Christa Wolf

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Medea

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SOURCE: A review of Medea, in World Literature Today, Vol. 71, No. 1, Winter, 1997, pp. 142–43.

[In the following review, Grawe discusses Wolf's damaged literary reputation following Was bleibt and her implicit self-defense in Medea.]

Christa Wolf, formerly everybody's darling in both East and West Germany and a moral as well as a literary authority, was in an excellent position to play an important conciliatory role after the Wendé. Sadly, she failed to do this. In 1990 she published her ill-fated story Was bleibt (see WLT 65:1, p. 111) in which, many critics felt, she had seized upon the first opportunity to portray herself as a Stasi (East German security service) victim. Suddenly Wolf was very controversial indeed. She withdrew from the battleground, accepting an invitation from the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she compared herself with the Jews driven into exile by the Nazis, a comment which gave rise to bewilderment rather than understanding. When she confessed soon after that she had briefly been involved with the Stasi herself in the late fifties and early sixties, she countered the public attacks by publishing her complete and rather innocuous IM Stasi file (1993). Next she published a volume of topical essays, speeches, and letters (Auf dem Weg nach Tabou, 1995; see WLT 69:3, p. 579) in order to give an insight into her current thinking and feeling. But would she be able to rescue her literary career? Critics and fans alike, I am sure, were eagerly awaiting her first piece of fiction since 1990. In my view, Wolf has written an absorbing and challenging book in her usual somewhat elegiac tone. In a manner reminiscent of Thomas Mann's Joseph tetralogy, which appeared during the Nazi period, she has responded to the provocations of the present by retreating into the distant mythical past, without, however, losing sight of her own time and predicament.

In Medea: Stimmen Wolf presents a new, personal, feminist, and stirring interpretation of the Greek mythological figure of Medea, who lives on as the sorceress who slaughtered her own children in her adopted homeland of Corinth in order to take revenge on her unfaithful husband Jason, he of Golden Fleece fame. The book consists of eleven monologues by six characters, with Medea's own voice as the most persistent one (chapters 1, 4, 8, and 11). Though reflective in mood and monotonous in tone, these monologues by, among others, Jason and his new bride Glauke capture Medea's person, feelings, and fate from both sympathetic and hostile perspectives and draw the reader into the events which they narrate in jigsaw-puzzle fashion: Medea's dangerous discovery that Corinth is founded on a crime; the false accusation that she killed her brother in Colchis: her victimization after the ritualistic castration of a young Corinthian by a group of women from Colchis; and her expulsion from Corinth after her two sons have been murdered not by her but by Corinthian agents. The reader last sees her wandering into exile, a defeated, lonely, distraught figure.

Medea thus is a book without hope, a book about the loss of friends, home, and magic powers, a book about alienation from two worlds. The title question of Wolf's earlier story Was bleibt has turned into Medea's desperate, personal question “Was bleibt mir” on the final page of this her latest work. The answer: nothing but curses for her enemies and an overwhelming sense of loneliness in a world in which she does not belong. Medea is a very personal work in that it reflects how Wolf perceives her recent treatment in Germany. Accordingly, one is tempted to interpret some of Medea's enemies as real-life characters: the former female disciple and friend who became her bitter enemy, or the man from Colchis who became the master of ceremonies in Corinth. Still, although one feels for Medea and the author, one cannot help observing that, once again, Wolf has reconstructed a person guilty of misdeeds or mistakes or misperceptions as a victim.

Medea goes beyond the personal, however. It is a study of the defamation and victimization of a person perceived as a public danger. It is also a study of two worlds, which can be easily identified as East and West Germany: Medea's old homeland of Colchis, primitive but humane and with equality for its citizens, misgoverned and thus doomed; and Corinth, her new homeland, rich and splendid but treacherous and utterly materialistic, and, above all, a paternalistic society contemptuous of women with a public image and role. Wolf obviously sees her plight as the machinations of male chauvinism; will this create new enemies for her?

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