TY - JOUR
AU - Titlestad, Michael
AB - This essay contrasts Hans Magnus Enzensberger's poem The Sinking of the Titanic (1978) and Günter Grass's novel Crabwalk (2002). Each is concerned with a spectacularly interrupted voyage: Enzensberger with the Royal Mail Steamer Titanic, and Grass with the torpedoing in the Baltic of the Wilhelm Gustloff, which was carrying refugees (and some military personnel) fleeing the vengeful advance of the Red Army in January 1945. The poem and novel present sequels to the tragedies: each recounts and imagines aspects of their afterlife. In doing so, Enzensberger and Grass contend with shifting practices and regimes of memory, and their implications for creative representation. Crabwalk, I argue, articulates concerns that relate quite specifically to shifts in German memory-politics from the late 1990s, while The Sinking of the Titanic is concerned more generally with the limits of utopianism and rectilinear apocalyptic representations. I conclude that the two texts are compelling counterpoints. In conjunction, they sound out the ways in which interrupted journeys can be imagined as generative or can be recuperated into forms of ideological reiteration that have potentially brutal consequences.
TI - Sequels: Hans Magnus Enzensberger's The Sinking of the Titanic and Gnter Grass's Crabwalk
JF - Forum for Modern Language Studies
DO - 10.1093/fmls/cqt030
DA - 2013-10-04
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/sequels-hans-magnus-enzensberger-s-the-sinking-of-the-titanic-and-ecsDPJq3a1
SP - 423
EP - 436
VL - 49
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -