Air war, literature and compassion.(Literature)

A YEAR OR SO AGO, Germany's "conscience" and grand old man of letters Gunter Grass published his boldest novel in years. Crabwalk tells the story of the sinking, off what is now the Polish port of Gdynia, of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a converted Kraft durch Freude (strength through joy) cruise ship, by a Soviet torpedo in January 1945. Gustloff was a Nazi propagandist and intelligence officer in Switzerland who had been snot in 1936 by a Jewish student from the Balkans: the party promptly made him a martyr to the cause. The ship launched with his name in 1937 carried workers in state-financed holidays to Norway and the Mediterranean: this was the socialist part of the Nazi program. In January 1945, having been transformed into a hospital ship, it was crammed with refugees, some of them soldiers, fleeing the advancing Red Army: about 9000 people, many of them women and children, lost their lives in the Baltic, making it the worst maritime disaster ever.

The main female character in the book, Tulla Pokrietke, who survives the shipwreck in a state of advanced pregnancy, bears the same name as Grass's own mother: her blunt, canny and obdurate cast of mind, Stalinist leanings and all, becomes a token of the kind of popular culture which survived longer in the East than in the more politically correct West. For Grass's book has a wider remit: it touches not just on the fate of refugees like those of the Wilhelm Gustloff but on the misery of the millions of "Vertriebene" (expellees) driven from their homes in the east. Hitler's legacy was double: not only the mass murder of the Jews but the destruction of ethnic German life outside of Germany. The end of the war saw the largest refugee flow in European history. In the last two years of the war five million Germans fled the advancing Red Army; between 1945 and 1948 another seven million were driven out of their ancestral homes in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia and Hungary.

Grass is the first left-winger to develop what is claimed to be a taboo theme, or one which until recently had been identified with the "Ewiggestrigen"--reactionaries and revisionists. Nobel laureate status and his various public engagements have made it possible for him to avoid the charge of moral equivocation. What he really seems to be arguing in his novel is the case against repression: deeply felt passions always return in some form or another, and the more stifled the less predictable their return. So runs the psychiatric folklore.

Later in the same year the independent historian Jorg Friedrich published his 600-page work Der Brand (The Blaze), a detailed and unsparing account of the fate of civilians caught in the Allied bombing. As the economy (and exemplary social democracy) that absorbed so much energy after the war heads for deep depression, Friedrich's book seems to have caught a new mood in the country: it has been in the best-seller lists for months, and parts of it were serialised in the right-wing tabloid Das Bild.

Only a few years ago Anglo-American historians had been accusing the Germans of being Hitler's "willing executioners"; now for the first time the Germans are being invited to see themselves as victims of history too. In the same year as he was voted man of the century in Britain, Winston Churchill stood accused in Germany of a deliberate policy of airborne terror against civilians, and was even called a war criminal in Bild's editorial pages.

In 1997, well before Friedrich's book, W.G. Sebald gave a series of four lectures in Zurich on the air war in Germany (and apparently goaded Grass into taking his scuttle-step forwards). Born in the Allgau in 1944, Sebald came as a lecturer to Manchester in 1966, and eventually ended up as Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia. After a number of quite conventional academic monographs in German (one is called Describing Unhappiness) he published four books in the 1990s which, in English translation, made him world-famous. Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz are part-memoir, part-travelogue, part-phantasmagoria, and go under the generic term "novel", it would seem, for convenience's sake. Sebald called the last "a prose book of indefinite form".

In his writings the mildly rebellious free-bird rambling of the grandparents' generation (the Wandervogel movement, one of the first celebrations of youth as a social group, marked its centenary in 2001) has yielded to a craving for travel, a kind of fugue even, though Sebald is no Kaspar Hauser: if anything, he is rather more of a Don Quixote, fated to spread the harm of which he is victim. We might call his method enigmatography. Black-and-white photographs are planked like ...