Crabwalk (2002), published in German as Im Krebsgang, is a novella by German author Günter Grass, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. Born in 1927 in the Free City of Danzig (now known as Gdańsk, Poland), Grass explores the effects of the past on the present: in this novel, he interweaves various strands and combines fact and fiction in exploring the lack of attention to German victimhood in their losses in World War II.

He uses fiction to explore the lasting influence of such major events as the early 1945 sinking of the ship Wilhelm Gustloff by a Soviet submarine, in which more than 9300 people died, most civilians and thousands of children. He believes that the failure to recognize the cost of such losses as the ship sinking to the Germans helped create a rise of neo-Nazi movements.

The title, Crabwalk, defined by Grass as "scuttling backward to move forward," refers to various events, some occurring at the same time, which are the same events that would lead to the eventual disaster. Crabwalk might also imply a more abstract glance at history, in order to allow a people to move forward. The protagonist's awkward relationships with his mother and his estranged son, explored via the crabbed process of scouring the wreckage of history for therapeutic insight, is another expression of the title.

The narrator of the novella is journalist Paul Pokriefke. He was born on 30 January 1945, the day that the Wilhelm Gustloff was sunk by a Soviet submarine in the last year of World War II. His young mother-to-be, Tulla Pokriefke (born in Danzig, was featured in two earlier parts of the Danzig Trilogy, Cat and Mouse and Dog Years). She is among the more than 10,000 passengers on the ship, who included a majority of evacuees and some military, and the relatively few hundred survivors. Tulla says in the novel that Paul was born the same moment the ship sank, when she had been rescued and was on board a torpedo boat.

Paul feels that his life is strongly influenced by these events, above all because Tulla repeatedly urges him to fulfill his 'duty' and to commemorate the event in writing. In the course of his research, Paul discovers by chance that his estranged son Konrad (Konny) has taken an interest in the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff as an expression of Nazi thinking.

For years Konny had lived with his mother after his parents divorced. He created a website ('blutzeuge.de') by which he explores the 1936 murder of Swiss Nazi leader Wilhelm Gustloff, and the sinking of the ship named for him. He creates a dialogue in which he adopts the role of Gustloff. Another young man, Wolfgang Stremplin, takes the role online of David Frankfurter, Jewish assassin of Gustloff.

The two men eventually meet in person in Schwerin, the hometown of Konny. (A memorial stands to the historic activist Gustloff.) The meeting takes place on 20 April 1997; more than 100 years after Hitler's birth on that date in 1889. Wolfgang takes on a Jewish persona for his role playing.^{[citation needed]} He spits three times on the memorial to Gustloff, a Nazi activist, thus desecrating it in Konny's eyes. Konny shoots him dead, mirroring Frankfurter's shooting of Gustloff. Afterward he surrenders to the police and says, "I shot because I am a German". (By contrast, Frankfurter had said, "I shot because I am a Jew".)

The narrator realises that his imprisoned son has become a new style of martyr. He is celebrated as such by neo-Nazis on the Internet.