Reckoning with the Past
It is no coincidence that the contemporary German novelists most readily associated with the theme of war-guilt are all from West Germany….
The literature of East Germany [has focused] … overwhelmingly on the present and future, the building-up of socialism and the bright hope it represents….
It is against this background that the measure of Christa Wolf's achievement in her new work, Kindheitsmuster, must be judged. "What is past is not dead", she begins provocatively, "It is not even past. We separate ourselves from it and pretend to be strangers." The past that she then proceeds to evoke is her own, those years from 1932 to 1946 when, between the ages of three and seventeen, the "patterns of childhood" to which the title refers were formed….
[The narrative of the fictional-autobiographical family], however, occupies barely half of the book, for parallel with it runs an account of a two-day visit in July 1971, by Christa Wolf, her husband, her brother, and Lenka, her fourteen-year-old daughter, back to Landsberg, which now lies in Poland and is called Gorzów Wielkopolski. But this is no sentimental journey: it is a reckoning with a past that still haunts and, with the presence of Lenka, an attempt to explain to a contemporary teenager how these things could have happened. The confrontation of two epochs in the form of mother and daughter is one of the book's greatest strengths. Not only does it demonstrate the organic and emotional ties that link past and present, but it also shows the delusion of putting a neat full-stop after 1945 in the fond hope that the blame and all the emotional repercussions could be channelled conveniently westwards. Kindheitsmuster is a plea to remember and learn from the past and at the same time an appeal for vigilance and sensitivity in the present.
But there is more, for on top of this dual perspective we are also given a detailed and soul-searching account of the actual process of writing, with interwoven reflections on the problems of narrative form….
Thus we have a running commentary on the genesis and progress of the book, with disquisitions on the technical problems and the writer's own misgivings before the task she has set herself. All very interesting, painstakingly honest even, but it becomes a little wearisome that the reader should constantly have his own judgment preempted and that Christa Wolf should seek so persistently to undermine her own achievement. Her writing is sufficiently powerful to be allowed to speak for itself, and although a certain amount of formal scaffolding can be illuminating, here it sometimes runs the risk of obscuring the edifice within.
However, the continual shifting between levels of narration is in fact handled very smoothly, and, despite its excess baggage, Kindheitsmuster … never completely loses its momentum. It is a courageous book that breaks taboos and, as we have come to expect from Christa Wolf, it is infused with an integrity and a deep moral concern that raise it far above the narrow and selfconscious partisanship of much GDR literature. It speaks equally to East and West Germany—itself a daring accomplishment for an East German author—but also, with its atmospheric depiction of a fateful era and its patent and compelling truthfulness, to wider audiences beyond.
Peter Graves, "Reckoning with the Past," in The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1978; reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission), No. 3966, April 7, 1978, p. 396.
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