Günter Grass Breaks Taboo on Refugees

Has Günter Grass, the literary guru of the European left, undergone a sudden hardening of the arteries?

Germany's Nobel prize-winning novelist has pounded the hustings for the Social Democrats and stood up for liberal and radical causes in almost every major public debate in his country during the past 30 years. Yet this week he has embraced, not just one, but three causes that were previously associated with the right, if not the far-right.

In an interview published yesterday in the weekly newspaper Die Woche, the brooding, pipe-smoking writer lambasted the government's efforts to outlaw the neo-Nazi National-democratic party of Germany (NPD) and said he favoured lifting a ban on the republication of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.

But what has most startled his compatriots is Grass's choice of subject matter for his latest novel, published this week. Im Krebsgang highlights the suffering of German refugees fleeing from the Soviet army at the end of the second world war. The title, which roughly translates as "crab-wise", is an allusion to the way crabs move slowly backwards when threatened.

The story centres on the sinking by a Russian submarine in the Baltic in January 1945 of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a liner laden with refugees. More than 8,000 people, most of them civilians and wounded soldiers, were killed.

Yet this disaster was almost never talked about in Germany. Only on the right did anyone express an interest in the cause of the millions driven out of Russia, Poland and Czechoslovakia at the end of the war.

Edmund Stoiber, a hardline conservative who is to lead the Christian Democrats into the next general election, and Jörg Haider, of Austria's far-right Freedom party, have both taken up cudgels on behalf of those expelled from the Sudeten region of what is now the Czech republic.

As if to distance himself from the right, Grass began the week by warning against Mr Stoiber's election and comparing him to Mr Haider.

A front-page article in the conservative daily Die Welt yesterday accused Grass of making intentionally controversial pronouncements to promote his new book. Grass said in the interview that he had been opposed to the banning of extreme rightwing parties since the 1960s and wanted readers to see for themselves the "nonsense" in Mein Kampf.

His latest novel has clearly tuned in to a new, more considered, less reflexive approach to the past among Germans. It has been welcomed on the left and right alike.

The liberal news magazine Der Spiegel put Grass on the cover of this week's edition while a columnist for the conservative tabloid Bild, who had lost many of his own relatives in the flight from the east, said the novelist had for the first time legitimised the grief of the survivors.

"We, the expelled, may cry together. I thank you for this," he wrote.

A distinguished Jewish critic, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, confessed that he too had had tears in his eyes as he read Im Krebsgang. It was among the "best, most distressing works that Grass has written".

But if the author's latest work is symptomatic of a change in German attitudes, it is one that is being watched with deep concern elsewhere. Many in Poland and the Czech republic fear that entry into the EU could make them vulnerable to demands by Germans for the return of property abandoned in 1945.