Christa Wolf

Las Vegas is not exactly the place where one would have thought to find Christa Wolf, and she did not stay there long. When she played roulette, she set herself a limit of $ 60 and then stopped. (…) She is not easy to seduce when it comes to earthly pleasures. This scene is at the end of her fictionally exaggerated remembrance prose, boldly referred to by her publisher as a “novel”. Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud is a book which is definitely about seducibility. And it is only here, on a journey to the Navajo and Hopi Indians, that she finally manages to let go and to take an interest only in what she encounters: the landscape and the people. (…) The previous months - from September 1992 to May 1993, Christa Wolf was a guest of the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Almost everything revolved around her and her history, her life in the GDR and in socialism, but above all around the shock that she suffered when, in the summer of 1992, the Gauck Office presented her not only with the 42 volumes of her so-called victim file, but also a slim file from which she realised that she had been on the Stasi’s list of casual informants from 1959 to 1962. (…) The abbreviation “IM“ (Informelle Mitarbeiter – informal employee) was devastating in year two after reunification. A morally charged public opinion was unable to differentiate. And now it had caught out that great moralist Christa Wolf of all people. In Stadt der Engel she recounts how the newspaper articles she could hardly bear poured out of the fax machine in L. A.

Jörg Magenau: „Ans Selbstgespräch gefesselt“
© die tageszeitung, 26 June 2010