Historical and present-day novel by Günter Grass, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Im Krebsgang takes on the worst maritime disaster in history, the sinking of a German cruise ship, the Wilhelm Gustloff. Packed with more than 9,000 refugees, it was attacked in the Baltic Sea by a Soviet submarine in January of 1945. Born to an unwed mother on a lifeboat the night of the attack, Paul Pokriefke is a middle-aged journalist trying to piece together the tragic events. While his mother sees her whole existence in terms of that calamitous moment, Paul wishes their life could have been less touched by the past. For his teenage son, who dabbles in the dark, far-right corners of the Internet, the Gustloff embodies the denial of Germany's wartime suffering. "Scuttling backward to move forward," Im Krebsgang is both a tale of a tragedy at sea and an examination of the ways different generations of Germans now view their past.