Now Germany’s Nobel Prize-winning author Gunter Grass has resurrected the memory of the 9,000 dead, including more than 4,000 children–with his latest novel “Crab Walk,” published last month. The book, which will be out in English next year, doesn’t dwell on the sinking; its heroine is a pregnant young woman who survives the catastrophe only to say later: “Nobody wanted to hear about it, not here in the West [of Germany] and not at all in the East.” The reason was obvious. As Grass put it in a recent interview with the weekly Die Woche: “Because the crimes we Germans are responsible for were and are so dominant, we didn’t have the energy left to tell of our own sufferings.”
Since most Germans feared they would be accused of equating their losses with the horrors they inflicted on others, only the nationalist right spoke freely about what happened to the 13 million Germans brutally driven out of their homelands at the end of the war. As the Soviet Army advanced into what is now Poland and the Czech Republic, revenge killings, starvation and exhaustion claimed the lives of an estimated 2 million civilians. Even now, many of Germany’s neighbors react angrily to any talk of the refugees’ plight, fearing that it’s a pretext to revive claims to their old lands. Czech Prime Minister Milos Zeman recently called them “Hitler’s fifth column,” implying that anyone who survived their ordeal should feel lucky and keep quiet. Not everyone agrees. “We shouldn’t hide what happened to the Germans at the end of World War II,” says Leon Kieres, president of Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance. “All of these issues should be addressed.”
Grass is no German nationalist. He opposed the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990, arguing that after the Holocaust his people had forfeited the right to live in a united nation. Precisely for that reason, his willingness to break the taboo against writing about what happened as World War II ended has had an electrifying effect. The weekly Der Spiegel put “The German Titanic” on its cover, and critics from left and right have praised his work. Franz Josef Wagner, a columnist for the tabloid Bild who remembers fleeing the Soviet Army with his mother, thanked Grass for allowing all expellees to “cry together.” German public television has aired a series of documentaries on the Germans’ flight and expulsion, while explaining why the Soviet Army was motivated to unleash such bloody revenge.
The long silence about the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff and other tragedies of that period was probably unavoidable–and necessary. By unreservedly owning up to their country’s role as the perpetrator of monstrous crimes, Germans have managed to win acceptance abroad, marginalize the neo-Nazis at home and make peace with their neighbors. Today’s unified Germany is more prosperous and stable than at any time in its long, troubled history. For that, a half century of willful forgetting about painful memories like the German Titanic was perhaps a reasonable price to pay. But as Grass has demonstrated, even the most politically correct Germans believe that they’ve now earned the right to discuss the full historical record. Not to equate German suffering with that of its victims, but simply to acknowledge a terrible tragedy.
