German Authors and Genres

On December 1, 2011, the author Christa Wolf died at the age of 82. As hardly another writer of her generation, she represented the ruptures, contradictions and hopes of Germany. Her works have been translated into 40 languages.übersetzt.

For visitors to the German capital, the Dorotheenstadt Cemetery, in the district Mitte, just behind the Brecht House in the Chausseestraße, is a must. Brecht is buried there, as is Hegel, Fichte, Heinrich Mann and many other great writers and intellectuals. Not far from the graves of Hans Mayer, Günter Gaus and Stephan Hermlin, the visitor will find the grave of Christa Wolf. The world-renown writer died on December 1, 2011, after a long illness. In what does her fame and significance consist?

A new German republic (1949–1965)

She was born Christa Ihlenfeld in 1929 in Landsberg an der Warthe (now Gorzów Wielkopolski). She graduated from high school in 1949. The same year saw the founding of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). German literature is to be the guiding medium in building a democratic socialism, and the young woman, married to the one year older Gerhard Wolf since 1951, wants to lend a hand in the work. Christa Wolf becomes a publisher’s reader, a literary critic and editor of the journal neue deutsche literature (new german literature). Her literary debut, Moscow Novella (Moskauer Novelle, 1961), shows what contemporary socialist-realist literature could look like. Wolf becomes well-known with her novel The Divided Sky (Der geteilte Himmel, 1963). In flashbacks and inner monologues, it relates the life of Rita Seidel, who awakes in a hospital in “the last days of August 1961” (the Berlin Wall was erected on August 13, 1961). Her commitment to the building of socialism, fired by the workers in her factory brigade, alienates her from her lover, the chemist Manfred Herrfurth, who is skeptical of the GDR and in the end deserts the republic while Rita remains in East Germany. Especially because The Divided Sky confronts the taboo subject of flight from the GRD, it became a great success in both East and West Germany. But the 11th plenary session of Central Committee of the SED (the ruling party of the GDR) brings Wolf’s early literary career to an abrupt end for her taking this liberty.

Subjective authenticity and loyal opposition (1966–1990)

The novel The Quest for Christa T. (Nachdenken über Christa T., 1968), which is closely connected with the poetological essay “Reading and Writing” (“Lesen und Schreiben”, 1968), develops for the first time an important theme of the author’s life: the psychosomatic realm, illness and death. In flashbacks, dreams and reflections, the book presents thoughts about a friend who recently died of leukemia. The fragmentary reminiscences on this doubting anti-heroine are linked to a critical interrogation of everyday social life that has never before been attempted in GRD literature. The collection of short stories Unter den Linden (1974) was followed in 1976 by Wolf’s third novel: in 18 chapters, Patterns of Childhood (Kindheitsmuster) describes the childhood of Nelly Jordan and the everyday life of a German provincial town during the Nazi period. The memories, which end in 1947, are repeatedly confronted with images, thoughts and conversations from the East German present, which are examined with Lutheran conscientiousness for survivals of fascist behavior. The reference point of Wolf’s truthfulness is her own personal involvement, without which the desired “subjective authenticity” of her writing would not be possible. After the expatriation of Wolf Biermann (1976), against which Wolf publicly protests, she turns to the “conversational space of Romanticism”. In the short-story No place, nowhere (Kein Ort. Nirgends, 1979), a fictitious meeting between the poets Karoline von Günderrode and Heinrich von Kleist in June 1804 becomes the occasion to reflect on the scope and limits of individual self-realization and the social freedom of poetry. The story concerns a question that is central to Wolf’s entire œuvre: why civil society’s demand that “human beings”, and especially women, have the freedom “to become subjectivities” has not been met even in GDR socialism. Wolf soon complements the use of Romanticism as an echo chamber and hall of mirrors for her characters with that of the ancient world, particularly in the short story Cassandra (1983), about whose context and creation the author provides information in her Frankfurt lectures on poetics (1982). With these works, and with the short story Breakdown (Störfall, 1987), Wolf becomes a role model in the 1980s for the women’s movement, the peace movement and the environmental movement in both parts of Germany. Reading tours take her to various parts of the world, including Scandinavia, France and the United States, her works are translated into many languages, she is awarded the most important literary prizes of the East and West Germany, and she does a lasting service by her tireless support of young GDR authors.

After the literary debate (1991–2011)

Wolf is significantly engaged in the “Wende” – with her speech on November 4, 1989 at the Alexanderplatz in Berlin, with her signing of the appeal For Our Country, and with her collaboration on a draft constitution for a reformed GDR. The publication of her short story What Remains (Was bleibt) in 1990, though it was already written in 1979, leads to what was later to be called the first German-German literary debate, in the course of which Wolf is accused of having a dreamy and Romantic concept of politics and too close a relationship with the leadership of the GDR. When in 1993 it transpires that the archives of the GDR State Security Service (the “Stasi”) contain not only 42 comprehensive volumes of “victim documents” on Wolf, but also documents that identify her as an informal Stasi collaborator (IM) from 1959 to 1962, the revelation disrupts her life permanently. In her short story In the Flesh (Leibhaftig, 2002), she describes her subsequent existential crisis and its life-threatening psychosomatic effects, which become a seismograph for the collapse of her country. Her last book, The City of Angels or the Overcoat of Dr. Freud (Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud, 2010) broaches the events surrounding the revelations. The memoir and autobiographical travelogue, composed of diary sketches, dream protocols and fictional passages, may be read as her painful self-examination, confession and legacy. What remains firmly etched in our minds is the image of Christa Wolf as a guardian of literature, developer of the humanist tradition, and credible advocate of the utopia of a decent and humane society, who wore herself thin in the narrow GDR world of “really existing socialism” and never felt quite at home in the capitalist West of the post-reunification period.