History is humanized and personalized in this novel by making Paul born on a lifeboat on the night of incident and through a reunion of the survivors of the ship. This is the way the characters in the novel obtain historical specificity. According to a critic, "It represents historical process, and in doing so gestures towards actual historical progress. The realism of the novel allows the reader to engage with and empathize with historical individuals and thence gain a sense of their own historical specificity. It is able to communicate to people a sense of their own historicity, and the ways that they might be able to construct historically inflected identities for themselves" (de Groot, p. 29).
Gunter Grass has often been considered Germany's guilty conscience. By making his characters like Tulla re visiting history, he reveals German's efforts to revise history. In Crabwalk Paul reveals the indelibility of past in German's life on which they are ashamed of. "There it is again, that damned date. History, or, to be more precise, the history we Germans have repeatedly mucked up, is a clogged toilet. We flush and flush, but the shit keeps rising " (122). Moreover Paul always regrets his birthday on "this accursed thirtieth ". But ironically his son Konrad starts a cyber war against Jews and influenced by his grandmother Tulla, hopes to re write history. Paul's efforts to forget his history remain futile as he says "Everything that I try to crabwalk away from, or admit to in relative to the truth, or reveal as if under duress, comes out, after the fact and from guilty conscience " (189). Likewise the Soviet Supreme Commander did not let the success achieved by U-boat S-13 and his commander Marinesko published in Red Banner Fleet's daily bulletin, out of shame on such a big loss of civilians in Gustloff incident.
The plot of the novel revolves around the sinking of the German refugee ship, Wilhelm Gustloff, in January 1945 on the Baltic ocean by a Soviet submarine.