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The Realization Of A Virtual Past In Günter Grass's Crabwalk , Paul A. Youngman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In his 1999 Nobel lecture, Günter Grass declares narration to be "a form of survival as well as a form of art." He sets out to demonstrate this declaration in his latest novella Crabwalk (2002), in which he echoes Walter Benjamin's concerns regarding war and information. The twist for Grass, the author who writes exclusively on his Olivetti typewriter, is that he analyzes the Internet as a narrative medium in his most recent work. This paper analyzes Crabwalk as a look at various forms of media—oral memories, historical monographs, film, and a website—through which humans narrate the past, in this …