her attention instead to her grandson. She also supplies Konny with the weapon which he uses in the murder, after he is threatened by neo-Nazi skinheads. The old one The mysterious figure of the old one stands between Grass and the narrator Paul. Belonging to the generation of those who fled west after the end of the war, he encourages Paul to write of the sinking as a substitute for his own failure to do so. The narrator refers to him as his "employer" or "boss". The possibility of identifying him with Grass serves to prevent the equation of the narrator with the author. Analysis The message of the novel is essentially that by ignoring the subject of German suffering in World War Two as exemplified by the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff gives a platform for political extremists, and that the best way to reduce their appeal is to incorporate events such as the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff into the popular memory of the past. Notably, Paul Pokriefke, the narrator of Crabwalk does not like to talk about the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff and only opens up about the subject when he discovers a neo-Nazi website that uses the sinking as a way to glorify the Third Reich. The critic Stephen Brase felt that the main theme of the novel was parental failure as Paul together with his ex-wife Gabi are unable to prevent their son from becoming a Nazi. Brase saw the characters of Paul and Gabi as emblematic of the post-war generation who came of age in the 1960s who wanted to create a better Germany, but were unable to make lastingly positive changes. Grass portrayed Paul as well meaning, but unable to make the changes he wants because for the first half of the novel he cannot speak of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff. Even when Paul does speak of the sinking, he stresses that some of the aspects of the sinking such as the fate of the passengers in the interior of the ship who were unable to escape as the ship went down too rapidly into the icy waters of the Baltic sea are simply too horrible to put into words. In a different way, the parents of Wolfgang Stremplin are also shown as having failed as Stremplin's philo-Semitism-which is deeply heartfelt as the result of guilt over the Holocaust-but is