Earlier this year, Gunter Grass, a Nobel prize winner, caused a tidal wave of agonized German heart-searching with his novel " Im Krebsgang " ( Crab Walk ), in which he relates the disaster of a German transport ship carrying German refugees from eastern Prussia, which was sunk off the Baltic coast by Russian torpedoes in early 1945 with the loss of 7, 000 lives, mostly women and children.
