Sophie Salvo

University of Chicago

ssalvo@uchicago.edu 

Impotent Forms: Crabwalk and the Political Novel

In the 2002 novella Crabwalk, Günter Grass makes his narrator confront his shortcomings head on. By his own admission, Paul Pokriefke is a bad father, a bad son, and certainly a bad romantic partner. Set in the present day of its publication, with a glance backward toward the trials of German history, Crabwalk tells interweaving stories of violence, hatred, and misunderstanding. The title alludes to the way that Grass’s narrator tacks between multiple historical events, including the ascension of Wilhelm Gustloff to Nazi leader in Switzerland in the 1930s; Gustloff’s eventual murder by the Jewish student David Frankfurter; the Nazi ship named in Gustloff’s honor, which first took Germans on pleasure cruises through the Kraft durch Freude campaign, but then met a disastrous end as a Nazi naval vessel in 1945; and the online resurrection of Gustloff by the twenty-first century’s far right, as he is celebrated through anti-Semitic vitriol on websites and in chatrooms—and then in person. Only this last part is Grass’s invention.

“Oh if only I, born fatherless, had never become a father!” Paul laments as he sits in court, awaiting his son Konny’s conviction for murdering a “Jew” out of perverted loyalty to the long-dead Gustloff.^[1] When his wife leaves him, calling Paul a lost cause, he simply agrees: “she was right” (2004, 42). Grass’s narrator is politically as well as interpersonally challenged, apathetic and rarely voting. Most damningly, he is a bad participant in German memory culture. He considers that if he had talked with his son about German suffering during the war, Konny would not have sought the information from neo-Nazis and might never have been radicalized.

This last point, about Paul as representative of problems in German memory culture, has been the focus of much of the scholarship on Grass’s novella, and with good reason. As it centers on the Russian sinking of the Nazi ship the Wilhelm Gustloff—which was carrying soldiers as well as fleeing German civilians, including thousands of children—the plot of Crabwalk hinges precisely on the ethics of acknowledging German suffering in the Second World War. Phrases like “narrative normalization”, “Germans as victims”, and “witness and testimony” have dominated both scholarly and popular discussions of the text, as debates about Grass’s narrative have become proxy for debates about how to remember and talk about the Germans expelled from the East towards the war’s end.

One thing that has garnered less attention, however, is that Paul Pokriefke is not just an absent father and a middling citizen, but also a bad writer. “I know my limitations”, he concedes, “I’m a run-of-the-mill journalist, who can do a decent job for short stretches” (2004, 41). This is not exactly false modesty. He writes without conviction, having spent his career “shredding all sorts of subjects to be served up as articles”, first as a reporter for the right-leaning Springer tabloids, then for the left-leaning Tageszeitung, and then freelance (2004, 1). In his younger years, he even took a creative writing class—“based on the American model”—but the instructor decided that Paul didn’t have what it takes to write real literature; a Kolportageroman was the best he could hope for (2004, 27).

This instructor turns out to be Grass himself, who appears in the plot simply as “he”, the shadowy figure propelling Paul to write the text that we readers of Crabwalk now hold in our hands. Although Grass is not named directly, he and this character are clearly selfsame, since the instructor refers to his own literary output, specifically his “mighty tome” Dog Years, which Grass published in 1963. The justification that the character Grass gives for why Paul should be the one to write about the fate of the Gustloff, and all that surrounds it, is twofold. First, Grass does not have it in him, is no longer interested in dredging up history: “around the mid-sixties he’d had it with the past […] the voracious present with its incessant nownownow had kept him from producing the mere two hundred pages. . .” (2004, 80). Second, Paul has a unique biographical connection to the ship: his mother, Tulla, boarded the ill-fated vessel while pregnant with Paul, and he was born on a rescue boat as the Gustloff sank into the sea.

These explanations for the novella’s conceit of authorship may be logical enough within the diegesis, but they do not adequately explain why Grass the author structures the text in this way: in other words, why he ventriloquizes his intervention into contemporary memory politics through a bad writer. Crabwalk is arguably one of Grass’ most accessible and most politically engaged texts. It is a few hundred pages long, compared to the 700-plus pages of The Tin Drum or Dog Years. It received significant attention by the public and in the media upon its publication—briefly pushing “two Harry Potter novels from the top of the Spiegel bestseller list”, Helmut Schmitz reports (2007, 148)—an attention that Grass himself cultivated. Crabwalk is, furthermore, the book that is set most immediately in the present, and that most directly takes up the present’s political concerns, such as the rise of the far-right in Germany, the internet as a breeding ground for right-wing hate (e.g., “both parts of the now united Germany were experiencing a series of right-wing extremist criminal sects […]” (2004, 216–217)). What does it mean, then, that in a text so clearly intended to become part of public political discourse, Grass chooses a mediocre writer to be its narrator?

There are a myriad of established theories about what literature can and cannot do in the world; what “political literature” should or should not look like; whether it should be realist, avant-garde, or something in between; whether style should take precedence over content, or vice versa; whether it should facilitate a reading experience that is identificatory or alienating or educational or pleasurable, or something else entirely. In this paper, I am less interested in theories of political literature, be they prescriptive or descriptive, than I am in how literature’s relationship to the political has been understood by literary texts themselves—in this case, specifically, by Grass’s novella.

“How can subversive writing be both dynamite and of literary quality?” Grass had asked in his 1999 Nobel Prize acceptance speech: 

Is there time enough to wait for the delayed action? Is any book capable of supplying a commodity in so short supply as the future? Is it not rather the case that literature is currently retreating from public life and that young writers are using the internet as a playground? A standstill, to which the suspicious word “communication” lends a certain aura, is making headway. Every scrap of time is planned down to the last nervous breakdown. A cultural industry vale of tears is taking over the world. What is to be done? (2007, 113) 

What is to be done, indeed? In the Nobel speech, Grass provides no clear solution, only a tongue-in-cheek reference to Sisyphus and then an abrupt switch to the topic of world hunger. Three years later, as Crabwalk appeared in German bookstores, he seemed still to be haunted by these questions. For, as I would like to suggest, Crabwalk has a vexed relationship to its own status as literature: the genre it declares through its subtitle—“Novelle”—is a term both descriptive and derogatory. Yes, the text is about generational divides, about German victimhood and the long shadow of Nazi crimes, about the far-right’s appeal to disaffected youth. But it is also about the function of literature, and what political utility—if any—it may claim.

***

Critics disagree about whether Crabwalk should be considered a novella. Herman Beyersdorf, Martin Swales, and Jill E. Twark find what they understand to be constitutive elements of the novella genre in Grass’s text. These include a focus “more on events and their causes than upon exposition, description more than character development” (Twark 2004, 153); an “un-leisureliness of interpretive rhetoric” and self-reflexivity (Swales 2017, 378); and the requisite “unerhörte Begebenheit” in the murder that Konny commits (Beyersdorf 2002, 587). Siegfried Mews, conversely, criticizes those who locate the “unerhörte Begebenheit” in Konny’s murderous act, arguing that this is not supported by the text: if Im Krebsgang is presenting an unheard-of-event at all, he contends, it is the sinking of the Gustloff (2008, 322). And the editors at Harper, who subtitled the English translation of Grass’s text simply “a novel”, seemed not to view Crabwalk as a novella at all. Although length alone is not necessarily indicative of the novella genre, it is with noting that Crabwalk clocks in at around 200 pages—the length of many novels (though not those by Grass, which tend toward the 500+ range). In any case, categorizing Grass’s text as a novella requires that scholars agree on a definition of the genre, which, as the above discussion indicates, is no simple endeavor. 

A look at the text’s self-characterization does not exactly illuminate the issue. On the one hand, there is the title page—the unequivocal Im Krebsgang. Eine Novelle. On the other hand, there is the opening to chapter 6, where Grass has the narrator write, “Er sagt, mein Bericht habe das Zeug zur Novelle. Eine literarische Einschätzung, die mich nicht kümmern kann. Ich berichte nur: […] (“He says my report would make a good novella. A literary assessment with which I can’t concern myself. I merely report the following: […]” (2004, 130)). Not only does the narrator disavow the literariness of his work, but so too does his verb mood. He writes here in the language of journalism—konjunktiv I, or reported speech—suggesting that Grass, who is supposed to be the editor rather than author of the text, slapped on the title of “Novelle” even though it doesn’t quite fit.

The text’s relation to other narrative genres is also ambivalent. The genre of the novel is above all associated with Tulla, Paul’s dynamic, problematic, and sometimes Nazi-sympathizing mother, who wants to write a novel recounting the sinking of the Gustloff. Paul recalls that “as a journeyman carpenter and surrounded by men, Mother would say, when asked about her escape route, ‘I could write a novel. The worst was the bombers, when they came in real low over us and pow-pow-pow. . . But I was always lucky. I’m telling you, it would take a lot more than that to do me in!’” (2004, 167–168). When her writing never comes to fruition, she tries to get Paul to do so in her stead—“That sea there full of ice, and them poor little ones all floating head down. You’ve got to write about it. […] Someday I’ll tell you the whole story, exactly what happened, and you’ll write it all down” (2004, 28). Tulla wants this narrative because she wants to memorialize and pay tribute to the ship and its sinking; she is later obsessed with the physical memorial that is erected in the memory of Gustloff. Insofar as it is aligned with a kind of uncritical memorialization, the text seems suspicious of the novel form as an impossible means of hagiography or propaganda. Paul reports that he had up until now been “unwilling” to do his mother’s bidding (2004, 29). Instigated by the writing teacher, however, he now does exactly that, telling the story of the ship’s sinking.

This writing teacher (alias Grass) had once sized up Paul as destined for nothing more than a Kolportageroman and this, I would argue, is basically what Paul ends up producing. Although obsolete today except as an insult, the Kolportageroman has an extensive, if undistinguished, history. The word Kolportage comes from the French “colporteur”, a term for a traveling book salesman who would carry his wares in a tray around his neck (“col” meaning “neck” and “porter” meaning “carry”), selling them door to door (see Plummer 2016, 3). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, colporteurs hawked exclusively religious tracts and prayer books. Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, however, this sales practice expanded beyond the religious context. As literacy increased among the lower classes and book purchasing boomed, publishers responded by producing serialized novels that had short, easy to read installments, often with illustrations, and that appealed to current tastes. According to Ronald A. Fullerton, publishers attempted to attract lower-class readers by “deliberately print[ing] in a crude type-style reminiscent of old-fashioned devotional works and schoolbooks—physical reminders, in other words, of books to which the lower classes had long been exposed” (1977, 267). These tactics were highly successful, and the market for these novels flourished: between 1870 and 1880, for example, there were approximately 200 publishers putting out this kind of text. Favorite topics included not only captured maidens, haunted castles, and royal exploits (although there were certainly many books about this), but also recent wars and political events, such as the Dreyfus Affair (see figure 1).

Figure 1. The front page of a Kolportageroman about the Dreyfus affair, Unschuldig getrennt by Eugen Tegen, 1931.

Indeed, many novels were written immediately after, if not already during, the events they depicted, such as the 1850 novel 1849: oder, des Königs Maienblüthe (1849: Or, the King’s May Blossom) by one Franz Lubojatzky. “Politischer” (political), “historischer” (historical), and “socialer Roman aus der Gegenwart” (social novel from the present) were popular subtitles; such texts often understood themselves to be intervening in contemporary politics. For example, the 1869 novel Ein Kind des Volkes: oder, Der Arbeiterkönig (A Child of the People: or, the Worker King), opens by proclaiming that “the right of the novelist to harmoniously interweave political and social questions with the creations of his imagination and thereby to bring rather abstract subjects closer to general understanding is today as indubitable as it is unchallenged” (Storch 1869, n.d. My translation). Kolportageromane continued to be published through the 1800s, with their popularity petering out by the mid twentieth century.

Obviously there is much that differentiates Grass’s novella from the Kolportageroman as I have outlined it above. Crabwalk is neither serialized nor printed in Gothic script, and it bears hallmarks of postmodernism that would have been unthinkable in the nineteenth century. Yet there is enough that Crabwalk shares with such novels that it is worth pursuing the narrator’s mention of this genre. Colportage novels not only told sensational stories—as does Crabwalk—but also addressed political issues by refracting them through individual characters, as does Grass in his text. Intended and curated for a popular audience, they were stylistically midway between literature and journalism. According to Jessica Plummer,

The colportage novel was the seedy shadow of the cheap illustrated daily, which in turn played the bogeyman to more expensive and better-produced periodicals. Colportage novels and their authors were highly aware of newspapers as their counterparts, and successfully turned the mandate of the newspaper to inform citizens into a fictional strategy, co-opting journalistic style, claiming a basis in authorized sources, and interrogating the ability of the burgeoning cut-throat competition for newsworthiness to provide readers with the “real truth”. This became a practice central to the content and aesthetic appeal of the novels. (2016, 106–107)  

A journalist by trade, Grass’s narrator is similarly invested in questions of authoritative sources and accurate reporting, repeatedly demonstrating the historical research he has performed. Moreover, as he previously worked for the Springer tabloids, he is no stranger to sensationalism’s appeal to the masses. There is one more significant similarity between Crabwalk and the Kolportageroman: their superficial portrayal of character psychology. Kolportageromane had little time to render a character’s consciousness in depth, instead favoring a succession of dramatic events.^[2] This is also the approach taken by Crabwalk. Indeed, Grass (the character) demands that Paul stick to “surface level” description and not conjecture about other people’s thoughts, feelings, or motivations:

He strictly enjoined me from speculating about Konny’s thoughts […] He said, “No one knows what he was thinking and is thinking now. Every mind is sealed, not just his. […] We see only what we see. The surface doesn’t tell everything, but enough. So no thoughts, including none thought out ex post facto. If we use words sparingly, we’ll get to the end more quickly. (2004, 215–216) 

By incorporating significant elements of the colporteur novel into the text, Grass has Crabwalk make an argument about the relationship between literature and politics—about the difficulty of reconciling literary ambitions with popular accessibility. Crabwalk does not aim for the resplendence of something like The Magic Mountain (another work mentioned by Paul), nor does it have the force of a work by Kleist, Grabbe, or Büchner, authors Paul heard about as a young, apathetic student (he preferred to hang out with the girls in the pub). Crabwalk instead presents itself as a self-consciously mediocre piece of literature, one which attempts to proceed quickly enough to keep the reader’s attention.

Or at least, this is the gambit of Grass’s novella. Whether Crabwalk is actually mediocre is a subjective judgment better left to the reading public (and one with which this author would happen to disagree). “How can subversive writing be both dynamite and of literary quality?” Grass had asked in his Nobel speech. Does literature need to be “bad” to be politically effective? Certainly, in the world of Grass’s novella, so-called “high” literature has little power. The Kafka volumes that line Konny’s shelves in juvenile detention, for example, seem not to have influenced his thinking in any discernible way.

In this essay, I have been suggesting that we read Grass’s staging of Crabwalk as mediocre as a representation of one of political literature’s key problematics—the tension between the inherent ambiguity of literary language and the necessary unambiguity of expedient political messaging. Yet even popular, accessible, “mediocre” literature has little power when compared to the force of the internet, Grass’s text suggests. Although Crabwalk is set at the turn of the twenty-first century, just at the beginning of the digital age, the internet’s effect on political discourse, its monopoly on the political imagination, is already palpable. In Grass’s text, printed literature stands powerless in the face of websites and chatrooms, like Konny’s beloved www.blutzeuge.de, which are constantly shifting their content and participants to meet the tastes of—as Grass’s literary alter-ego would put it—the “incessant nownownow” of a “voracious present”.

In the Nobel speech, Grass had associated the phrase “to be continued” with literary fiction, a comment on the human drive toward storytelling and the ability of stories to persuade and make us see the world anew. In Crabwalk, however, continuous storytelling becomes the domain of the internet in contradistinction to literature. In the last pages of the novella, Paul visits Konny in the juvenile detention facility and Konny seems, perhaps, to finally snap out of his obsession with Gustloff, smashing the replica ship he has built. Whatever hope this supplies Paul, however, is short-lived: he finds out that Konny’s right-wing followers have created new websites in his support, promising to wait for his release. Crabwalk concludes with the fatalistic assertion, “It doesn’t end. Never will it end” (2004, 234), marking a sharp distinction between the literary text (bounded, printed, unable to change), and internet discourse (always shifting, adapting, exceeding the capabilities of the printed book).

What Grass’s novella could not foresee, of course, is the digitalization of literature itself, particularly how the far right would digitize the very literary genres that Grass’s text portrayed as impotent and obsolete, thereby coopting them into their political agenda. As recent studies have shown, the advent of online publishing has facilitated an “increased reach of FREs [far-right extremists] in the digital communication ecosystem” (Boucher and Young 2023, 143).^[3] This is both because it has made self-publishing easy and cost-effective, and because right wing extremists can create websites where they deposit digital copies of books they endorse for their members to download. In archives such as the “Colchester Collection” (now the “Aryan Archive”) canonical authors like Schiller and Homer share space with books explicitly advocating racism and anti-Semitism. These canonical works, write Boucher and Young, “both legitimize FRE fictions by their proximity and make claims about the whiteness of the Western canon itself” (2023, 144).

Such claims about the canon are also promoted by conservative, digitally distributed “book club” series, as Johannes von Moltke and Susanne Komfort-Hein have recently discussed (2024, 619–638). Focusing on the PragerU “Book Club” in the US and, in Germany, the series “Aufgeblättert. Zugeschlagen,” which takes the tagline “Mit Rechten Lesen,” von Moltke and Komfort-Hein show how these programs use digital platforms to instrumentalize literature for political aims. Right wing publishing networks have also become agents of coordinated political messaging, as Erika Thomalla argues. New right publishers such as Antaios and Jungeuropa, and the digital networks that they create, have worked “discursively to create a subversive “counter-public” (2024, 643. My translation). In these instances, the cultural capital provided by literature is equally significant, if not more important, than the content of the work itself, which is neatly packaged and interpreted for the audience along political lines. Ideological merit is taken as indicative of aesthetic merit, and vice versa: the book is a commodity whose main function is to legitimize the New Right’s increasing power.

***

In the final years of his career, we can see Grass struggling further with how to make politically significant literature relevant in the digital age. With the controversial poem “Was gesagt werden muss” (“What Must Be Said”) from 2012, which criticized a potential nuclear attack by Isreal on Iran, Grass tried to intercede—even more directly than with Crabwalk—into contemporary politics. Grass’s poem may seem rather tame from the vantage point of 2025, with Israel’s multiyear destruction of Gaza and the ensuing debates about free speech continuing unabated, but it in 2012 it was a real flashpoint, sparking arguments about Germany’s responsibility to the state of Israel, the nature of anti-Semitism, and the threat of nuclear war. Rather than rehash those debates, what I would like to focus on in the final section of this essay is how “What Must Be Said” attempts to address, in a less sophisticated way, a problem that Crabwalk had diagnosed: namely, how to make literature that can intervene in the world.

As scholars have pointed out, “What Must Be Said” is a curious text. Agnes C. Mueller notes that, with neither rhyme nor meter nor “alliterations or creative metaphors”, the work reads more like an essay than a poem (2013, 389).^[4] Stuart Taberner similarly describes Grass’s poem as “ponderous, overworked, even hackneyed” (2013, 402); for Egbert Jahn, it is “nothing other than a short political statement in 69 lines” (2015, 188); Marcel Reich-Ranicki judged “every stanza” to be “bad” (2012, n.d.). It is not difficult to see what they are talking about. Grass’s lines sound like prose forced into the general shape of a poem:

      It’s the alleged right to a first strike

      that could destroy an Iranian people

      subjugated by a loudmouth

      and gathered in organized rallies,

      because an atom bomb may be being

      developed within his arc of power.

      Yet why do I hesitate to name

      that other land in which

      for years – although kept secret –

      a growing nuclear power has existed

      beyond supervision or verification,

      subject to no inspection of any kind? (2012, n.d.)

“What Must Be Said” is a poem that refuses the poetic, a poem whose message requires basically no hermeneutic work to understand. Like Crabwalk, the poem seems to work against its own medium. Yet whereas Crabwalk thematized the difficult position of politically-engaged literature in the digital age, examining its situation from a critical distance, “What Must Be Said” lacks this complexity. Instead, it makes itself as consumable as possible, especially on digital platforms, where it successfully “generated more than 200,000 hits on Google and […] thousands of tweets on Twitter” (Taberner 2013, 400). 

Of course, even with this robust digital reception, Grass’s poem did not change the outcome of Israel’s planned strike on Iran; that was the result of an intricate geopolitics. What the poem did accomplish was to force a conversation about Grass and the authority of his work. “What Must be Said” insists, without irony, on the power of Grass’s pen (its ink, Tinte), a power that Crabwalk had left ambiguous. “Why only now, grown old,/ and with what ink remains, do I say:/ Israel’s atomic power endangers/ an already fragile world peace?” Grass writes in the poem. Taberner describes this line as an “unreflective association of intellectual authority with male potency” (2013, 402); Timothy B. Malchow calls it “masculine bluster” (2021, 211).

Crabwalk, too, was invested in questions of masculine potency. The few female characters, such as Tulla and Konny’s mother, are sidelined such that the novella is fundamentally a story about fatherly authority and patrimony. The imperative to write is passed between three generations of men, from the writing teacher Grass to Paul to Konny. By the time it reaches this last generation, this imperative has become a perverted impetus to rewrite history in the name of hate. In this way, the novella remains ambivalent about what good storytelling can do, and especially about the right form for such storytelling to take, whether journalism, film, literature, online forums, or something else entirely. By contrast, “What Must Be Said” is, as the title makes abundantly clear, concerned only with the act of saying. The poem’s assertion of discursive authority is so conspicuous, its eschewal of any artistry so obvious, that it puts an end to the conundrum that Grass had once entertained in his Nobel speech. To be effective in the digital age, the poem indicates, “dynamism” must supersede “literary quality” in two senses: not only “quality” as literary excellence, but also as the very trait of being literary—as literariness itself.

Works Cited

Beyersdorf, Herman. 2002. “Von Der Blechtrommel bis zum Krebsgang: Günter Grass als Schriftsteller der Vertreibung”. In: Weimarer Beiträge 48, 568–593.

Boucher, Geoff and Young, Helen. 2023. “Digital Books and the Far Right”. In: Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 37, 140–152.

Fullerton, Ronald A. 1977. “Creating a Mass Book Market in Germany: The Story of the ‘Colporteur Novel’ 1870-1890”. In: Journal of Social History 10, 265–283.

Grass, Günter. 2004. Crabwalk: A Novel. New York: HarperVia.

Grass, Günter. 2007. “To Be Continued . . .”. In: Nobel Lectures: From the Nobel Laureates, 1986-2006. New York: The New Press, 99–114.

Grass, Günter. 2012. “What Must Be Said”. Translated by Breon Mitchell. In: The Guardian, April 5 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/apr/05/gunter-grass-what-must-be-said. Accessed June 23, 2025.

Jahn, Egbert. 2015. “‘With What Ink Remains’: Stabbing a Pen into the Hornet’s Nest of Israeli, Jewish and German Sensitivities”. In: World Political Challenges (Berlin: Springer, 187–203. 

Malchow, Timothy B. 2021. Günter Grass and the Genders of German Memory: From the Tin Drum to Peeling the Onion and Beyond. Woodbridge : Boydell & Brewer.

Mews, Siegfried. 2008. Günter Grass and his Critics: From the Tin Drum to Crabwalk. Columbia: Camden House.

Moltke, Johannes (von) and Komfort-Hein, Susanne. 2024. “‘Where Woke Goes to Die’: Transnationale Literaturpolitiken der Neuen Rechten”. In: Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 98, 619–638.

Mueller, Agnes C. 2013. “Acting Out”. In: German Studies Review 36, 389–393. 

Mueller, Agnes C. 2015. The Inability to Love: Jews, Gender, and America in Recent German Literature. Evanston: Northwestern UP.

Plummer, Jessica Ellen. 2016. Selling Fiction: The German Colportage Novel 1871–1914. Doctoral dissertation at the University of Texas at Austin.

Ravndal, Jacob Aasland. 2021. “From Bombs to Books, and Back Again? Mapping Strategies of Right-Wing Revolutionary Resistance”. In: Studies in Conflict & Terorrism 46, 2120–2148.

Reich-Ranicki, Marcel. 2012. “Es ist ein ekelhaftes Gedicht”. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 8 2012: https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/das-israel-gedicht-von-grass/marcel-reich-ranicki-ueber-grass-es-ist-ein-ekelhaftes-gedicht-11710933.html. Accessed June 23, 2025.

Schmitz, Helmut. 2007. “Representations of the Nazi Past II: German Wartime Suffering”. In: Contemporary Fiction: Writing the Berlin Republic. Edited by Stuart Taberner. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 142–158. 

Storch, Arthur. 1869. Ein Kind des Volkes: oder, Der Arbeiterkönig. Politisch-socialer Roman aus der Gegenwart. Pest, Wien, Leipzig: A Hartleben’s Verlag.

Swales, Martin. 2017. “Günter Grass’s ‘Im Krebsgang’ and the Novella: Reframing the Narrative Frame”. In: German Life and Letters 70, 376–382.

Taberner, Stuart. 2013. “Grass’s Poem ‘Was gesagt werden muss,’ or, the Last Hurrah of the Aging Author”. In: German Studies Review 36, 399–403.

Thomalla, Erika. “Neurechte Verlagspolitik”. In: Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 98, 639–659.

Twark, Jill E. 2004. “Landscape, Seascape, Cyberscape: Narrative Strategies to Dredge up the Past in Günter Grass’s Novella Im Krebsgang”. In: Gegenwärtsliteratur 3, 143–168.