While Heinrich Böll's stories depict facets of the everyday lives of soldiers, Günter Grass's texts are predominantly interested in the home front. Grass embarks on an exploration of the origin and consequences of violent conflicts. Unlike Böll, who showed great sympathy for the plight of ordinary Germans, Grass shies away from the theme of German suffering and focuses his attention instead on Germany's burden of guilt for the crimes of war and genocide. This reluctance to portray the experience of German refugees, bombing victims, or soldiers may be due to the fact that Grass, even more so than Böll, is acutely aware of the dangers inherent in narratives of victimization. His first novel and postwar masterpiece, Die Blechtrommel (1959), is not only a powerful call for personal accountability, but also expresses a critique of what might be described as a German propensity for self-victimization through playful irony and biting satire.

Since Grass had long been identified with German Vergangenheitsbewältigung and its insistence on remembrance and accountability, his novella Im Krebsgang (Crab Walk, 2002) instigated a heated public debate. Numerous critics felt that the poet laureate had revised his previous leftist political stance. To Günter Franzen, for example, a critic for Die Zeit, the fact that Grass of all people chose to present a literary account of German victimization and thus to tackle a topic that is commonly identified with the right end of the political spectrum was “eine Überraschung … die an ein Wunder grenzt” (a surprise … bordering on a miracle).