CAPONEU

Elias Kreuzmair

University of Greifswald

https://eliaskreuzmair.de

Response to Sophie Salvo’s contribution

In her contribution, Sophie Salvo asks a simple yet profound question: why does Günther Grass, in his 2003 novella Crabwalk, and I quote, „ventriloquize his intervention into contemporary memory politics through a bad writer?“ (4) Or, to put it differently, I quote again, „What does it mean that, in a text that was so clearly intended to become part of public discourse, Grass chooses a mediocre writer to be its narrator?“ (4) This question is central to Crabwalk, especially since the narrator – a bad writer – is mentored by a creative writing teacher closely resembling Grass himself. This teacher assigns him to write about his life as the son of a German refugee during the Second World War and the father of a murderer with far-right views.

Salvo argues that Crabwalk highlights the impotence of printed literature in contrast to the continuous storytelling of websites and chatrooms. She writes: in Grass’s text, “printed literature stands impotent in the face of websites and chatrooms. […] Continuous storytelling becomes the domain of the internet in contradistinction to literature […]. Crabwalk concludes with the fatalistic assertion, ‘It doesn’t end. Never will it end’, marking a sharp distinction between the literary text (bounded, printed, unable to change), and internet discourse (always shifting, adapting, exceeding the capabilities of the printed book)” (8)

Following Salvo’s ideas, I would like to explore three directions for further discussion by trying to consider the difference between good and bad writers, between potent and impotent forms, as a matter of media.

First, we might consider the broader media landscape in Crabwalk. Beyond novels and “internet discourse”, the novella engages with other forms of media: Paul Pokriefke, the protagonist, is a journalist writing for newspapers; he refers to movies as sources of information; there is the factual book about the Gustloff, the ship on which Pokriefke’s mother fled Soviet troops by Heinz Schön; and there is oral history, particularly from his mother. This points to a more complicated media economy than the binary of internet versus printed literature. Each medium seems tied to a generation: oral history and the great novel to the older generation (represented by Pokriefke’s mother and the Grass-like figure); newspapers and movies to Pokriefke’s own generation; and websites and chatrooms to his son’s. Each medium frames the ongoing discourse—including racist and anti-Semitic ideas—according to its technical conditions. As media theorists have shown, the “new” media often are often portrayed as alive, in contrast to the “dead” older media. Salvo’s terms “potent and “impotent” echo this dichotomy: potent media generate life and continuity, while impotent media appear static and lifeless.

Second, this distinction between potent and impotent forms also implicates gender. In Crabwalk, male characters dominate the written word: the great novel, journalism, and internet discourse are all male spaces. Female characters, by contrast, remain excluded from textual authority. Pokriefke’s mother is bound to oral expression and sometimes struggles with her dialect, especially in emotional moments. She needs a male relative to tell her story. While the men in the novella often fail in life, they wield “potency” in writing, reinforcing a gendered hierarchy within media and narrative forms. And one could also ask this question in regard to the political novel: is it a masculine genre?

Third, one could ask: what does it mean for a medium to be “potent”? To create continuations or “life” through storytelling? Grass’s novella suggests that potency lies in the ability to build temporal communities. Media products become political when they foster connections and communication. This is true of Schön’s book about the Gustloff, which informs survivors of the sinking ship of different nationalities who meet at memorial sites; of Pokriefke’s own writing, which inevitably sparks debate when it is published; of websites and chatrooms, which sustain extremist discourse but also connect the murderer and his victim; and of Crabwalk itself, which ignited public debate upon its release. In fact, in my copy of the novella, I found a newspaper clipping from the Süddeutsche Zeitung reporting on a Polish article in which the author––who had not yet read the book due to the lack of a Polish translation––had already commented on it. The mere existence of the printed book triggered discussion.

To summarize, I propose three aspects for further discussion:

1. The complex media discourse in Crabwalk beyond the binary of book and internet;
2. The interplay of genre, media, and gender, which could be read as political dimension of the book;
3. The political potential of the media as a means of building communities.

II.

In the second part of my response I would like to emphasize why these aspects are particularly relevant to the question of the political novel in the digital age. As Ivana Perica and Aurore Peyroles argue in their introduction to the volume What is the Political Novel? Defining the Genre, “the political novel emerges less as a genre defined by specific norms and more as an interpretive framework” (Perica and Peyroles 2025). This means that asking about “the political novel in the digital age” activates a specific interpretive lens––one that inevitably places the media at the forefront. The question of the political novel thus becomes a question of the media constellations that enable and shape it. The political dimension of literature lies not only in its subject matter or its ideological stance, but also in the way it circulates, engages with other media and how it reflects on these processes of interaction and circulation. This shift requires a rethinking of how we approach political literature: not only in terms of content and form, but also in terms of how literary texts and their forms function in the evolving media landscape.

What does this mean in regard to Grass’s Crabwalk and the three points I have raised in response to Salvo’s contribution? As she rightly points out, the media has long been neglected in discussions about Crabwalk, and yet the novel is still widely regarded as a political text. To examine Crabwalk within the framework of the political novel in the digital age means reframing its politics as a matter of media. First, the novel constructs a specific relationship between potent (internet discourse etc.) and impotent (printed books) forms. However, this distinction does not hold true for Crabwalk itself, nor does it seem to be a claim that the novel takes seriously for its own status. The novel relies on print culture––newspapers, television debates, conventional literary criticism—to generate public discourse. While the digital is presented as the dominant, unstoppable force within the novel’s plot, Crabwalk as a book itself positions the printed book as an essential medium for political engagement. In today’s post-digital age, things may be different: authors’ careers often begin on social media before they become authors of novels that are published as books. The historical distance from the publication of Grass’s novel reveals something fundamental: the “digital era” is not a fixed state, but a historical one. The role of digital media in relation to other media shifts over time. Rephrased for a post-digital context, this means that the use of analog media can itself be an answer to the question of the political novel in the digital age. In a sense, Crabwalk performs a comparable act of media reflectivity––it uses an older form, the colportage novel (as Salvo has shown), to initiate a discussion in newer media such as newspapers and television.

Secondly, the media are not a neutral vehicle of discourse, but must be examined through an intersectional lens. Each medium carries specific connotations regarding race, class and gender, and its political impact cannot be understood in isolation from these structures. When we look at the “digital era” from this perspective, we must recognize that digital technologies are not just platforms for literary circulation but choices that are themselves political. Different digital media have different connotations in different cultural contexts; they are used by different social groups, shaped by different economic conditions, and constrained by national and regional regulatory frameworks. The same internet that enables marginalised voices to gain visibility also reinforces existing and new hierarchies through algorithms, surveillance, and corporate control.

Third, if we consider the political novel as a matter of media, we must consider the ways in which different media––especially digital ones––build and sustain communities. The internet forums in Crabwalk can be seen as a prefiguration of social media. It could be argued that social media, more than any prior medium, excels at building communities that transcend traditional boundaries––linguistic, national, and ideological. These communities can be both progressive and reactionary, both democratic and exclusionary. Crabwalk stages this ambivalence: digital media facilitate the continued spread of racist and anti-Semitic narratives, but they also provide a space for contestation and counter-discourse, even though in the end Pokriefke’s son kills his discussion partner David. In this sense, the novel’s pessimism about the digital as a place where racist and anti-Semitic ideas are perpetuated could be reconsidered. Rather than seeing the internet solely as a space where reactionary forces thrive, we might ask how digital media could also sustain political literature in new ways––by fostering transnational reading publics, enabling direct interaction between authors and readers, or giving rise to new forms of collective literary production (on Reddit or Bluesky, for example). The question of the political novel in the digital age, then, is not only about how novels thematise digital media, but also about how literature itself functions within a digitally networked public sphere.

Work Cited

Perica, Ivana and Peyroles, Aurore. 2025. “Who’s afraid of the Political Novel?”. In: What is the Political Novel? Defining the genre. https://open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/articles/5-161. Accessed June 23, 2025.