Virtual Memory in Günter Grass's Im Krebsgang

Bibliographic Data

ID9853778
AuthorsKristin Veel (0000-0002-5563-4874, corresponding author)
Year2004
Volume57
Issue2
Pages206-218
Publication date2004-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueGerman Life and Letters (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0016-8777 • E-ISSN: 1468-0483
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.0016-8777.2004.0280.x
OpenAlexW2088847648
LanguageDE
Citations received4

This essay is concerned with the significance of the references to the internet in Grass's recent novella Im Krebsgang . It examines recent public statements by Grass, including his Nobel Prize lecture of 1999, in order to expound the issues raised in Im Krebsgang . It distinguishes between the different types of commemoration exemplified by the main characters in the work (the narrator who was born on the night of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff in the Baltic in 1945, his mother Tulla Pokriefke who is a familiar figure from earlier narratives by Grass, and his son Konny who sets up a website commemorating the historical figure of Gustloff in a neo‐Nazi spirit). It explains the disjointed (crab‐like) character of the narrative as a means of maintaining openness in relation to both past and future, and it brings out the sense in which this mode of narration subverts the blurring of the real and the imaginary which Grass shows to be an inherent danger of cyberspace culture. The essay thus concludes that Grass is enacting a difference between the ethically neutral spatial freedom of the internet and the ethically coherent space of literary narrative

Art · Character (mathematics · Cyberspace · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Novella · Openness to experience · Order (exchange · Psychoanalysis · Relation (database · Sociology · The Imaginary · The Internet · Computer Science · German History and Society · History · Literature and Cultural Memory · Psychology · Social Psychology

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