The Alienation of ‘I’: Christa Wolf and Militarism
[In the following essay, Marks discusses the conflicted and oppressive social environment of Wolf's youth in Nazi Germany and examines its literary expression in A Model Childhood and Cassandra.]
In 1938, witnessing the rise of Fascism and the threat of a second world war, Virginia Woolf wrote Three Guineas to answer the question, “How in your opinion are we to prevent war?” (3). War, Woolf argues, is only a symptom of the competitive, dominating drive fundamental to patriarchal society; it is the rivalry inherent in business, law courts and church hierarchies taken to an extreme and openly violent degree (18–20, 64, 91). Preventing war would seem, then, to require a basic restructuring of society—a difficult task, Woolf feels, especially for women, who are denied any direct political clout. The most reasonable option, she decides, may be to adopt an attitude of “indifference.” By this, Woolf means refusing to participate in or even acknowledge any form of competition, patriotism or militarism, and saying instead, “as a woman, I have no country. … As a woman my country is the whole world.” Such women, declaring themselves a “Society of Outsiders,” would not gratify nationalist vanity with either praise or scorn, but would “shut the bright eyes that rain influence, or let those eyes look elsewhere” when asked to cheer their men on to war (109).
Decades later—after World War II had indeed occurred—East-German writer Christa Wolf also confronted the problem of women's response to war, focusing, like her predecessor, on how an individual can resist the conforming pressures of a militaristic society. Christa Wolf was a young girl in Germany at the height of Hitler's power; throughout her childhood, she was a willing and enthusiastic follower of the Third Reich, not flagging in devotion until well after Hitler had lost the war. After the fall of Fascism, however, as she entered university in what had become East Germany, she was struck by the work of Karl Marx and became a committed socialist, feminist and opponent of militarism and of the nuclear arms race.
In her writing, Wolf confronts the political and social forces that shaped her in these two very different molds. In her 1976 fictionalized autobiography A Model Childhood, Wolf considers this issue most directly; although she presents the story of her childhood in the third person, as an account of a girl she calls “Nelly,” Wolf is clearly depicting the psychological basis of her own youthful devotion to Nazism. In her 1983 novel Cassandra, she explores the nature of militarism from a much longer historical perspective, retelling the classical myth of the Trojan War from the horrified viewpoint of a female narrator, the prophetess Cassandra. What emerges in both of these works is a question even more complicated than the one posed by Virginia Woolf: how can people, in practical terms, survive in and resist the pressures of a warlike society without suffering violent persecution, without experiencing a debilitating alienation from their social group, or without becoming agents of violence themselves?
Certainly in the Germany of the 1930s and '40s, as A Model Childhood reminds us, the indifference to nationalism encouraged by Virginia Woolf was punishable as crime. Even in Nelly's small hometown, a Nazi official systematically enforces participation by every citizen, threatening those who fail to display the swastika flag or are seen to smile at a Jewish doctor in the square. Nelly's parents, Charlotte and Bruno Jordan, each receive ominous visits from government officials—Charlotte for remarking to a woman friend in 1944 that Germany is losing the war, and Bruno for, according to rumor, giving credit to Communists in his little shop and for being under-zealous in observing the Hitler salute (165, 41). In a fully militarized state, in which demands for compliance are backed up with the threat of arrest and violent reprisal, it is not “shut eyes” but “shaking knees” that characterize those inclined to dissent.
Although Bruno Jordan's “thinking was socialist in tendency,” and although, after his experience of being buried alive at the battle of Verdun, he thinks “war means nothing but one big pile of shit,” when he is asked to join the Nazi storm troops—which in any event “could not have been refused without consequences”—he concedes with a kind of relief (37, 32, 42). As much as he would like to abstain from the military order in the way Virginia Woolf advocated, the social pressure to conform is too strong, and the price of dissent is, for him, simply too high. Wolf calls his relief at giving in to these pressures “the bliss of conformity (it wasn't everybody's thing to be an outsider, and when Bruno Jordan had to choose between a vague discomfort in the stomach and the multi-thousand voice roar coming over the radio, he opted, as a social being, for the thousands and against himself …)” (42–43).
Charlotte and Bruno Jordan are pressured into compliance with a regime which seems unnatural to them, but in the case of Nelly we have an example of the way a child growing up in a militarized state can be socialized from the start into conformity with its values. Wolf describes Nelly in school, hearing her adored teacher tell his class, “A German girl must be able to hate” (128), and tells of Nelly singing “innocently” with her classmates “Jew-heads are rolling all across the street. / Blood, blood, blooood, / blood must be flowing thick as thick can be” (136). Nazi Germany is an extreme case—Virginia Woolf herself identifies it as the ultimate example of the drive for violent domination (Three Guineas 142, 167)—but it nonetheless makes evident a difficulty in the desire to move “outside” a violent social order; that violent social order may be so rigorously engrained in individuals that they may take it with them wherever they try to go.
Especially for someone like Nelly, the classic “good little girl” who craves approval from her elders, her teachers and anyone in authority, conformity to the prescribed system of behavior becomes a way to garner praise. Obedience then becomes the cornerstone of self-esteem. Nelly feels humiliated when her teacher scolds her because her weak right arm cannot sustain the Hitler salute through all the verses of “Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles,” and she obsessively exercises her arm to overcome the weakness and recover her sense of self-worth (99).
Submission to Nazi ideology gives Nelly not just a sense of self-esteem, but also a visceral, almost sexual, satisfaction. We see her as a young girl awaiting a visit to her town by Hitler and feeling that “The Führer was a sweet pressure in the stomach area and a sweet lump in the throat” (45), and listening to a radio broadcast of Hitler's taking of Vienna “which moved Nelly's inner depths in a way no force of nature had ever moved her before; she was trembling, and her father's brown writing desk bore the sweat marks of her sopping-wet hands” (164). Even as Germany is losing the war, she refuses to betray her loyalty to Hitler, writing in her diary of “her decision to keep absolute, lasting faith in the Führer, even during hard times” (304). Her allegiance is voluntary, and complete.
In her novel Cassandra, Wolf presents another woman, this time a completely fictional one, whose identity is similarly based on pleasing those in power. Cassandra is especially concerned with pleasing her father, King Priam of Troy, and defines herself primarily as “the king's daughter.” When in the course of the Trojan War the populace of her once relatively gentle and humane home city begin to replicate the efficient, ruthless violence of their enemy the Greeks, she must, in order to preserve her identity, deny any private anxieties that may arise: “The king's daughter is not afraid, for fear is weakness, and weakness can be amended by iron discipline” (35).
An even more obvious parallel to Nelly in A Model Childhood might be Cassandra's weaker-willed sister Polyxena. Despite a conscious hatred of the military party gaining power in Troy, Polyxena finds some unconscious part of herself responding powerfully to Andron, one of the army's cruelest officers: “She dreamed that she was in a garbage pit and stretched her arms toward [Andron]. … [that] she had coupled in the most degrading way with [him] … whom she hated while she was awake. … something alien inside her was forcing her to burn with passion” (96–97).
As Cassandra decides, regarding Polyxena with revulsion, “many were prepared to be victims, not only from the outside, but through something in themselves” (97). To stand aloof from a system of brutality, as Virginia Woolf asks the ethical individual to do, can be profoundly lonely, whereas to join the group is instinctively pleasurable. The “bliss of conformity” can be more than just a release from fear of reprisal; it can be an animal satisfaction, even excitement, in submerging oneself in the energy of the mob, in submitting, self-degradingly, to a dominant, overwhelming force.
This surrender of the independent self is an explicit goal of totalitarian ideology. Wolf grew up in the years when Mein Kampf was a national bestseller, and Hitler was adamant on the relation of the individual to the state: “if we consider the question, what, in reality, are the state-forming or even state-preserving forces, we can sum them up under a single head: the ability and will of the individual to sacrifice himself for the totality. … [In the Aryan], the instinct of self-preservation has reached the noblest form, since he willingly subordinates his own ego to the life of the community and, if the hour demands, even sacrifices it” (151–52, 297). Survival of the individual self and survival of the state are, by Hitler's definition, mutually exclusive. Insisting on the primacy of the individual self is then quite literally an act of treason.
Failure to sacrifice oneself to the state is selfish, even criminal. Compliance, however, means taking part in brutality one might secretly find repugnant; it demands the suppression of pity or compassion, and a surrender of the right to an independent, emotional self. For Wolf, the pressure of this double bind creates a lasting self-estrangement. Years after the fall of Hitler, when Wolf, as a socialist deeply opposed to totalitarianism, writes of her childhood, her early training in self-denial in combination with her adult sense of guilt and shame at what she once was seems to require the use of a cautious and uncomfortable fiction. Wolf cannot talk about herself directly, but approaches her childhood memories as if they belong to someone else—the fictional construct Nelly. It may simply be too painful, or perhaps even more of a falsehood, for Wolf to speak of both her early and later selves with the use of a single, coherent “I.”
The ability to say “I,” comfortably and without internal division—or shame for betraying either the group or some private ethical impulse—the ability to conceive of oneself as an integrated, feeling being, capable of pleasure and of love and of independent moral choice, threatens the stability of the totalitarian state as Hitler defines it, and is therefore what the totalitarian state must seek to destroy. “Community interest comes before self-interest,” went the popular slogans in Christa Wolf's youth, “Germany must live, even if we have to die” (43, 54).
For Cassandra, Wolf makes this crisis of loyalty, self-versus-state, absolute. In order to claim the right to a personal “I” in opposition to her state, she must sacrifice everything else; since she is both the daughter of the king and Troy's high priestess, her government, her religion and her family are all one—rejecting any of it, she rejects everything, loses every anchor of social identity. In addition, given her highly visible position, as the new military party gains power in Troy, any protest on her part will result immediately in arrest and in probable execution. With this extreme pressure upon her, while Cassandra may condemn her sister's outright sexual submission to Andron, her own active resistance to the military order is long in coming. As the conflict with the Greeks escalates, and she sees Troy attempt to preserve itself by becoming increasingly militarized—demanding the kind of rigid discipline and will toward self-sacrifice required by Hitler's Germany—she does little to try and stop it.
When Cassandra discovers that Helen, the ostensible cause of the war, is not even in Troy—that actually Cassandra's brother Paris lost Helen to the King of Egypt on his way home, but would rather risk his city in “a war waged for a phantom” than confess this shame—Cassandra wants to proclaim the truth, but finds she cannot: “The Eumelos inside me forbade me. … I was the seeress, owned by the palace. … [It was for Eumelos's] sake, whom I hated, and for the sake of my father, whom I loved, that I had avoided screaming their state secret out loud” (69).
Cassandra's long inability to act on her feelings of moral outrage stems not only from a desire to protect her father and his government, but also from the desire to preserve her own sense of self. Condemning the Trojan government, as she knows full well, would mean the sacrifice of the identity she has always known—as the king's daughter, as seeress, as a citizen of Troy. “I have always granted myself these times of partial blindness,” she says in defense of her vacillation; “To become seeing all of a sudden—that would have destroyed me” (40).
For a considerable time, Cassandra continues to perform her duties as seeress—ritual sacrifices in which she no longer really believes—to convince her people that the gods will help them win the war (87). The preservation of her social identity, achieved through the suppression of her feelings of outrage, comes, however, only at the price of suppressing most other private feelings as well. There is, she gradually discovers, something more to her than her status as “the king's daughter,” something which is sacrificed by loyalty to the Trojan “we”; there is also an independent, emotional “I”: “Part of me—the gay, friendly, unconstrained part—stayed behind, outside the citadel. … Vacillating and fragile and amorphous was the ‘we’ I used. … It included my father, but did it any longer include me? … Each evening that part of me which was loyal to the King, obedient, obsessed with conformity, returned to the fortress with a heavy heart. … and consequently I was more and more out of touch with my ‘I’” (94).
The conflict between the two parts of her nature—one social, one private—is experienced by Cassandra as internal violence, as the violation of her inner self by alien forces. She imagines “a fight going on inside me. … Two adversaries had chosen the dead landscape of my soul as their battlefield and were engaged in a life-and-death struggle. Only madness stood between me and the intolerable pain” (60). While one might expect Cassandra to favor her internal “I” over the demands of the hated military party, the demands of her moral voice are equally responsible for her pain. The need to know and speak the truth about Troy is itself experienced not as a natural part of her consciousness, but as an “alien being who … had already eaten its way deep inside me; I could no longer get rid of it” (48). When Cassandra does at last, though far too late, cry out against what Troy has become, she says she does so only because “finally the dreadful torment took the form of a voice; forced its way out of me, through me, dismembering me as it went” (59).
What we might call the moral or ethical voice, the voice of dissent, is experienced by Cassandra as violently “alien.” This would seem to contradict the earlier use of the word, when Polyxena's desire for the repulsive Andron is considered an “alien” aberration from her true self. For Polyxena, it is alien to conform; for Cassandra, it is alien to dissent—but that contradiction is at the heart of the problem of identity. It may be impossible, Wolf seems to be suggesting, to separate out some “genuine,” “innate,” “moral” self from a self socialized to accept violence and the sacrifices demanded by a culture at war.
We have already seen how a child like Nelly can be taught to accept what many might call perverse acts—the adoration of Hitler, the hating of Jews—as normal and good; nothing “innate” in her serves to contradict her general acceptance of Nazi ideology. She never even gets as far as Wolf's mythical Cassandra; in A Model Childhood at least, Nelly never recants her identification with the military order. Nevertheless, though in ways far more subtle than Cassandra's moral rebellion against the military party, even Nelly experiences moments of “alienation” from the Nazi program. One day she reads in the SS newspaper of a eugenic practice called “The Wells of Life” in which “tall blond blue-eyed SS men” are mated with young Aryan women to produce “racially pure” children. Her response is ambiguous; like Cassandra regarding Polyxena, Nelly feels private moral revulsion, and simultaneous guilt for her revulsion:
after reading the article, Nelly sat with the paper across her knees, clearly thinking: No, not that.
It was one of those rare, precious, and inexplicable instances when Nelly found herself in conscious opposition to the required convictions she would have liked to share. As so often, it was a feeling of guilt that engraved the incident in her memory. How could she have known that bearing guilt, was, under the prevailing conditions, a necessary requirement for inner freedom?
(222–23)
It is not clear, unfortunately, that Nelly's opposition arises from some instinctive sense that this scientific manipulation of human life is wrong; instead, it may simply be that her training in Nazi ideology has clashed with a trace of competing training she absorbed from her parents’ old sexual value system—“her mother's warnings not to ‘throw herself away’” (223).
At the same time, while neither Nelly nor Cassandra, at least at first, reject their militaristic governments in the abstract, their resistance does increase the more those governments impinge on their intimate lives. For Cassandra, the impulse to resist is almost invariably triggered by the rupture of a private human relationship for the sake of the glory or preservation of the state: Paris's theft of another man's wife, not for love but to prove his prowess as “supreme among men” (58, 64); Agamemnon's sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia to get good winds for his warships (53); King Priam's willingness to sacrifice his children Paris and Polyxena (53, 108), and to have Cassandra, when her eventual protests become too loud, buried alive, and then traded to an ally in exchange for troops (127–28, 133); and everyone's willingness to send a young Trojan woman to the “brute” Achilles, the murderer of her lover, because her constant weeping is “undermining morale …” (80–81).
As might thus be expected, the issue of sexuality is particularly vexing. Because love and sexual pleasure are intensely private experience shared by pairs who hold each other as special, the desire for pleasure and for genuine emotional bonds between lovers—as opposed to the emotionless reproduction of more bodies for the state, “future national comrade[s]” as Hitler calls them (Mein Kampf 45)—can be seen as an impulse against the state. Even early on, before the war starts, Cassandra's complex reactions of inner revulsion and guilt are triggered by societal pressures to deny her own desires for love. When she is required by Trojan tradition to sit in the temple and allow any strange man who passes to deflower her, she feels disgust and “dreadful shame,” but feels duty-bound to master herself, to overcome her supposed weakness with inner discipline: “Close my eyes, I can't go on; but I could” (16). It would be wrong, shameful in another sense, to indulge her private self by refusing her duty. Thus, ironically, when the man who selects her turns out to be Aeneas, whom she actually loves and with whom we might expect her to enjoy sex, she finds it impossible to respond.
Their problem is two-fold—they cannot have sex because the enforced nature of the encounter would debase the genuine emotion of love, but also because love, which would allow them to enjoy it, would seem to disqualify the act as fulfillment of duty. The suppression of personal desire seems almost to be an integral goal of the ritual act. When they blame themselves for their “failure,” they are really blaming themselves for failing to overcome their feelings of love.
Significantly, in the lives of the cruelest agents of the military order, there is also a notable absence of love. Aeneas's father Anchises comments to Cassandra that Eumelos may be obsessed with gaining military power because no woman will marry him—“You [women] won't let him in. So he takes revenge, it's as simple as that. A bit of responsiveness from your lot and who knows, he might be cured” (91). Cassandra herself believes that the Greek King Agamemnon's sexual impotence is what accounts for “his exquisite cruelty in battle” (10). There seems to be some suggestion that the practice of war not only forces the rupture of intimate bonds, but may arise in the first place out of the failure to form them.
In A Model Childhood, the one “boyfriend” whom Nelly has is the repulsive Horst Binder, a boy so “infatuated” with the Führer that he dresses like him and schedules every hour of his day to do what Hitler would be doing at that time. Horst tells Nelly “with a pained look of renunciation” that their relationship can never be more than spiritual; instead, he spends his time with her talking of “the beautiful meaning of self-sacrifice to a higher endeavor.” Nelly, apparently wanting something more from romance, feels “guilt” for her selfish desires, and, wanting “to punish herself, suffered his company with even greater friendliness than before.” Later, she catches sight of Horst Binder having himself whipped with a switch by the town's “feared, brutish street-gang leader,” and the expression in his eyes (“it wasn't pain or fear or rage—something entirely different, something unknown to her”) makes her run away (205). Horst Binder never bothers her again, but after the war Nelly learns that, when their town was about to be overrun by allied forces, rather than surrender, the boy took a pistol and shot his parents to death in their bed, then killed himself.
Not only must healthy love for another person be suppressed for the sake of the state, but also self-love. In A Model Childhood, Nelly's most serious moment of rebellion comes when a girl in her Hitler Youth camp, Gerda Link, refuses to confess to an alleged minor theft. While the group sings, “And now the me is part of the great We, / becomes the great machine's subservient wheel,” a girl named Christel, who has “colorless hair,” publicly strips Gerda of her Jungmadel kerchief and knot (191). Nelly feels a strong sympathy for Gerda, which focuses, significantly, on Gerda's being “beautiful” with her “darkish skin … and long, dark hair” (192). Watching the blonde girls punish Gerda, Nelly is overwhelmed with anxiety and has to run away: “According to her own convictions, she should have felt disgust for Gerda Link instead of this spineless pity; she should have felt enthusiasm for the leader's straightforwardness, instead of, well, fear. … She admitted to herself, to her own bewilderment, that she didn't want to go on serving in the unit until kerchief and knot had been returned to Gerda Link” (193). Her refusal to return to the Jungmadel group is so strong that she half-fakes, half-induces in herself a bronchial ailment that excuses her for the entire winter.
According to Nazi ideology, “Race is the soul seen from without” (98), and fair hair is a sign of superiority. Since Nelly, like Wolf herself, has dark hair, finding Gerda Link beautiful is declaring an aspect of herself beautiful. It is a transgression against ideology, but also a re-affirmation of self. Of course, this stand can be sustained only temporarily; when, after Nelly's prolonged absence, the Jungmadel group nominates her for a leadership position, she capitulates, with the usual motives: “Recognition, and comparative security from fear and from overwhelming guilt feelings. … [and from] self-doubt.” In return, she gives “submission and strict performance of duty” (194).
The psychic cost of this kind of self-denial and of the dehumanizing pressure of war is not quite adequately accounted for by Virginia Woolf's call for indifference from her Society of Outsiders. To be fair to Woolf, in her post-World-World-I fiction, like Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, she clearly portrays how war brutalizes the emotional, private self. In Three Guineas, in her famous statement of feminist pacifism, however, written in the quiet period between the wars, Woolf is perhaps too hopeful about the power of the individual to withdraw from the influence of a wartime military order. For the women Christa Wolf writes about, such a withdrawal is simply impossible—the military state aggressively penetrates even the most intimate aspects of life.
In her influential 1979 essay “Women's Time,” French feminist theorist Julia Kristeva directly addresses the difficulties inherent in such a withdrawal. Discussing feminist impulses to form a “counter-society,” Kristeva decides that the primary impulse to withdraw comes not so much from a desire to prevent war in its global sense, but to escape, on a more individual level, from the “sacrificial and frustrating” pressure that a militaristic society exerts on its own citizens. What the vision of a counter-society promises is not just global peace but, on a more intimate level, a refuge which is “harmonious, without prohibitions, free and fulfilling” (202). Unfortunately, Kristeva warns, the very idea of a counter-society implies the same kind of us/them, good/evil, ally/enemy dichotomy which allows war in the first place. It may result in a dangerous tendency to place the blame for all suffering onto a hated, excluded group—in this case, onto men—and to “counter-invest” the suffering women have endured into some form of retaliatory violence (203).
In Christa Wolf's writing, we can see a clear illustration of how militarism destroys what Kristeva would call one's “affective life as a woman” (203). As Cassandra witnesses the increasing inhumanity of her own society—“the people I met seemed to me more and more alien”—she also loses her ability to enjoy being alive: “my limbs no longer moved of their own free will. … I had lost all desire to walk, breathe, sing. … The unloved duty inside me ate up all my joy” (99–100). The violence of Achilles against her people, especially when he murders twelve Trojan captives in one night, is also experienced as penetrating her insides and destroying her feeling self: “Achilles the brute occupied every inch of space outside and inside of us. … Twelve times the cry, that of an animal. … twelve times the red-hot iron burned out of us that place from which pain, love, life, dreams can come. The nameless softness that makes human beings human” (113); “I was, living, what Hector became dead: a chunk of raw meat. Insensible” (112).
This is real “indifference,” the total deadening of human feeling inside the individual; it is seen here not as a way to prevent war, but as one of the goals of war—to subsume every citizen into the war machine, to demoralize the enemy—and it is also war's greatest casualty.
Wolf plays out Kristeva's prediction in both A Model Childhood and Cassandra, as she describes her heroines, their feeling selves brutalized, turning their frustrated anger outward again in counter-violence. Although Nelly is powerless to turn her frustration against the system that “brutally ignores” her affective life, she releases it through the games she plays. In one favorite game, she fantasizes being a Princess whose servant, guilty of some nameless “horrible treachery,” is subjected to “punishments marked by exquisitely lengthy and torturous procedures” (121). In another, she builds a sand town for ladybugs in which they have to “prove their gratitude by strictly following the prescribed streets and paths.” When they stray, she buries them in “underground sand caves: prisons” and when they escape she says: “You're bad, wicked, disobedient. … violently and hastily she covers them with loose sand, again and again, as soon as they try to escape. I'll show you. Why should she cry, she's actually quite delighted” (162).
In a game with her brother Lutz, Nelly imagines that the dolls in their doll house are guilty of the vague crime of “Pretending.” Nelly and Lutz, appointing themselves thought-police, punish the dolls brutally:
Nelly and Lutz, who know what goes on in the culprit's minds, shake them up and call them by their real names: Spare Rib, Owl Claw, Bat Beast, Stink Puke, Cross-eyes, Mongoltop, and Dung Heap. There is weeping and gnashing of teeth. Their punishment is based on the principle that pretenders deserve to be misled. Their arms and legs are tightly bound with yarn, they're thrown into a corner, Stink Puke's head is pushed into the toilet. All food is removed from the house. Lutz, who controls the batteries, must cut off all the lights.
(105)
It is not difficult to see what Nelly is playing out in her games. On the one hand, she is identifying herself with those in power, as the Princess, the city builder, the moral avenger. On the other, growing up as she does with relentless demands for obedience and conformity, with pressure never to slip, never to think any selfish or unpatriotic thought, Nelly must also identify on some level with the treacherous servants, insects and dolls who are “guilty” of secret, subversive thoughts, of being insufficiently “grateful” for having their lives rigidly ordered, of having “real names” or real, hidden selves, grotesque selves who hate those who have power over them.
As Cassandra is led captive into Greece, she reports that her heart, bludgeoned out of its ability to feel, has turned instead into a kind of hard, metallic weapon: “my heart, which I had stopped feeling long ago, grew smaller, firmer, harder with each rest stop, as a smarting stone from which I could not wring another drop of moisture: then my resolution was formed, smelted, tempered, forged, and cast like a spear” (22). Her hatred of Achilles and her desire to do violence against him as he did violence against her people, becomes at times her whole existence: “If only nothing survived me but my hatred. If the hatred sprouted from my grave, a tree of hate that would whisper: ‘Achilles the brute’” (79); “If only he, Achilles, had died a thousand deaths. If only I could have been present at every one. Let the earth vomit out his ashes” (83).
Cassandra never acts on her hatred, but another group of women, the Amazons, led by the woman warrior Penthesilea, do—they are rumored to have actually “killed their own menfolk” (117). They have, as Kristeva would put it, made men “a scapegoat charged with the evil” of war. Penthesilea seems to believe that by stopping men, she can stop war, even if she must wage war to do it; she is willing to have “everything … come to a stop,” to destroy all human life if necessary, even her own, because “I don't know any other way to make the men stop” (118).
Instead of ending male violence, however, Penthesilea's attack on Achilles, which ends in her own murder and the rape of her dead body, only drives other women to further violence, to random, animalistic destruction. The women rage through the camps “like a monster”: “A procession leading nowhere on earth, leading to madness. … The companions of the corpse came to resemble human beings as little as she did. Not to speak of the howling. … Their knowledge was in their flesh which hurt unbearably—the howling!—in their hair, their fingernails, in the marrow of their bones” (121).
Panthous the Greek priest appears, and though he is innocent of Penthesilea's death, the women rip his body apart. In committing mass counter-violence, they have indeed become exactly the thing they claim to hate; instead of reclaiming their right to an “I,” they have revealed, as Cassandra laments, just how much they belong to the “we” of their supposed oppressors: “we are capable of rummaging through someone else's entrails and of cracking his skull … I say ‘we,’ and of all the ‘we's’ I eventually said, this is still the one that challenges me most. It is so much easier to say ‘Achilles the brute’ than to say this ‘we’” (119).
Kristeva supposes that the woman possessed by violence will turn it against some external, “excluded” evil element, but we have seen that such a we/they division—the “good” conforming self versus the “guilty” rebellious self—can occur within a single individual under pressure from the military state. Even to retain an individual body is lasting proof that such a woman has not surrendered absolutely to the totality, and when she strikes out in frustration, she may turn her violent feelings against herself. Nelly has “fits of depression” in which she compulsively rips her cuticles, alternately starves herself and binges on chocolates, and makes herself walk barefoot over the iron boot-scraper outside her front door (251). Cassandra likewise is shown to experience moments of perversely self-indulgent, almost voluptuous masochism. It is simultaneously alienating and liberating, intensely painful and also pleasurable: “I did not want to feed this body, I wanted this criminal body, where the voice of death had its seat, to starve, to wither away. Lunacy: an end to the torture of pretense. Oh, I enjoyed it dreadfully … I had gone back to being myself. But my self did not exist” (60).
Punishing her body, Cassandra punishes her failure to conform to Troy. At the same time, though, she is achieving a kind of freedom—if she destroys her body, no one can have control over her anymore. In a strange sense, by almost killing herself, she recovers if only for a moment her affective life—an element of “dreadful” pleasure.
Eventually, Cassandra decides that to retain her body, to continue to live, will force her to remain enslaved to a system that both denies her inner “I,” and pushes her toward participating in Achilles's brutal “we.” Offered a chance for escape and survival with Aeneas, she deliberately chooses capture and execution by the Greeks. Society as it is currently constructed, she has come to believe, will inevitably force the soft, human, private self into a rigid, dehumanized role—that of murderer, or at best, of statue-like “hero.” Her choice, effectively a suicide, is to her the only way to avoid “submission to a role contrary to my nature” (95).
This is, to say the least, a bleak conclusion: that the only way to have a free self is to die. There is, however, another faint hope held out, in Cassandra if not in A Model Childhood, another possible model for human existence. Throughout the war, small groups, both Trojan and Greek, have escaped briefly from the citadels and the war camps to gather in caves that line the Scamander river. These people, frustrated by war, have been inviting the disaffected: “Come to the mountains. The forest. The caves along the Scamander. Between killing and dying, there is a third alternative: living” (118).
The life they make for themselves there is admittedly idealized, but as an ideal at least it would seem to provide some sort of answer to both Virginia Woolf and Julia Kristeva. It imagines a way for those who oppose war to remove themselves from participation in it, as Woolf wishes to do, but does so without predicating their separatism on any vain hope of its stopping the war, or of ending war's power to destroy them. At the same time, it asserts that it is possible that such a society might function, not in the counter-violent way the Amazons choose, but as a haven which is indeed “harmonious, without prohibitions, free and fulfilling,” to use Kristeva's formulation, without having that harmony overrun, as Kristeva implies it must be, by the violent desire for revenge.
The society in the caves acknowledges, and satisfies, the individual's primal need to belong to a group, but creates a group that holds as sacred the individuality of each member, their bodies, and their feelings. The people in the caves prize talk, self-expression, touch, and the pleasure of belonging, not to a vast, impersonal totality, but to a web of intimate relationships: “we sang a lot. Talked a lot. … We used to tell each other our dreams; many of us were amazed at how much they revealed about us. … we spontaneously touched each other and got acquainted. … we concentrated on what mattered most: ourselves, playfully” (132–33).
The group is admittedly made up mostly of women, but not so by design; it exists as an alternative to the practices of killing and dying, but does not define itself in opposition to an “excluded element” of human beings. Men weary of war can come; Aeneas and his father Anchises come, Greeks can come, even Andron and Eumelos are welcome to come, though there is little hope of helping the two of them (93, 91).
The greatest drawback of this society is that, in a world dominated by war, it cannot last. “We knew we were lost,” says Cassandra, “We were fragile. Our time was limited”; but nevertheless: “it was not a question of how much time we had. Nor of whether we could convince the majority of Trojans, who of course remained in the dismal city. We did not see ourselves as an example. We were grateful that we were the ones granted the highest privilege there is: to slip a narrow strip of future into the grim present, which occupies all of time” (132–34).
The temporary nature of the society in the caves is both its practical weakness and its greatest ethical strength—it is not going to force itself down the throat of history, it will not battle others for dominion or glory, or even for basic survival. “Why hurt other people? Or disturb them,” asks Cassandra when she is brought to the caves. Saying that, “All of a sudden I noticed that my heart was in great pain. Tomorrow I would get up again with a reanimated heart that was no longer beyond the reach of pain” (124). The restoration of the ability to feel is what life in the caves allows, and it is possibly the greatest victory Cassandra can have over the immensity of war—to refuse to be made “indifferent,” to hold onto her affective life, even if all she can feel is pain.
Just before her death, Cassandra is asked by a Greek chariot driver a question much like that originally posed by Virginia Woolf: “if victory after victory means destruction in the end, then destruction is planted in our nature?” Cassandra can only answer, “I believe that we do not know our nature. That I do not know anything. So in the future there may be people who know how to turn their victory into life” (116).
Early on in Cassandra, Wolf writes, “War gives its people their shape … they were made and shattered by war” (13). Perhaps we cannot, as Virginia Woolf would like to do, avoid the shaping affect which militaristic society has on us. Nor does Christa Wolf have an easy answer for how to bring an end to violence. The best we can do, Wolf seems to suggest, is to maintain a constant, humane awareness of how deeply systems of violence can penetrate us and influence our own behavior; if we can accomplish this, we may be better able to resist the power of militarism to shatter our emotional selves, or to make us participate in the shattering of others.’
Works Cited
Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Boston: Houghton, 1971.
Kristeva, Julia. “Women's Time.” 1979. The Kristeva Reader. New York: Columbia, 1986. 187–213.
Wolf, Christa. Cassandra. 1983. Trans. Jan Van Heurck. New York: Farrar, 1984.
———. Fourth Dimension: Interviews with Christa Wolf. 1987. Trans. Hilary Pilkington. London: Verso, 1988.
———. A Model Childhood. Trans. Ursule Molinaro and Hedwig Rappolt. New York: Farrar, 1980.
Virginia Woolf. Three Guineas. New York: Harcourt, 1938.
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.