gave the impression that it was Poland that attacked Germany in 1939. Giordano argued that Grass's intentions in Crabwalk were honorable, but his argument could be easily be distorted into a picture of moral equivalence with there being no differences between the actions of the Axis and Allied states-a way of remembering the past that Giordano was vehemently against.. The critic Siegfrid Mews wrote that there was much to Giardano's concerns, noting that British reviewers of Crabwalk praised the novel for its attention to the "forgotten victims of ethnic cleansing" and the "sense of loss" that the novel embraced was a sign of the growing "normalisation of Germany". In a review in the conservative Daily Telegraph, much was made about the "9, 000 people who died [on the Wilhelm Gustloff]-six times more than in the Titanic disaster-were largely ignored by the country's literacy elite and to an extent by the historians". Mews noted that many of the British reviewers seemed to embrace the novel's message that story of German victimisation in the war should be part of the memory of the past in a manner that seemed to be contrary to Grass's intentions.' The British critic Julian Preece noted in Crabwalk that the sinking becomes a symbol for Der Flucht ("The Flight")-the massive, chaotic and catastrophic flight of Germans from the eastern parts of Germany in the winter of 1944-1945 as the Red Army advanced into the Reich towards Berlin. Through Grass does note that there were soldiers abroad the Wilhelm Gustloff, he also notes that the majority of those who went down with the ship were civilians and that Captain Alexander Marinesko of the Soviet submarine S-13 had no reason to believe that the cruise ship was anything other than a civilian ship when he torpedoed it, thus making the sinking unjustified in his view. In the novel, Grass notes that the story of the sinking was forbidden in East Germany, which he compares with the way that the subject of German victimization in the war had become increasingly taboo in West Germany since the Brandt era. Much of the novel concerns Paul Pokriefke's attempts to sort out the various meanings attached to the sinking, including also the Soviet viewpoint as Pokriefke traces the story of Captain Marinesko who found himself imprisoned in a Siberian Gulag camp after the war. Through the novel condemns Marinesko, he is not depicted