Word: crabwalk
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Three! Two! One!” shouted Green as she scurried on her hands and feet, leading her team in crabwalk sprints across the ink-stained floor of the printing press room. Though Green initially joined the team reluctantly, she soon seized the reins of the cardio-side of the dance-team chariot, flogging her horses towards what she was certain would be a victory...
...Crabwalk (Harcourt; 234 pages) tells the story of a journalist, Paul Pokriefke, who was born as his mother escaped the sinking Wilhelm Gustloff, a cruise ship carrying refugees that was sunk by a Russian submarine in the Baltic Sea in January 1945. The number of those who died will never be known, though around 7,000 seems a reasonable guess. It was the greatest disaster in maritime history...
Purely as a novel, Crabwalk is a disappointment. The plot, which turns on the efforts of Pokriefke's tortured teenage son Konrad to understand the tragedy, is predictable. With the exception of Pokriefke's mother, a harridan who dotes on her grandson, the characters are not drawn finely enough to grab the reader. But as a window into the compromises and dishonesties with which Germans have had to live for two generations, the book packs a punch...
...family could easily have been on the ship. His mother was never able to talk to him about what she experienced when the Russians moved into Danzig. "There is no family in Germany that did not learn some kind of lesson from the two World Wars," says Grass. In Crabwalk, a character based on Grass--himself a man of the left--laments the "staggering failure" of the left's silence in the face of such misery. That silence is ending...
...heavily that a fire storm "lifted gables and roofs from buildings, tore trees from the ground and drove human beings before it like living torches." The absence of any body of literature discussing the Allied bombings, Sebald thought, was evidence of the timidity of German art. But books like Crabwalk have begun to reclaim an important part of the German experience...