He uses fiction to explore the lasting influence of such major events as the early 1945 sinking of the ship Wilhelm Gustloff by a Soviet submarine, in which more than 9300 people died, most civilians and thousands of children.

The protagonist's awkward relationships with his mother and his estranged son, explored via the crabbed process of scouring the wreckage of history for therapeutic insight, is another expression of the title.

In the course of his research, Paul discovers by chance that his estranged son Konrad (Konny) has taken an interest in the sinking of the Wilhem Gustloff as an expression of Nazi thinking.

[2] For her, the cruise ship Wilhelm Gustloff, built in 1937 to put the Volksgemeinschaft (people's community) into practice by allowing ordinary Germans to take free vacations abroad, was a floating utopia.

[2] Most Germans could not afford a vacation abroad in the interwar period, owing to the undervalued Reichsmark, so a voyage aboard the ship was considered to be a great privilege.

After the ship was launched, a number of German families who were considered Volksgenossen ("National Comrades"-i.e people who belonged to the Volksgemeinschaft) were allowed to take a free vacation aboard the Wilhelm Gustloff.

Grass believes that events that represent the full German experience, such as the major losses of thousands of innocent people in the ship sinking, should become part of the popular memory of the past and the war.

[3] Critic Stephen Brase suggests that the main theme of the novel is parental (and generational) failure, as Paul and his ex-wife Gabi are unable to prevent their son from becoming a Nazi.

[4] Brase considered the characters of Paul and Gabi to be emblematic of the post-war generation who came of age in the 1960s and wanted to create a better Germany, but were unable to make lasting positive changes.

[4] Even when Paul does speak of the sinking, he stresses that some of its aspects, such as the deaths of the passengers in the interior, who were unable to escape because the ship sank rapidly and in icy waters, are simply too horrible to put into words.

[5] In a different way, the parents of Wolfgang Stremplin are shown as having failed because their son's philo-Semitism, a result of guilt over the Holocaust, is portrayed as deeply felt but also somewhat silly and absurd.

[6] In a critical 2002 review in Die Zeit, Thomas Schmitt rejected Grass's thesis of a "national taboo" against the memory of German victimization in the war.

He notes that families of Germans who fled or were expelled from their longtime homes in other national territories in the postwar period have kept alive the memories of these lost homelands.

[7] Schmitt noted that the expellee groups hurt their cause by demands for a revanchist foreign policy directed at taking back parts of Poland that Germany had once controlled.

[7] While acknowledging the terrible loss of life in the ship sinking Schmitt noted that the next day, a Nazi-directed death march ended in the same area, with a massacre of survivors at the edge of the sea.

[5] Schmitt also noted that the Wilhelm Gustloff was carrying military personnel and weapons, making it a legitimate wartime target for the Soviets under international law.

[5] Grass was among the "Flakhelfer generation", those Germans under the Third Reich who were too young to be drafted into the Wehrmacht, but were usually assigned as gunner assistants to Luftwaffe anti-aircraft batteries that were used against the Allied bombers during the strategical bombing offensive.

[7] Raddatz argued that the portrayal of the "68ers" as well meaning but ineffectual intellectuals, due to their own flaws, was distorted and reflected Grass's personal disapproval of the protest movements in the 1960s.

[7] Many reviewers felt that the "spectacular success" of Crabwalk would lead to a new national discourse that would place the image of Germans as victims of the war as the dominant memory of the past.

[5] Giordano argued that Grass's intentions in Crabwalk were honorable, but his argument could be distorted into an assertion of moral equivalence, as if there were no differences between the actions of the Axis and Allied states.

[5] A review in the conservative Daily Telegraph, noted that the "9, 000 people who died [on the Wilhelm Gustloff]-six times more than in the Titanic disaster-were largely ignored by the country's literary elite and to an extent by the historians".

[5] Mews noted that many British reviewers seemed to embrace the novel's message that the story of German wartime should be part of the memory of the past in a manner that seemed to be contrary to Grass's intentions.

[8] The novel explores Paul Pokriefke's attempts to sort out the various meanings attached to the sinking, including the Soviet viewpoint as represented by Captain Marinesko.

[10] Preece says that the debate about the assassination of Wilhelm Gustloff in Switzerland, which takes up much of the novel, was "...really a distraction from the horror in the snow experienced by the refugees in the winter treks to the west, which claimed the lives of so many in such degrading circumstances".

He further said that Grass made a "considered argument" that people such as Tulla should be allowed "to have their heroes and martyrs and memorials and ceremonies of remembrance", as repression of any kind leads to "unpredictable consequences".