The Middle Voice in Günter Grass's Im Krebsgang1

When it was published in 2002, Gunter Grass's novella Im Krebsgang appeared in a line of fictional narratives with significant historical elements that address German suffering during the Second World War. Narratives of this kind include relatively early literary pieces such as Hans Erich Nossack's account of the firebombing of Hamburg in "Der Untergang" (1948) and Gert Ledig's novel Die Vergeltung (1956), as well as post-unification works such as Monika Maron's Pawels Briefe (1999) and Uwe Timm's Am Beispiel meines Bruders (2003). Perhaps the most notable among works on this subject is W G. Sebald's volume Luftkrieg und Literatur (1999), where he identifies a "skandalose [s] Defizit" and expresses his astonishment that the massive suffering that Germans endured, in particular in the incessant and increasingly severe bombings, never became the consideration of German literary writing or historical investigation (76) ? These narratives, elegiac in tone, are set deep inside the home front and depict civilian life in an expanded war zone, one that included the homes of the perpetrating nation and the family settings in which frontline-like violence was experienced. In his contribution to the subject matter Grass deals with the eastern front where civilians confronted an advancing Red Army that not only engaged the German army militarily, but also sought a settling of scores for the devastation and misery that the German military had visited upon the Soviet Union and its citizens. Where fictional and historical depictions of German suffering are concerned, Grass' s Krebsgang narrative presents an illustrative case in what Stuart Ta berner has referred to as the "three key topoi" of wartime narratives ("Literary Representations" 226). He explains that, as we consider the transmission of stories of wartime experiences from one generation to the next, three predispositions provide an established framework for how these matters manifest themselves in broader discussion. First there is the mistaken idea that there has been little written about German suffering due to the taboo associated with the topic in the decades immediately following 1945; secondly he recognizes the controversy endemic to how the Nazi past is represented in terms of fiction or history, be it in East or West Germany; and, thirdly, Taberner sees the presence of "a more metaphysical anxiety with regard to the traumatic disruption of family histories and legacies" (226). To be sure, the signature themes that have shaped texts about German suffering are richly present in Grass's novella. The appropriateness of the topoi label aside, they are, after all, not patterns established over centuries of cultural history, yet the trends that Taberner identifies are clear to see in Grass. His narrator stresses, for example, the public neglect of the maritime disaster of the Wilhelm Gustloff as it became "Legende" because it was "verdrangt" in reasonable public spheres and left to serve the pejorative rhetorical purposes of right-wing groups. He explains that "Die Gustloff und ihre verfluchte Geschichte waren jahrzehntelang tabu, gesamtdeutsch sozusagen" (Krebsgang 31). Indeed, the novella's detailed historical accuracy combined with the depiction of human trauma manifest at an intimate multi-generational level tether Grass's text to Taberner's three post-war tendencies in regard to German suffering. I will take Taberner's assertions as a point of departure, but expand the reading of Im Krebsgang with a more encompassing concept that introduces a different angle from which to approach this text. While Grass's text plainly illustrates the three patterns mentioned above, it also offers an exceptional means of understanding aspects of dealing with a difficult historical legacy in its psycho-social dynamics and in how it expands - through discrete intermediary means - the otherwise limiting binary of perpetrator and victim. Despite the social and psychological complexity of transmissibility and the political considerations involved in the representation of history, both axiomatic to Taberner's framework, it becomes clear that the Pokriefkes, as a family entity viewed within its discursive generational relationships, occupy a simultaneous dyadic and median position as both perpetrators in the murder of an adolescent and victims in their direct and indirect association with this tragic maritime event, the two key focal points of the narrative. …