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.