Wolf, Christa

On the eve of her youngest daughter’s forth birthday Christa Wolf records her first entry in her one-day-a-year diary, an annual tradition that continues until both her daughters are well into their forties. Based on Maksim Gorky’s ‘One Day in the World’ project, in 1960 the Moscow-based newspaper Izvestiya invited several writers, including Wolf, to record their thoughts and experiences on the 27th of September. The East German novelist, screenwriter and essayist decides to continue this ritual “in opposition to the inexorable loss of existence”, as a way of recording her own personal development and as “an exercise against blindness to reality”. The forty unedited extracts that feature in One Day a Year allow us to peek behind the ‘iron curtain’ and walk a mile in the shoes of a writer, woman, and a wife and mother in a socialist country during the Cold War.

Wolf records and reflects on the many moments, from the trivial to the profound and the political that combine to create a personal history and the outline of a life, with an awareness that she lives this day ‘more consciously’ than the other 364. The published entries cover the period between 1960-2000 and are peppered with headlines from around the globe, which help to contextualise her personal experiences in light of global events, many of which have since become part of our shared history, including the assassination of JFK, the space race, the threat of nuclear warfare and the beginnings of HIVAIDS.

The three central themes that emerge from the diary are the personal; where she focuses on her relationships with friends and family; the professional, where she recounts her experiences as a writer; and the political, where she reveals a complex and contradictory relationship with politics and the communist regime.

At the centre of Wolf’s personal life is her long-suffering life partner Gerhard (Gerd). Plagued by sickness and self-doubt, the East German writer is heavily reliant on the cruel-to-be-kind emotional and professional counsel that her husband offers. She often allows her emotions to rule her mental and physical states, and each chapter inevitably begins with some form of physical complaint, either a migraine or an ache of some kind. Although she is aware of her own shortcomings and of the psychosomatic connection between her mental and physical conditions, she does at times paint a fairly unflattering picture of herself as an attention-seeking hypochondriac. Thankfully Gerd’s rational, no-nonsense approach provides a nice counterbalance to Wolf’s hysteria and also offers an alternative point of view for readers to identify with.

Wolf’s other great love, writing, proves a less constant companion, abandoning her in times of need and showering her with gifts at others, as she constantly struggles to find the right balance between writing for others; thereby compromising her art, and writing for herself as the purer form of artistic expression. Throughout the book she shares her inspirations, fears, doubts, dilemmas, difficulties and dialogues about the art of writing and it is comforting to learn that even a writer of her calibre experiences many moments of self doubt.

At times, she sees writing as the most important thing in her life and at others she experiences a kind of feminine guilt for the time this takes away from her role as a wife and mother. While Gerd provides her with invaluable support and enduring patience, writing is the thing she prizes above all others. “The only interesting thing in life is writing, I said. Gerd does not like to hear that.” Writing not only sustains her, it is her source of inner strength. The dichotomy between her public persona and her private one is marked; in the former she is a strong moral champion who provides a voice for the disenfranchised and in the latter she is self-doubting and vulnerable. Revered and reviled for the content of her writing on both sides of the East/West divide, Wolf’s open criticism of state-run politics in her country made her a subject of suspicion, while her refusal to condemn the socialist regime outright drew criticism from the West.

As an intellectual and a Marxist, socialism in its pure ideological form has continuing appeal for Wolf; however, the drudgery, bureaucracy, oppression and uniformity that she sees when it is practically applied in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) contribute to feelings of hopelessness about the prospect of change and despair that no better alternative exists. The Soviet intervention in Prague during the spring of 1968 becomes a major source of disillusion for Wolf, a sentiment that grows in the years that follow. She watches from the sidelines as friends and colleagues head West and her health suffers when she speaks out against the regime and yet she endures.

Sometimes described as a “loyal dissident”, her feelings towards the politics and the politicians in her country are often contradictory; she was a member of the Socialist Unity Party from 1949-1989, but didn’t attend any party meetings from the early ‘70s onwards and requested expulsion. She decried the lack of communication between East and West during the early years of division, but opposed Germany’s reunification in 1990. The subject of Stasi surveillance for thirty years, she also wielded considerable power and was often called on to intervene on behalf of unknown individuals who have been persecuted by the state. The revelation in 1993 that she acted as an informal co-operator for the Stasi between 1959 and 1961 caused a furore, with many questioning the moral stance she takes in her writing.

While she is critical of the communist regime in East Germany and abroad, claiming that its uniformity and rigidity run counter to creativity, for Wolf it is still a case of better the devil you know and she undoubtedly saves most of her vitriol for the “false needs” that characterise the West. In particular she is critical of the West’s notion of democracy “a democracy that protects property and consumption” rather than human rights and true freedom.

This day-in-the-life traces the personal and professional trajectory of a complex and often contradictory woman. The fragmented narrative moves at a fast pace, with each family member gaining a year with every passing chapter. This acceleration makes Wolf’s personal development more obvious than it would be in a day-by-day account, although we are given little insight into how many of her personal and political beliefs evolved. This one-day-a-year device does leave a few gaping holes in the political narrative, as well as a few loose personal threads. A political timeline or potted history at the beginning of each year would have made the text more cohesive. Equally, the 618-page book would have benefited from careful editing, given some chapters read like shopping lists of domestic ritual, while others are filled with insightful personal and political perceptions. Similarly, the countless footnotes that identify each person mentioned in the text, another labour of love by Gerd, are distracting rather than insightful and break up the narrative flow. These shortcomings aside, this series of snapshots that revolve around family, friends, career, domestic ritual and politics are indeed the stuff of life.

The Book

Wolf, Christa: One Day A Year / transl. by Lowell A. Bangerter . - New York : Europa Editions, 2007. - 650 S. ISBN 1-933372-22-2 Original title.: Ein Tag im Jahr (German)