History: Rewritten, Revised or Revisited in Crabwalk by Gunter Grass

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History: Rewritten, Revised or Revisited in Crabwalk by Gunter Grass “History is what it is, but it is also what we make of it. What we call “history” is not a thing, an object of study, but a story we choose to tell about things…Thus all history writing requires a fictive or imaginary representation of the past”. Richard Slotkin Gunter Grass in his novel Crabwalk re writes, revises and revisits history of Nazi Germany and World War II. Rather than blatantly saying, Grass chooses an indirect but subtle way to communicate the real essence of Nazi Germany through, persons, places, objects and symbols. In fact the plot, setting and characters in the novel combine to generate the whole process of historical revisionism. In Crabwalk, Grass has presented history as a kaleidoscope creating different patterns in every different view. The historical event of the sinking of Gustloff becomes a prism through which the attitudes of three generations of Germans are refracted thus revising history differently in their individual contexts, ideologies and loyalties. The history is revived in the novel through different sources including memoirs, internet, blogs, chat rooms and objects like Wilhelm Gustloff ship. A desire to rewrite history, leads the characters in Crabwalk towards “Negationism”. Crabwalk is essentially a historical novel in which Grass employees the sinking of Wilhelm Gustloff, the ship to reveal the history of Nazi Germany and attempts of its second generation to forget it. In this novel Grass makes his readers as well as characters go through a process of self evaluation. Thus the historical event of the sinking of the ship becomes a minor incident in comparison to the hatred and racial prejudice which had been affecting Germans, Russian and Jews on a larger level. In Lukács words “What matters therefore in the historical novel is not the retelling of
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