In Memoriam: Christa Wolf
Lise Weil
PART I. The “Service”
Christa Wolf, originally of the GDR, died on December 1, 2011, in Berlin, at the age of 82. I happened on the news on Facebook sometime in late January of this year. For days, I reeled from the shock, not just the shock of her death but the shock of my not having known about her death for over six weeks. Wolf is a writer whose words I have lived by, more or less consciously, for almost thirty years. No other living writer did as much to shape my literary consciousness and political imagination. The only book I possess that’s as beat-up as my copy of To the Lighthouse is her novel The Quest for Christa T. The Reader and the Writer is a close second. Passages from her novels and essays still visit me on a weekly basis. Not only that, she used to make regular appearances in my dreams. How could she have passed from this world without my having a clue?? This despite the fact that I regularly, sometimes for an hour or two at a stretch, immerse myself in the information-drenched world of cyberspace. (Now that I know of her death, I’ve been drowning in blogs, commentaries, obituaries, interviews). How did this vital piece of information fall through the net?
I subscribe to U.S. and Canada-based feminist listserves, where deaths of literary figures in the U.S. and Canada are fairly well covered—though occasionally there are cracks here as well. But what of writers on another continent? I’m talking about women writers of course and most particularly feminist writers. Thirty, twenty, maybe even ten years ago a women’s magazine or newspaper would have brought me news of an important death (at its best, the feminist press knew no borders). Or if not that, a friend who had read it in one of those papers. There were gatherings then, often centered around books; if I hadn’t already found out from a newspaper or a friend it would certainly have come up at one of them.
I don’t know how we’re all supposed to keep track of these deaths, today, the deaths of the feminist writers whose imaginations have rocked our worlds. No doubt there are fans of the great visionary Quebec writer Louky Bersianik in Europe, Australia, even in the U.S., who have no idea that she died also in December, two days after Wolf in fact, at the age of 81. Beyond keeping track of these deaths, how are we supposed to mourn them, dispersed as we all are?
I decided to take matters into my own hand. I wanted to gather a bunch of women together and tell them why this loss felt so huge to me, what it was about Wolf as writer, thinker, and human being that felt so vitally important. Since I don’t have a blog, I decided to create a “gathering” by going through my address book. I sent a shorter version of the tribute that follows (Part II) out to everyone I thought might be interested. As it turned out, many were. What follows are excerpts from some of the responses. Not quite the same as gathering at a campfire or a crossroads, as one of these writers comments, but “perhaps the next best thing.”
She is one of the greats. Men get to be great while alive; women have to be dead for between 30 and 50 years (often way longer). I recall when Monique Wittig died. One of the Bee Gees died that day too and there were obits everywhere. I too can't tell you how important Wolf is. Her A Model Childhood rocketed me into the stratosphere. Cassandra, Medea, Christa T. and all the others including her essays. I can't get enough of her.
I didn’t know until this moment. How could this have happened? Accident is one of the most important books I know. I reference it in a class or conversation as often as any other. Everyday, I think about Fukushima. About the radioactive seals suffering in the arctic sea. About Chernobyl. And so I have thought of Christa Wolf every day. And then there is the terrifying and brilliant In the Flesh. I wrote to Wolf about five years ago when she was in Los Angeles hoping we could have a glass of wine or a cup of coffee. It was at the time when everyone was finding a way to condemn her for her past history without any willingness to understand what it is to live and write under fascism. Without any sense of what we are betraying every day. . . Now I must read everything immediately and I feel as I have betrayed her by not reading everything while she was alive. As if we would have had that conversation if I had. . .
I felt similarly years ago when I stumbled across the knowledge that June Jordan had been dead for several months. We are bombarded with the day-to-day nonsense of so-called celebrities; however, we have to search for information on women writers and artists whose works go more deeply than sound bites.
I did not know that Christa Wolf had died . . .What I wonder are we to do when it seems as if women are disappearing into either obscurity or have become female robots once again.
In the age of communication some of what we used to rely on in the stream of feminist knowledge is no longer flowing.
Despite being a news junkie, I had not heard this either. Our history is still more invisible than we’d like to believe.
There are (at least) two things to be grieved here: the loss of another one of our visionaries, and the lack of ritual that has pervaded our experience of embodied life-narrative since cyberworld. There are reasons why people gather at campfires and crossroads to be in the presence of each other for these occasions. Perhaps what you did is the next best thing, yet still not the same.
I read Cassandra during the final two weeks of training (my athlete) for the Olympic Games in 2004 at the camp in Rethimno, Crete. My own path since then has taken me away from the enlightenment I experienced in those summer days spent mostly alone with Cassandra in the warm Sahara winds and sometimes turbulent surf that lapped the beaches of antiquity. My book is heavily highlighted and I just opened to this: "She was able to position herself outside her own people to such an extent that she could ‘see’ their disastrous fate." What a scary, lonely place to be. How comforting Wolf's disturbing words must be for you...and were for me as I played in the ancient Games that were forbidden to Sappho. "...the expressions of the losers who do not give up, who know: they will lose again and again, and again and again will not give up, and that is no accident, no mistake or mishap, but is meant to be that way."
It was Cassandra that sent me off to a cognitive understanding of fear. . . that fear is ambivalence, the pull from two opposite directions at once. . . Then of course, there was the general identification – and the learning about timing, about when to get out of the burning building oneself. Funny, that was back when there was such a place as "out"—or seemed to be.
Didn't know, don't do Facebook etc. & where online would such info appear, Ms?? We'll see; not so far, to my knowledge; I get MsBlog. . . .I found Christa Wolf late (as with everything else), Medea read first; I think her Great. So now I will pursue this sad news online; not sad really, she did live 8 decades & her written body will last –that is, if feminism does! And/or serious writers. . . . TheBig Erasure, (the BigSleep of women's history) where is the female Raymond Chandler to write it. Well, living history: before our eyes it happens.
In 1990, just after the Wall had fallen, I toured Germany with my German version of Gertrude Stein in Words and Pictures. One night I read in West Berlin, the next in the freshly opened East Berlin. The contrast could not have been more striking. Whereas Stein’s language, her play with words and concepts, her whole fun and pun, were easily and fully understood by Berliners in the West, the audience at the Penzlauer Berg literary café seemed deeply puzzled. There was a sense of paralysis in the room, of fear because of a lack of a cultural context for Stein’s writing, without which you can’t tell what is humor, what is irony and what is not. There was only one person in the packed room who was able to break into laughter at Stein’s wit: it was Christa Wolf. The only person there, I imagine, who had been allowed to leave the confines of the East German dictatorial state and therefore had been able to cross the steep cultural divide between Paris and East Berlin.
Part II. A (very partial) Tribute
“Literature today must be peace research,” Christa Wolf pronounced in her Büchner Prize speech. More than any other writer I know, she showed me what it is to be a writer of conscience.
For Wolf, prose was an instrument of conscience and self-knowledge, a means of stirring up the hardened deposits of history, of laying bare lies and buried truths. She was a master diagnostician of the darkness of the twentieth century. “The main aim of my work in recent years has been the question of what it is that has brought our civilization to the brink of self-destruction” she once said in an interview. She understood that that self-destructiveness had its roots in dissociation: “How one could be there and not be there at the same time, the ghastly secret of human beings in this century,” she wrote in A Model Childhood, a novel in which she tried to comes to terms with a Nazi childhood. And later: “Sin in our time consists of not wanting to know the truth about oneself.” Countering that dissociation, which Wolf saw at work everywhere, was one of her self-appointed tasks as a writer. The words spoken by Christa T. in her early and best-known novel The Quest for Christa T. could just as easily have come from her: “We must know what has happened to us . . .One must know what happens to oneself.”
In Accident: A Day’s News (Storfall), set in the East German countryside three days after the explosion at Chernobyl, Wolf confronted the specter of ecological disaster. A woman is attempting to go about her daily routine, but the simplest pleasures—milk, salad, eggs— are now laced with fear. She thinks of the mothers who “sit down by the radio and attempt to learn the new words. Becquerel. . . Half-life is what the mothers learn today. Iodine 131. Cesium. Explanations by other scientists who contradict what the first ones say; who are furious and helpless. . .” (“Hope begins,” Wolf once said in an interview, “when one faces reality, when one simply sees what is.”)
As an East German writer, Wolf took social engagement as matter of course. “I can’t abstract myself from [society],” she once said in an interview. “It is this sense of always being touched by what touches society, although it sometimes drives me to despair, that is the source, amongst other things, of my creative drive.” At a time when, Occupy Wall Street notwithstanding, unfettered capitalism seems to be the model towards which all societies are leaning, it is bracing to read a writer for whom an alternative existed. “We East Germans had a vision, a utopia,” she once wrote, and even after reckoning with the abuses of the regime she continued to cling to that vision. Beginning with the collection of essays The Reader and the Writer, published in 1968, Wolf would develop a body of writing about writing marked by a steadfast refusal of alienation and a fervent wish that literature be effective, be useful, that it might help to bring about a more livable world, “help ensure that the things of this earth endure.” Hers was, as she put it, an “aesthetics of resistance.”
In the 1980s, Wolf’s social critique, along with her poetics, took a feminist turn. In the process of researching the figure of Cassandra for her novel of that name that appeared in 1983, she began to study archaeology and ancient matriarchal cultures. Travelling to Crete, she was outraged to discover that women were the original seers, prophets and poets, that their powers had been usurped by the priests of Apollo who took over the temple at Delphi, that women were subsequently either excluded or turned into objects. She began to consider the implications of the fact that for two thousand years women were barred from any significant role in shaping culture. “Does it seem misguided. . .to believe,” she wrote, “that if women had helped to think `thought’ over the last two thousand years, the life of thought would be different today?”
Wolf’s Cassandra is a feminist parable. Even as her Cassandra, originally loyal to her father King Priam and her country (Troy), comes to understand that the Trojan war, far from being an aberration, is deeply symptomatic of patriarchal consciousness, and that “we have no chance against a time that needs heroes,” she begins to feel a deep kinship with women from other layers of society. Wolf’s own feminist awakening is traced in her Frankfurt lectures, which later appeared as essays accompanying Cassandra. In terms of narrative, she writes in these essays, the necrophilia of patriarchal cultures is to be seen in the “strictly one-track-minded approach—the extraction of a single ‘skein’. . . a blood-red thread extracted from the fabric of human life, the narrative of the struggle and victory of the heroes, or their doom.” To these one-track stories Wolf suggests that we oppose something she calls “the living word”: “This word would no longer produce stories of heroes, or of antiheroes, either. Instead, it would be inconspicuous and would seek to name the inconspicuous, the precious everyday, the concrete. . .Perhaps it would greet with a smile the wrath of Achilles, the conflict of Hamlet, the false alternatives of Faust.”
“In the age of universal memory loss,” Wolf wrote in A Model Childhood, “we must realize that complete presence of mind can be achieved only when based on a clear past.” One of her main projects as a writer was to remove blinders, her own and others’, to make herself and the reader aware of blind spots, to see clearly. The relentless questioning that characterized her narrative voice was often directed at herself (the authorial “I” and the narrative “I” often appeared to be identical); she seemed always ready to expose her own failings, to open up even her rawest wounds for closer inspection. In the aftermath of the response to What Remains (Was Bleibt), a novella about a day in the life of a GDR writer whose every move is monitored by state secret police agents, she would try to come to terms with the fact that for three years, as a young woman, she herself worked for the Stasi. West German critics, who had already attacked Wolf for waiting till after reunification to publish the novella, pounced at this news. Never mind that she was an informal collaborator, provided no incriminating information, and claimed to have repressed the episode (entirely believable in light of the focus on dissociation in her previous work). Her reputation was forever tarnished. As Kate Webb recently wrote in The Guardian, “Her refusal to simply exonerate herself was read as a sign of guilt, rather than for what it was: a continuation of her life's work of intense self-interrogation and reflection.”
In a speech she gave in 1980 on the occasion of receiving the Georg Büchner Prize (later published in a book of essays called The Author’s Dimension), Wolf indicted Western culture for its devaluing of women as sources of knowledge and insight, its idolatry of scientific thinking, its inner emptiness. And she raised the question of the fate of literature, and of language itself, in a highly technologized world which increasingly seems bent on its own destruction. “Shall it then, the language of literature, fail us?” she asked. Her answer to this question comes in the following passage, and hinges upon the taking up a “simple, quiet word” – verkehrt (upside-down, reversed). These words, I believe, ring truer than ever today.
“The condition of the world is reversed, we say tentatively, and notice: it is true. We can stand behind this sentence. The word is not beautiful, only right, and it is thus a rest for our ears, which have been torn by the clamor of great words, a little relief too for our conscience, disturbed by too many false, falsely-used words. Could it perhaps be the first word of another accurate language which we have in our ears but not yet on our tongues? Perhaps from it could develop. . .a chain of other equally accurate words which would express not only a negative of the old but an other, timely sense of values. . . So that we can again speak to one another, and tell each other stories, without having to be ashamed.”*
*From an unpublished translation by Myra Love. I prefer it to Jan van Heurck’s in part because of the resonance of “reversed” with Mary Daly’s notion of “reversal.” Other translations are by the translators cited below.
References
Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T. Tr. Christopher Middleton (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1972)
Christa Wolf, The Reader and the Writer: Essays, Sketches, Memories. Tr. Joan Becker (New York: International Publishers, 1977)
Christa Wolf, A Model Childhood. Tr. Ursule Molinaro and Hedwig Rappolt (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980)
Christa Wolf, The Author’s Dimension: Selected Essays. Tr. Jan van Heurck.(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983)
Christa Wolf, Cassandra: A Novel and four Essays. Tr. Jan van Heurck (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984)
The Fourth Dimension: Interviews with Christa Wolf. Tr. Hilary Pilkington (New York: Verso, 1988)
Christa Wolf, Accident: A Day’s News. Tr. Heike Schwarzbauer and Rick Takvorian (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989)
Christa Wolf, What Remains and Other Stories. Tr. Heike Schwarzbauer and Rick Takvorian (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993)
Christa Wolf, Medea, a Modern Retelling. Tr. John Cullen (New York: Doubleday, 1998)
Christa Wolf, In the Flesh. Tr. John S. Barrett (Boston: David R. Godine, 2005)
Christa Wolf, originally of the GDR, died on December 1, 2011, in Berlin, at the age of 82. I happened on the news on Facebook sometime in late January of this year. For days, I reeled from the shock, not just the shock of her death but the shock of my not having known about her death for over six weeks. Wolf is a writer whose words I have lived by, more or less consciously, for almost thirty years. No other living writer did as much to shape my literary consciousness and political imagination. The only book I possess that’s as beat-up as my copy of To the Lighthouse is her novel The Quest for Christa T. The Reader and the Writer is a close second. Passages from her novels and essays still visit me on a weekly basis. Not only that, she used to make regular appearances in my dreams. How could she have passed from this world without my having a clue?? This despite the fact that I regularly, sometimes for an hour or two at a stretch, immerse myself in the information-drenched world of cyberspace. (Now that I know of her death, I’ve been drowning in blogs, commentaries, obituaries, interviews). How did this vital piece of information fall through the net?
I subscribe to U.S. and Canada-based feminist listserves, where deaths of literary figures in the U.S. and Canada are fairly well covered—though occasionally there are cracks here as well. But what of writers on another continent? I’m talking about women writers of course and most particularly feminist writers. Thirty, twenty, maybe even ten years ago a women’s magazine or newspaper would have brought me news of an important death (at its best, the feminist press knew no borders). Or if not that, a friend who had read it in one of those papers. There were gatherings then, often centered around books; if I hadn’t already found out from a newspaper or a friend it would certainly have come up at one of them.
I don’t know how we’re all supposed to keep track of these deaths, today, the deaths of the feminist writers whose imaginations have rocked our worlds. No doubt there are fans of the great visionary Quebec writer Louky Bersianik in Europe, Australia, even in the U.S., who have no idea that she died also in December, two days after Wolf in fact, at the age of 81. Beyond keeping track of these deaths, how are we supposed to mourn them, dispersed as we all are?
I decided to take matters into my own hand. I wanted to gather a bunch of women together and tell them why this loss felt so huge to me, what it was about Wolf as writer, thinker, and human being that felt so vitally important. Since I don’t have a blog, I decided to create a “gathering” by going through my address book. I sent a shorter version of the tribute that follows (Part II) out to everyone I thought might be interested. As it turned out, many were. What follows are excerpts from some of the responses. Not quite the same as gathering at a campfire or a crossroads, as one of these writers comments, but “perhaps the next best thing.”
She is one of the greats. Men get to be great while alive; women have to be dead for between 30 and 50 years (often way longer). I recall when Monique Wittig died. One of the Bee Gees died that day too and there were obits everywhere. I too can't tell you how important Wolf is. Her A Model Childhood rocketed me into the stratosphere. Cassandra, Medea, Christa T. and all the others including her essays. I can't get enough of her.
I didn’t know until this moment. How could this have happened? Accident is one of the most important books I know. I reference it in a class or conversation as often as any other. Everyday, I think about Fukushima. About the radioactive seals suffering in the arctic sea. About Chernobyl. And so I have thought of Christa Wolf every day. And then there is the terrifying and brilliant In the Flesh. I wrote to Wolf about five years ago when she was in Los Angeles hoping we could have a glass of wine or a cup of coffee. It was at the time when everyone was finding a way to condemn her for her past history without any willingness to understand what it is to live and write under fascism. Without any sense of what we are betraying every day. . . Now I must read everything immediately and I feel as I have betrayed her by not reading everything while she was alive. As if we would have had that conversation if I had. . .
I felt similarly years ago when I stumbled across the knowledge that June Jordan had been dead for several months. We are bombarded with the day-to-day nonsense of so-called celebrities; however, we have to search for information on women writers and artists whose works go more deeply than sound bites.
I did not know that Christa Wolf had died . . .What I wonder are we to do when it seems as if women are disappearing into either obscurity or have become female robots once again.
In the age of communication some of what we used to rely on in the stream of feminist knowledge is no longer flowing.
Despite being a news junkie, I had not heard this either. Our history is still more invisible than we’d like to believe.
There are (at least) two things to be grieved here: the loss of another one of our visionaries, and the lack of ritual that has pervaded our experience of embodied life-narrative since cyberworld. There are reasons why people gather at campfires and crossroads to be in the presence of each other for these occasions. Perhaps what you did is the next best thing, yet still not the same.
I read Cassandra during the final two weeks of training (my athlete) for the Olympic Games in 2004 at the camp in Rethimno, Crete. My own path since then has taken me away from the enlightenment I experienced in those summer days spent mostly alone with Cassandra in the warm Sahara winds and sometimes turbulent surf that lapped the beaches of antiquity. My book is heavily highlighted and I just opened to this: "She was able to position herself outside her own people to such an extent that she could ‘see’ their disastrous fate." What a scary, lonely place to be. How comforting Wolf's disturbing words must be for you...and were for me as I played in the ancient Games that were forbidden to Sappho. "...the expressions of the losers who do not give up, who know: they will lose again and again, and again and again will not give up, and that is no accident, no mistake or mishap, but is meant to be that way."
It was Cassandra that sent me off to a cognitive understanding of fear. . . that fear is ambivalence, the pull from two opposite directions at once. . . Then of course, there was the general identification – and the learning about timing, about when to get out of the burning building oneself. Funny, that was back when there was such a place as "out"—or seemed to be.
Didn't know, don't do Facebook etc. & where online would such info appear, Ms?? We'll see; not so far, to my knowledge; I get MsBlog. . . .I found Christa Wolf late (as with everything else), Medea read first; I think her Great. So now I will pursue this sad news online; not sad really, she did live 8 decades & her written body will last –that is, if feminism does! And/or serious writers. . . . TheBig Erasure, (the BigSleep of women's history) where is the female Raymond Chandler to write it. Well, living history: before our eyes it happens.
In 1990, just after the Wall had fallen, I toured Germany with my German version of Gertrude Stein in Words and Pictures. One night I read in West Berlin, the next in the freshly opened East Berlin. The contrast could not have been more striking. Whereas Stein’s language, her play with words and concepts, her whole fun and pun, were easily and fully understood by Berliners in the West, the audience at the Penzlauer Berg literary café seemed deeply puzzled. There was a sense of paralysis in the room, of fear because of a lack of a cultural context for Stein’s writing, without which you can’t tell what is humor, what is irony and what is not. There was only one person in the packed room who was able to break into laughter at Stein’s wit: it was Christa Wolf. The only person there, I imagine, who had been allowed to leave the confines of the East German dictatorial state and therefore had been able to cross the steep cultural divide between Paris and East Berlin.
Part II. A (very partial) Tribute
“Literature today must be peace research,” Christa Wolf pronounced in her Büchner Prize speech. More than any other writer I know, she showed me what it is to be a writer of conscience.
For Wolf, prose was an instrument of conscience and self-knowledge, a means of stirring up the hardened deposits of history, of laying bare lies and buried truths. She was a master diagnostician of the darkness of the twentieth century. “The main aim of my work in recent years has been the question of what it is that has brought our civilization to the brink of self-destruction” she once said in an interview. She understood that that self-destructiveness had its roots in dissociation: “How one could be there and not be there at the same time, the ghastly secret of human beings in this century,” she wrote in A Model Childhood, a novel in which she tried to comes to terms with a Nazi childhood. And later: “Sin in our time consists of not wanting to know the truth about oneself.” Countering that dissociation, which Wolf saw at work everywhere, was one of her self-appointed tasks as a writer. The words spoken by Christa T. in her early and best-known novel The Quest for Christa T. could just as easily have come from her: “We must know what has happened to us . . .One must know what happens to oneself.”
In Accident: A Day’s News (Storfall), set in the East German countryside three days after the explosion at Chernobyl, Wolf confronted the specter of ecological disaster. A woman is attempting to go about her daily routine, but the simplest pleasures—milk, salad, eggs— are now laced with fear. She thinks of the mothers who “sit down by the radio and attempt to learn the new words. Becquerel. . . Half-life is what the mothers learn today. Iodine 131. Cesium. Explanations by other scientists who contradict what the first ones say; who are furious and helpless. . .” (“Hope begins,” Wolf once said in an interview, “when one faces reality, when one simply sees what is.”)
As an East German writer, Wolf took social engagement as matter of course. “I can’t abstract myself from [society],” she once said in an interview. “It is this sense of always being touched by what touches society, although it sometimes drives me to despair, that is the source, amongst other things, of my creative drive.” At a time when, Occupy Wall Street notwithstanding, unfettered capitalism seems to be the model towards which all societies are leaning, it is bracing to read a writer for whom an alternative existed. “We East Germans had a vision, a utopia,” she once wrote, and even after reckoning with the abuses of the regime she continued to cling to that vision. Beginning with the collection of essays The Reader and the Writer, published in 1968, Wolf would develop a body of writing about writing marked by a steadfast refusal of alienation and a fervent wish that literature be effective, be useful, that it might help to bring about a more livable world, “help ensure that the things of this earth endure.” Hers was, as she put it, an “aesthetics of resistance.”
In the 1980s, Wolf’s social critique, along with her poetics, took a feminist turn. In the process of researching the figure of Cassandra for her novel of that name that appeared in 1983, she began to study archaeology and ancient matriarchal cultures. Travelling to Crete, she was outraged to discover that women were the original seers, prophets and poets, that their powers had been usurped by the priests of Apollo who took over the temple at Delphi, that women were subsequently either excluded or turned into objects. She began to consider the implications of the fact that for two thousand years women were barred from any significant role in shaping culture. “Does it seem misguided. . .to believe,” she wrote, “that if women had helped to think `thought’ over the last two thousand years, the life of thought would be different today?”
Wolf’s Cassandra is a feminist parable. Even as her Cassandra, originally loyal to her father King Priam and her country (Troy), comes to understand that the Trojan war, far from being an aberration, is deeply symptomatic of patriarchal consciousness, and that “we have no chance against a time that needs heroes,” she begins to feel a deep kinship with women from other layers of society. Wolf’s own feminist awakening is traced in her Frankfurt lectures, which later appeared as essays accompanying Cassandra. In terms of narrative, she writes in these essays, the necrophilia of patriarchal cultures is to be seen in the “strictly one-track-minded approach—the extraction of a single ‘skein’. . . a blood-red thread extracted from the fabric of human life, the narrative of the struggle and victory of the heroes, or their doom.” To these one-track stories Wolf suggests that we oppose something she calls “the living word”: “This word would no longer produce stories of heroes, or of antiheroes, either. Instead, it would be inconspicuous and would seek to name the inconspicuous, the precious everyday, the concrete. . .Perhaps it would greet with a smile the wrath of Achilles, the conflict of Hamlet, the false alternatives of Faust.”
“In the age of universal memory loss,” Wolf wrote in A Model Childhood, “we must realize that complete presence of mind can be achieved only when based on a clear past.” One of her main projects as a writer was to remove blinders, her own and others’, to make herself and the reader aware of blind spots, to see clearly. The relentless questioning that characterized her narrative voice was often directed at herself (the authorial “I” and the narrative “I” often appeared to be identical); she seemed always ready to expose her own failings, to open up even her rawest wounds for closer inspection. In the aftermath of the response to What Remains (Was Bleibt), a novella about a day in the life of a GDR writer whose every move is monitored by state secret police agents, she would try to come to terms with the fact that for three years, as a young woman, she herself worked for the Stasi. West German critics, who had already attacked Wolf for waiting till after reunification to publish the novella, pounced at this news. Never mind that she was an informal collaborator, provided no incriminating information, and claimed to have repressed the episode (entirely believable in light of the focus on dissociation in her previous work). Her reputation was forever tarnished. As Kate Webb recently wrote in The Guardian, “Her refusal to simply exonerate herself was read as a sign of guilt, rather than for what it was: a continuation of her life's work of intense self-interrogation and reflection.”
In a speech she gave in 1980 on the occasion of receiving the Georg Büchner Prize (later published in a book of essays called The Author’s Dimension), Wolf indicted Western culture for its devaluing of women as sources of knowledge and insight, its idolatry of scientific thinking, its inner emptiness. And she raised the question of the fate of literature, and of language itself, in a highly technologized world which increasingly seems bent on its own destruction. “Shall it then, the language of literature, fail us?” she asked. Her answer to this question comes in the following passage, and hinges upon the taking up a “simple, quiet word” – verkehrt (upside-down, reversed). These words, I believe, ring truer than ever today.
“The condition of the world is reversed, we say tentatively, and notice: it is true. We can stand behind this sentence. The word is not beautiful, only right, and it is thus a rest for our ears, which have been torn by the clamor of great words, a little relief too for our conscience, disturbed by too many false, falsely-used words. Could it perhaps be the first word of another accurate language which we have in our ears but not yet on our tongues? Perhaps from it could develop. . .a chain of other equally accurate words which would express not only a negative of the old but an other, timely sense of values. . . So that we can again speak to one another, and tell each other stories, without having to be ashamed.”*
*From an unpublished translation by Myra Love. I prefer it to Jan van Heurck’s in part because of the resonance of “reversed” with Mary Daly’s notion of “reversal.” Other translations are by the translators cited below.
References
Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T. Tr. Christopher Middleton (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1972)
Christa Wolf, The Reader and the Writer: Essays, Sketches, Memories. Tr. Joan Becker (New York: International Publishers, 1977)
Christa Wolf, A Model Childhood. Tr. Ursule Molinaro and Hedwig Rappolt (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980)
Christa Wolf, The Author’s Dimension: Selected Essays. Tr. Jan van Heurck.(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983)
Christa Wolf, Cassandra: A Novel and four Essays. Tr. Jan van Heurck (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984)
The Fourth Dimension: Interviews with Christa Wolf. Tr. Hilary Pilkington (New York: Verso, 1988)
Christa Wolf, Accident: A Day’s News. Tr. Heike Schwarzbauer and Rick Takvorian (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989)
Christa Wolf, What Remains and Other Stories. Tr. Heike Schwarzbauer and Rick Takvorian (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993)
Christa Wolf, Medea, a Modern Retelling. Tr. John Cullen (New York: Doubleday, 1998)
Christa Wolf, In the Flesh. Tr. John S. Barrett (Boston: David R. Godine, 2005)
About the author
Lise Weil was founder and editor of the print journal Trivia: A Journal of Ideas (1982-1991) and editor of its online relaunch Trivia: Voices of Feminism from 2005-2011. She is thrilled beyond words to be part of this beautiful reincarnation that almost wasn’t. Lise lives in Montreal and teaches in Goddard College’s low-residency IMA program. Her collection of Mary Meigs’ writings on aging, Beyond Recall, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in biography. Her translation of Verena Stefan’s “Doe a Deer” was included in Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction of 2011. She is currently completing a memoir, In Search of Pure Lust.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.