13); approximately two months after the publication of Im Krebsgang, in May 2002, Heinz Ludwig Arnold (38) estimated that there were hundreds of them. The conservative Die Welt, a daily with a national distribution, returned to Im Krebsgang repeatedly; the various contributors, among them Grass's fellow writer Rolf Schneider (2002), find the success of Grass's work fully justified; conversely, they question Grass's premise of exploring an allegedly neglected topic (for example, Wittstock 2002).