faber and faber, 2004, 238 p. Translated from the German Im Krebsgang by Krishna Winston.

On 30^th January 1945, the twelfth anniversary of Hitler achieving power, Paul Pokriefke, the narrator of this novel, was born. This was exactly fifty years after the birth of one Wilhelm Gustloff. On 30^th January 1945, a former Strength through Joy ship named after this Nazi “martyr,” a ship now packed with refugees – mostly women and children but with some wounded soldiers aboard – fleeing the Red Army advance into Germany, was sunk after being hit by three torpedoes fired by the Soviet submarine S-13, delivering its cargo of humans, dead or not yet dead, into -18^oC temperatures. Paul’s nine months pregnant mother was one of the passengers. The shock turned her hair white.

That sinking comprised the single greatest loss of life in one event in maritime history, even if the exact number who died can never be known. Yet years later “it still seems as though nothing can top the Titanic, as if the Wilhelm Gustloff had never existed, as if there were no room for another maritime disaster.”

So how, especially as a German, does a writer approach this tangled topic? Though their losses have been acknowledged, victimhood has not traditionally been claimed for German casualties of the Second World War. Still less afforded to them. How could a near contemporary of the perpetrators of the biggest set of crimes in history (certainly modern history) dare to?

Calmly, soberly, authoritatively and novelistically, it turns out. But also obliquely. As Grass asks us via Paul, “Do I sneak up on time in a crabwalk, seeming to go backward but actually scuttling sideways, and thereby working my way forward more rapidly?”

So, embedded in the tale of Paul’s existence – forever dogged by the circumstances of his birth – we have the life story of “the martyr,” Wilhelm Gustloff, born in Schwerin in 1895, who joined the Nazi party and recruited over 5,000 members from German and Austrian citizens living in Switzerland, where he was killed by a man named David Frankfurter, who claimed to have fired the fatal shots “because I am a Jew.” And that of the submariner, Aleksandr Marinesko, who commanded the S-13. Plus details of the construction and dimensions of the Wilhelm Gustloff (originally to have been named after Adolf Hitler but changed at his request to that of the Nazi’s latest martyr,) its Strength through Joy cruises with no class distinctions between its passengers, its use as a hospital ship in the Norway campaign and later as a military and refugee transport.

Paul, always fatherless – several men were subsequently implied by his mother to be possible candidates – is haunted by that thrice cursed date, as was his mother. Her accounts of the sinking and his birth vary, however, and like Paul’s fatherhood are not to be trusted. Paul’s lack of a father possibly led to his estrangement from his own son Konrad (Konny) whom Paul suspects, in a ramification of how that fateful January date echoes through his life, is behind an internet site named the Friends of Schwerin which lauds the memory of the ‘martyr’ and the ship which bore his name. He follows the online spats that result between Konny and a supporter of Gustloff’s killer (calling himself of course David Frankfurter) with something between bemusement and frustration.

Grass does not flinch from, but neither does he overly dwell on, the sinking – a catalogue of errors on the part of its officers, at the time the Wilhelm Gustloff had astonishingly no less than four captains each arguing with the others – and its many horrors, nor on the grisly prospect of being overrun by the Red Army. The German reoccupation of Nemmersdorf had revealed how brutal Soviet revenge could be. Publication of its details in Germany, intended to stiffen the population’s resistance, instead led to streams of refugees fleeing westwards.

Despite never mentioning the atrocities committed by the Nazis and their cohorts, nor does he try to exculpate his countrymen, “History, or, to be more precise, the history we Germans have repeatedly mucked up, is a clogged toilet. We flush and flush, but the shit keeps rising.”

As to the fatalities; in retrospect, “One zero more or less – what does it matter? In statistics, what disappears behind rows of numbers is death.” Each death, even in a larger catastrophe, is an individual tragedy.

At the heart of this novel – and it is a novel despite all its statistics and historical details – is the impossibility of escaping history. The circumstances of Paul’s birth, that sinking, toll through the years, Konny’s distance from his father and closeness to his grandmother manifesting itself in an almost wilful obsession, unamenable to reason and leading to yet more tragedy.

Paul feels it. “Everything that I try to crabwalk away from, or admit to in relative proximity to the truth, or reveal as if under duress, comes out, as he” (Konny) “sees it, ‘after the fact and from a guilty conscience.’”

For history is personal. Perhaps only the novel can deal with it.

Pedant’s corner:- In the preamble; versitilty (versatility.) Otherwise; “never miss an chance” (a chance,) “the planned invasion of England, Operation Seal” (that operation’s code name was Seelöwe, Sealion, not Seal,) Ruanda (German spelling of Rwanda?) “With August Pokriefke might there have been trouble” (‘With August Pokriefke there might have been trouble’ is a more natural word order,) an extraneous end-quotation mark, botswain (x 2, boatswain,) “with premediated deliberateness” (premeditated?)

This has been a good year for books with me though I didn’t read much of what I had intended to as first I was distracted by the list of 100 best Scottish Books and then by the threat to local libraries – a threat which has now become a firm decision. As a result the tbr pile has got higher and higher as I continued to buy books and didn’t get round to reading many of them.

My books of the year were (in order of reading):-
Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
Electric Brae by Andrew Greig
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel
Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson
Traveller of the Century by Andrés Neuman
The Affair in Arcady by James Wellard
Flemington and Tales from Angus by Violet Jacob
The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber
Ash: A Secret History by Mary Gentle
Young Adam by Alexander Trocchi
Song of Time by Ian R MacLeod
The Gowk Storm by Nancy Brysson Morrison
The Bridge Over the Drina by Ivo Andrić
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Fair Helen by Andrew Greig
The Dear, Green Place by Archie Hind
Greenvoe by George Mackay Brown
The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
Europe at Midnight by Dave Hutchinson
The Cone-Gatherers by Robin Jenkins
A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson
Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee
Born Free by Laura Hird
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

If you were counting that’s 25 in all, of which 15 were by male authors and 10 by women, 8 had SF/fantasy elements and 11 were Scottish (in the broadest sense of inclusion.)

Harvill Secker, 2009, 588 p + iii p introduction. Translated from the German Die Blechtrommel by Breon Mitchell. First published by Herrmann Luchterhand Verlag GMBH 1959.
Borrowed from a threatened library.

The Tin Drum’s first words are, “Granted: I’m an inmate in a mental institution,” – about as clear a marker of an unreliable narrator as you’re liable to find. This voice wanders randomly between Oskar and I to describe his experiences, often within the same passage, even the same sentence. Of uncertain parentage, “I” never quite decides if he is Oskar Matzerath or maybe Oskar Bronski. The book’s starting scene predates his birth with the conception of his mother, under his grandmother’s skirts in a potato field near Danzig, by a fire-raiser, fugitive from justice, who adopts a pseudonym. This concatenation of circumstances and attributes is typical of the novel as a whole, which is by no means an easy read but will repay the attention a dutiful reader gives it.

Oskar is a precocious baby, able to understand things while newly born, in particular his mother’s promise to buy him a drum for his third birthday. On this happy event he decides to stop growing, staging a fall down the cellar stairs (blamed on father Matzerath for leaving the door open) to account for it. He also has the ability to shatter glass by screaming, a tactic he frequently employs to avoid being separated from his beloved drum. When Oskar’s first day in school ends less than well (shattering the teacher’s glasses and the school windows) he never goes there again. Part of the scene’s translation is rendered as, “No more pencils, no more books, no more teacher’s dirty looks.” Though the couplet’s wording may indeed have arisen around the time, a variation on an older rhyme, I would be interested to know what the original German was. Oskar goes through unnumbered amounts of his red and white tin drums in the course of the book, being able to affect people’s actions through his drumming. This is only one of the many aspects of magic realism which pervade the novel, another example is that of a green ship’s figurehead which is somehow a bringer of doom. Oskar pretends to be unable to speak but gets some education from a neighbour who reads to him from books on Rasputin and Goethe, the twin poles from which he views the world. Later, from opposite walls of the flat where Oskar is brought up, pictures of Hitler and Beethoven glower at each other.

The perspective allows Grass to approach Oskar’s life and encounters with the world at an oblique angle. Given the times he was writing about this is perhaps as well, the distorting effect, its layering of grotesquerie, in part shielding the reader from the full impact of events which might otherwise be too disturbing. For Grass knows what he is doing. The text’s meanderings and reflections underline the madness of the times. As might be expected from such a full-on literary endeavour there is a full measure, here, of love, sex and death. Too much focus on sex apparently, when the novel was first published. Sexual encounters in the book are frequently bizarre and are often described with their accompanying far from romantic nitty-gritty. (I note here that even in between-the-wars Germany it seems a Scout Master – later subsumed into the Hitler youth – could be overly “fond” of his charges.)

Though Oskar’s life is related almost linearly in retrospect from the viewpoint of his thirty year old self lying in bed in the mental institution, within The Tin Drum’s pages there is cycle and recycle, events being come back to again and again, emphasising the predilections of Oskar’s life. Time seems to be fluid yet static, streaming past Oskar, yet carrying him headlong. Events rush past him but he instigates them too.

Along with Oskar’s story we are also provided with a history of Danzig, its many layings to waste, the stories of the peoples of its hinterland plus the degradation of Germany in the mid-twentieth century. “An entire gullible nation believed faithfully in Santa Claus. But Santa Claus was really the Gasman.” Of the war situation there are sly references to “improving the army’s situation with planned withdrawals,” and a soldier is said to be, “spending time in Courland.” After the war Oskar I restored to growth (another blow on the head as the catalyst.) He is misshapen but manages to make a living from drumming. He, “discussed collective guilt with Catholics and Protestants, shared that guilt with all who thought: Let’s get it over with now, be done with it, and later, when things get better, there’ll be no need to feel guilty.”

Oskar observes variously, “Even bad books are books, and therefore holy,” “You have to keep the Muses at a distance, otherwise the Muse’s kiss will start to taste like everyday fare,” “Lost wars seldom if ever provide a museum with trophies.”

There is an afterword where Breon Mitchell writes about the translation process, saying original texts remain fresh but translations fade with time. Grass cared about translations and for each book gathered his translators together to discuss them and answer questions on their texts. This new translation of Die Blechtrommel apparently preserves all the sentence lengths from the German, and tries to replicate its awkward syntax, which the first translation didn’t. To translate such a complex novel is undeniably a difficult task and Mitchell’s achievement is commendable. Nevertheless there are entries for Pedant’s corner:- All that was left to me were (all was,) fleur-de-lis (fleur-de-lys,) gas metre (meter,) at one point Oskar tells us the tin “rusted” (tin will corrode but does not form rust; only iron rusts,) a vicar ran the Catholic journeymen’s club (a vicar? Surely a priest?) Eight-comma-eights (in English these 88 mm [8.8 cm – rendered in German as 8,8 cm] anti-aircraft guns – but used particularly effectively as anti-tank guns – were known as eighty-eights,) sitz bath (my dictionary has sitz-bath,) doughboys (is a USian term for World War 1 enlisted men, not a German usage I’d have thought.) The Platters sing “The Great Pretender” in 1944 (The group didn’t form till 1952, that song wasn’t released by them till 1955.)

I see that Günter Grass has died.

I haven’t actually read any of his novels – he’s one of those novelists whom I meant to get round to sometime. The closest I have come was when I watched the film that was made of his novel The Tin Drum. The film was excellent.

There was a stooshie when he revealed he had been a member of the Waffen SS – mostly because he had managed to keep the fact to himself for 60 years and in the interim had been outspoken about Germany’s post-war attitude to the Nazis. I doubt, though, many German seventeen year-olds would have resisted being called up in 1944. In any case his war record can have had no bearing whatsoever on his abilities as a writer. As a person perhaps; but not as an author. (There were doubtless many more in Germany, Austria and various parts of Eastern Europe who may have had more reason to keep theirs quiet.)

The Nobel Committee saw fit to award him its prize in literature in 1999. That puts him in good company.

Günter Grass: 16/10/1927 – 13/4/2015. So it goes.

So it says here.

The ten are:-

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov
Secret Rendezvous by Kobo Abe
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Stories by Karen Russell
Smilla’s Sense of Snow* by Peter Høeg
In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan
Golden Days by Carolyn See

I’ll perhaps look out for some of these now.

*I have read this as Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow and as I recall the SF elements were the least convincing thing about it.

The others I haven’t read at all – but I’ve seen the film of The Tin Drum** and would have no problem with its inclusion in this list. I have read another by Bulgakov – though a glimpse of the cover of Heart of a Dog in the link would suggest that it is fantastical – and a short story by Kobo Abe.

The link shows Stories by Karen Russell variously involve girls raised by wolves, and vampires so where is the difficulty in categorisation there?

**I have since read The Tin Drum. See my review here.