Christa Wolf

Start Free Trial

Reality Broken in Two

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

SOURCE: “Reality Broken in Two,” in Understanding Christa Wolf: Returning Home to a Foreign Land, University of South Carolina Press, 1997, pp. 54–68.

[In the following essay, Resch examines the narrative structure, fictive techniques, and themes surrounding the invention of memory and identity in The Quest for Christa T.]

Christa Wolf did not think that The Quest for Christa T. fit the literary genre of the novel. Therefore, she asked that the label “novel” not be printed on the book cover. This is the first sign of an act of courageous defiance—creating a book that challenged the most sacred tenets of socialism and violated the essential principles of socialist realism. To smooth the arduous path to publication and to placate the cultural functionaries who would determine the book's fate, Wolf introduced her work carefully. She held public readings, explicated excerpts, described her narrative techniques, and boldly bent the official literary and political position to her concepts. In “Interview with Myself” she expounded the need for change: “The absurd opinion that socialist literature cannot treat the fine nuances of emotions, the individual differences of characters; that it is reduced to create types moving in prescribed sociological tracks: this absurd opinion is not held by anyone any longer. The years when we laid the practical foundations for the self-realization of the individual, created a socialist economy, are gone” (The Author's Dimension, [hereafter cited as DI] 32).

Even in the novel itself Christa Wolf planted various statements to preempt criticism and advance her concepts. Early in the text the narrator issues a plea for more artistic freedom: “Just once, only this one time, I would like to be permitted to experience and to say how it really was, nothing exemplary, nothing useful” (The Quest for Christa T. [hereafter cited as CT] 49). Particularly clever was Wolf's selection of the book's epigraph, which articulates the nature of Christa T.'s quest: “Was ist das: Dieses Zu-sich-selber-Kommen des Menschen?” (What is that: this coming-to-one-self?) In other words: this finding oneself, this discovering the self, this process of self-realization. The extended quotation from poet Johannes R. Becher's diary entry of 1950 reads: “Because this deep unrest of the human soul is nothing else but the sense and the suspicion that the human being has not come to himself” (DI 32–33). Having served as minister of culture until his death in 1958, Becher was one of the most prominent proponents of socialist realism. Wolf realized her book's message violated the most sacred tenet of socialism: self-realization through conformity, through identification with socialist society. So enlisting the authority of Becher's own words to defend her book was a stroke of genius—and a great irony. It also epitomizes the political schizophrenia from which writers straying from bureaucratic criteria suffered.

Christa Wolf's steps to shield her new book from ideological objections were skillfully taken. Even though the manuscript was finished in 1967, it took one year before the authorities reluctantly allowed the publication of a small number of copies. That estimates of the press run of the first edition range from a mere five hundred to fifteen thousand indicates how controversial the book was then viewed. The SED functionaries decried the lack of evidence that the book conformed to the guidelines of socialist realism. They accorded Wolf “honest intentions” in observing “partiality,” but the way the story was told was deemed harmful to the socialist view of life. This official assessment did not change until after the Eighth SED Party Convention in 1971, when the secretary-general of the SED, Erich Honecker, proclaimed that in socialism “there could not be any taboos in the area of art and literature” and that writers should address the “entire spectrum and variety of life” with the “entire wealth of their signatures.” While this official position clashed flagrantly with established literary practice, it did relax the codes of socialist realism, and Wolf's book finally conquered all hurdles—a great tribute to its author's persistence and rhetorical skills.

As if to spite its difficult birth, The Quest for Christa T. was a remarkable literary event in both East and West Germany; it soon became recognized as a prominent entry in the world's literary canon. Not surprisingly: its theme—the attempt to realize one's individuality in a vast sea of enforced conformity—is of critical importance in any society.

As in “June Afternoon,” Wolf immediately articulates the essential elements of the novel (which the book is still called in the absence of an appropriate term). Translation does not represent properly the title, which in German is Nachdenken über Christa T. (The Quest for Christa T.). The novel begins: “Nachdenken, ihr nach-denken. Dem Versuch, man selbst zu sein” (to paraphrase: Thinking about Christa T. and the attempt to be oneself). Unfortunately, think does not convey the significance of the verb nachdenken, which means “going after, pursuing something or someone through thinking.” The narrator, a major character in the novel, will follow Christa T. through reflection. Nachdenken appropriates additionally the exercising of powers of judgment and conception. The process strives for becoming conscious of or reaching a conclusion about its object. It is a nonlinear activity that tends to meander and leap about. Thus, Nachdenken in Wolf's title leads us to expect an intimate, subjective narrative account that will reflect the complex and surprising patterns of contemplation. Furthermore, Wolf chose the infinitive form of the verb think, which is identical to the imperative: a strong signal for the reader to participate in the thinking process. Finally, Wolf's opening sentence uses the neutral pronoun oneself—which could refer to anyone—implying that the quest for Christa T. entails a search for her own self or that of the narrator and the reader. Probably no title in Wolf's oeuvre has richer connotations.

Christa T. is obviously the protagonist. The name indicates a real person whose anonymity is to be protected; otherwise, the author would have given her surname. Because the T. could stand for many names, the protagonist might be representative of a whole group of individuals who have something in common. Because the author has the same first name, we are led to expect autobiographical references, as is typical for Wolf's work. In less than ten words the basic elements of structure and content are laid out for a novel tremendously complex and rich in narrative devices, language, and subject matter.

Scholars have debated the crucial issue of whether the two characters, Christa T. and the narrator, are authentic or fictional. Did Christa T. actually exist? Could she possibly be Christa W., Wolf herself? Is the first-person narrator Christa Wolf? Or are they both inventions? The answer to these questions is both yes and no.

Christa T.'s life, as gleaned from the text, is hardly intriguing, except that it is conspicuously similar to Christa Wolf's. The bare biographical data scarcely make a story. She was born in 1927 in a small town east of the Oder River, the daughter of a teacher. She commutes to high school, where she meets the narrator. As a refugee, she settles in a village in Mecklenburg after the war, enrolls at the University of Leipzig in 1951, majoring in literature, and after graduation teaches school in Berlin. She has a couple of love affairs, marries a veterinarian named Justus in 1955, moves to the country and builds a house, has three children, tries to write prose and poetry, and dies of leukemia at age thirty-five.

Although Christa T. is outwardly an ordinary woman, the narrator is fascinated by her, from the very first day they meet in high school. They become friends, are separated by the war, and renew their friendship when they run into each other in a literature seminar at the university. They see each other regularly in Berlin, where Christa teaches school and the narrator lives with her family. The narrator visits Christa in her country house, and they spend holidays together at the beach. After Christa T.'s death the narrator is entrusted with her writings, which consist of diaries, letters, prose fragments, a few poems, plans for stories. This legacy and grief about her death motivate the narrator to write an account of Christa T. Significantly, each woman's life story has conspicuous parallels to Wolf's biography.

Wolf herself contributed gleefully to the controversy about the characters’ authenticity and identity. She did have an old friend, Christa Tabbert, who died in 1963. Her untimely death moved Wolf deeply and motivated the writing of this book: “A person close to me died, too early. I defy this death. I look for an effective mode of defiance. I write, I search. I find myself having to record this search, as honestly as possible, as precisely as possible” (DI 31). Before the prologue to the novel, however, “C. W.” assures us that “Christa T. is a literary figure. Authentic are some quotations from diaries, sketches, and letters. I did not feel responsible for adhering faithfully to external detail. Secondary characters and situations were invented. Real living persons and real events are similar only by chance.” The narrator, who functions as biographer and analyst of Christa T.'s life, as character in her story, and as reviewer of the writing process, also seems to be a literary figure. But in the “Interview with Myself” Wolf admits that, in the course of telling the story, manipulating the documents and adding her inventions “to do justice” to her image of Christa T., a curious thing happened: both Christa T. and the “I,” the narrator, changed. They changed identity from fictional character to the author herself. The implication that this text is nonfiction explains Wolf's refusal to call it a novel. This metamorphosis from protagonist to author is affirmed by another of Wolf's experiences associated with the writing process: “Later I noticed that the object of my story was not—or was no longer—unequivocally she, Christa T. Suddenly, I stood in front of myself, I had not expected that. The relationship between ‘us’—Christa T. and the first-person narrator—suddenly became the focal point” (DI 32). When the invented interviewer wants to elicit a definite answer to the question of whether Christa T. and the narrator are authentic characters, Wolf recoils: “Did I admit that? You would be right if both characters were invented, after all.”

Authentic or not, it appears that Christa Wolf externalized herself in both characters: their lives are her life. The issue of identity transfer is frequently built into the text, as we will see. It is demonstrated by the imprecise delineation of narrator and Christa T. They cannot always be clearly distinguished because the narrator tends to switch abruptly from the third-person she to the first-person I, as if the two were identical; often she uses we in the sense of the pluralis majestatis, the royal we, or the inclusive pronoun one, which could refer to either character. Christa T. in her writing often alludes to herself in the third person: “SHE with whom she consorted, whom she refused to name, because what kind of name should she have given HER? SHE who knows that she has to be new again and again … and will not let anyone infringe upon her right to live by her own laws.” The narrator understands the “secret of the third person, who is present without being tangible, and who, when circumstances are in her favor, can draw more reality than the first person: I. About the difficulty to say I” (CT 168). Christa T. uses “SHE” as a matter of caution, to distance herself: this SHE could be either Christa T. herself or someone else, someone she “can inspect thoroughly as is her habit with others” (CT 116). Likewise, Christa Wolf frames her self in both Christa T. and the narrator to create distance, to be able to inspect them thoroughly—that is, to inspect herself thoroughly. The death of Christa T. precipitates the birth of the narrator, and The Quest for Christa T. must ultimately be a quest for Christa Wolf.

Thinking about Christa T. is the author's and, by extension, the narrator's way of dealing with grief. But there is a more critical reason: “Let us not pretend we are doing this for her. Once and for all: she doesn't need us. Let us make certain, then: it is for us, because it seems we need her” (CT 10). Why do we need her? Christa T.'s life is not exemplary. There are no extraordinary achievements; in fact, she is a failed writer who is unable to finish a text; she is not heroic in the socialist sense of successful immersion in socialist society. Then why does the narrator present her to us? In preparation for this question she discovered to her surprise that she needed to tell the story of Christa T.'s success. Success can be many things—“fame, for instance, or the belated conviction that one must do this and nothing else” (CT 90)—which is another way of saying that one must be oneself. The story of Christa T., then, is the story of her attempt to find and be herself. We need her example, made vivid, palpable, and real, so that we can discover “the unending possibilities lying within us.”

Before examining aspects of Christa T.'s story, we should identify the other quest in the novel, no less important and described with equal passion and meticulousness. The narrator constantly searches for new means to tell the story in order to do justice to Christa T., and, while she practices various techniques, she considers their inherent problems and their effectiveness. “I find myself having to capture this search, as honestly as possible, as precisely as possible,” Wolf said in “Interview with Myself” (DI 31). The narrator's role of explicator of her craft warrants her role as a protagonist in the book; her role as Christa T.'s friend and, thus, as a player in the story is secondary.

The narrator uses many different methods of narrative structure and language to delineate character. She uses a host of authentic sources to inform herself about Christa T. and to enrich her picture through different perspectives. Although the most important is her own memory, “the color of memory is deceptive,” she warns in the prologue. Several times she admonishes herself and us to forget our memories, forget what we know, “in order not to cloud our view” (CT 139). The narrator's distrust of her own memory introduces powerful tensions in the novel. If one person's recollections cannot be trusted, other sources of information are needed to unearth the true Christa T. Thus, the narrator solicits the memories and opinions of her family, friends, and teachers. She peruses Christa's written legacy—her poetry, incomplete stories, notes, diaries, letters. In her narrative she uses Christa's work freely, indicating direct quotations in italics. Thus, the narrator lends an air of authenticity to the story, but Wolf herself leaves no doubt about the fictional dimension: “I treated the material efficaciously. I supplemented memory with invention. Faithful adherence to documents was not important to me” (DI 32). Unfortunately, says the narrator, corroborating Wolf's view, one cannot rely on facts or the accounts of witnesses or even on Christa's own legacy. They are tainted by too much uncertainty and hide more than they reveal. Therefore, invention is necessary, “on behalf of the truth” (CT 29). And so she builds upon what seems to be an assemblage of authentic material and factual accounts with materials made from her own imagination.

The narrator invents characters she does not know or who did not exist in order to bring to life an important event or feature of Christa T. The principal of Christa's school is such an invention. Christa called upon him to arbitrate a conflict between her and her students: what she considered unacceptable lies they believed to be justified by the rules of ordinal life—the classical friction between an idealist and realists. She gets little comfort from the principal. They have different views of the world. His generation is not her generation. He has discarded ideas she still holds dear: no compromises, the truth and nothing but the truth, act according to the way you think. But he understands her generation's desire for power and kindness, all at the same time, and she treasures his admonition: “What is brought into this world through us can never be pushed out again.” The narrator concludes: “Perhaps the man, her principal, was not like that, but he could have been.” In this episode the narrator even tampers with Christa T.'s identity: the person sitting in front of the principal could have been another person her age, one of many. In this way the narrator not only places the portrait of one person into the context of the time, specifically the 1950s, but she renders it a prototype of an entire generation of Germans—Wolf's own generation.

Christa T. herself liked to invent people to scrutinize her experiences and herself. One of these was a “general,” whose psychic gifts were well-known and whom she went to consult: “Invented him with the sincere intention to be precise, to be objective.” The narrator devotes an entire chapter to this séance, which, most likely, took place only in Christa T.'s mind. She concedes that Christa's account of the general and his predictions is fair, but it only contains Christa's perception, and, therefore, she takes the liberty of correcting Christa's version and reinventing the general, “being fair like everyone else” (CT 83). This episode—Christa T.'s self-analysis refurbished by the narrator—is designed to reveal in a nutshell the past, present, and future of the protagonist, but the life story extracted from Christa T.'s palm is suspiciously like Christa Wolf's: a job in a publishing house, insecurities at first, then assertiveness and success, fame in the field of literature, her character a rare mixture of “romantic-poetic” and “pedagogical-practical” qualities. Only the premonition of impending death seems to apply particularly to Christa T. No wonder, then, that Christa, or the narrator, ends the scene with the low-German expression “Ick glöw doar nich an” (I don't believe it) then adding in high German, “But it is strange.” It is doubly strange, because there is an interesting role reversal taking place here: the literary character, in her attempt to find herself, describes the author. A subtitle for Wolf's novel might take after Pirandello: “A literary character in search of an author in search of a literary character.”

The narrator continually frets that the net she casts is not sufficiently fine to capture Christa T. “Sentences she wrote—yes. Also paths she walked, a room in which she lived, a landscape that was dear to her, a house, a feeling even—but not her” (CT 117). Therefore, the narrator often presents two versions of one event, one seemingly factual, the other creative conjecture—one of Wolf's unique techniques to better capture reality. Both could have taken place; both are intended to expose as many components of the central experience as possible. Christa's encounter of the veterinarian Justus and her decision to marry him represents a great change in her life. Moreover, love is a complex feeling, “ein zusammengesetztes Gefühl,” as Wolf describes it: “a feeling put together from many separate pieces.” Two approaches to undo the puzzle of love are presented. One episode depicts a costume ball that ends in the couple's engagement. Christa attends as a literary character, Fräulein von Sternheim, created by the nineteenth-century writer Sophie la Roche. Like many other allusions to literature contained in the novel, this fictional character mediates a message. Von Sternheim's virtuous, sad life in the country suggests Christa's life with Justus. Through this choice of costume the narrator shows the reader what Christa was trying to show Justus, namely “what she was giving up, if she went with him”—sacrificing her freedom and her pursuit of a vision. But other issues are involved in the decision to marry. So the narrator provides another version in a new chapter. Not a costume ball—“which was an invention, anyway”—but a trip to the country, where Christa visits Justus, marries him, and gives birth to her first child. In this version Christa is quite changed. Rather than seeing marriage as a threat, she finds a state of security, motherhood, happiness. “She recreated herself all over again, from the bottom up, for Justus, that was by no means an effort but the greatest earthly joy she had ever encountered” (CT 123).

The narrator appropriates this technique of rewriting reality from models she finds in Christa T.'s own diaries and prose. For example, one of her students, Hammurabi, accepted his classmates’ challenge and, for a few pennies, bit off a live toad's head. Christa's colleagues consider this a mere prank and find her tears puzzling: Was she not a country girl? To Christa this act of violence is a painful reminder of the everlasting evil in this world. She encounters the “dark side” of life for the first time as a ten-year-old child, when a drunk in inexplicable anger killed her cat with a brick. She also finds it reaffirmed even in contemporary times when she shares a hospital room with a woman who has been repeatedly raped and abused by her husband—yet she returns to him. Tampering with fact, Christa molds the toad story to her desire for a decent mankind, drafting a morally pleasing conclusion of repentance: Hammurabi rushes in, brushes his teeth, and then cries like a small child—a conclusion that bears witness to Christa's unwillingness “to accept the naked, true reality” (CT 110). Both writers, Christa and the narrator, either illuminate reality from various angles by creating several versions of it or reshape it in order to create an ideal. The unspoken premise here could well be—it is in future works—that civilized life cannot continue without the conception and pursuit of ideals as they occur in the individual person as opposed to the perpetuation of ideals through a government bureaucracy or a sterile society.

In all these narrative journeys the reader is a constant companion; we are always included in the genesis of the fiction. But Wolf worries that her efforts may not have the desired effect: “Even if I could manage to recreate faithfully everything that I still know or found out about her, even then it could be possible that the one to whom I am telling all of this, the one I need and am now begging for support, that at the end this person knows nothing about her” (CT 117). Wolf uses the pronoun we frequently to include the reader: “Once and for all: she does not need us. … we need her.” Through frequent questions she forces us to interact with the text: “Forcing, whom? You? And what for? To stay?” Even secondary characters address the reader, like Christa T.'s landlady, who worried about Christa “Until the girl started to cry, that was a relief, wasn't it?” This constant interaction, the presence of “another person with no name,” fashions an intimate relationship between author and reader, kindling the author's responsibility for honesty and fortifying the reader's willingness to participate in the fiction.

The assemblage of episodes, analyses, descriptions, quotations, and explications is divided into twenty chapters. They are loosely held together by a thread of chronology—a countdown to the day Christa T. dies—and by a web of repeated previews or reviews of certain events. These emphasize a different aspect of Christa T.'s character or of her attempt to assert and, at the same time, preserve herself in society. The narrator need not have worried about the picture of Christa T. that emerges at the end. It is a sharply focussed full portrait, surrounded by vaguely sketched secondary figures, on a broad but looming background of the early history of the GDR. Moreover, the narrator gives voice to the woman to say finally what she was unable to say in her lifetime. The concluding words of the novel are the often repeated refrain of Christa T.: “When if not now?” They launch not only the writing of Christa T.'s life but also the success story of the narrator as writer: the ending feeds into the beginning, the genesis of the novel.

We meet Christa T. playing the trumpet. She is actually blowing into a rolled-up newspaper, “hooohaahooo, something like that,” marching ahead of her class. We wonder: Is this an expression of spontaneity? An act of liberation? A call of defiance? To rally people behind her like Pete the Piper? Christa had the potential to raise her voice to all these effects, but she was unable to articulate—for everyone to hear and understand—the meaning of this “hooohaahooo.” The narrator, who would have liked to have made this call herself, saw it as an expression of Christa's vision, a vision of herself, “her secret.” In her thesis about Theodor Storm, a nineteenth-century writer, Christa T., who wanted to be a writer herself, pursues the question “how—and if at all and under which circumstances—one can realize oneself in art” (CT 97). She observes that Storm's artistic being is one with his human being. This is her vision for herself. But, in spite of valiant attempts—“When if not now?”—Christa is not able to realize her art, so she is unable to merge her humanity with her creativity. The tragedy she observed in Storm is her tragedy: “The conflict between wanting and being unable has pushed him into a fatal corner” (CT 98). That is why she had to die.

“I would like to write poetry,” the ten-year-old Christa wrote on the cover of her first diary, “and I also love stories.” In the course of her life Christa discovers why she needs to write: “she has an intense aversion to anything that has no form” (CT 22); she derives consolation from the written lines in her diary, for instance, when her cat is murdered (CT 26); “she can only get beyond things through writing” (CT 39); she was afraid she would disappear without a trace and wanted to leave verbal tracks (CT 38); she wanted to work with and for others, but indirectly, through writing (CT 74); and, of course, she wanted “to find herself inside and outside of herself,” to realize her self through writing. Achieving an authentic identity is the novel's central theme, expressed in many different contexts.

Unfortunately, Christa's periodic refrain “When if not now?” is sounded in vain. An occasional hesitant poem, disorderly notes, lists of titles, sketches, fragments—that is the extent of her literary legacy. She worries early that she will not be able to write, to put into words what is important to her. It didn't have to be perfect, but she wanted everything new and fresh, not pale and mundane like in reality. She wanted to pronounce something new, not what everyone else already knew. But her “originality,” she noted, was wasted, “given away, out of cowardice” (CT 142). In other words: she did not think herself courageous enough to write. Why does writing require courage? The narrator supplies an explanation:

She must have had knowledge early on of our inability to say things as they are. I am even wondering whether one can learn about it too soon and be discouraged forever, whether one can be enlightened too early, be robbed of one's self-deception too early. So that one gives up and lets things take their course. Then they have no way out: not into ambivalence, not into lies. … Then they make the best of themselves, or the worst. Or the mediocre, which is often the worst. And which when it feels threatening cannot be ignored any longer in silence.

(CT 38–39)

The narrator expresses herself with great circumspection here. She cannot say explicitly that the political environment prohibited Christa T. from portraying things as they are, from letting her originality, her individuality, emerge. It took great courage to write against the political grain. It is for this lack of courage in the face of political adversity that Christa T. did not finish “Malina, the Raspberry,” a story about the Nazi period told from her perspective as a child. The Third Reich was not a topic that the GDR regime, in the 1950s, wanted to see analyzed honestly. In Christa T.'s lifetime one spoke “only half sentences” about the subject. But in 1975 Christa Wolf would write just such a story: Kindheitsmuster (Patterns of Childhood).

Christa T. lacked self-confidence, a form of courage directed inward. She was plagued by doubt about her work, as the narrator says: “She could never have written: ‘My stories.’ She did not believe that her “currency” was worth anything. In a letter to her sister—never mailed—she describes herself as “not equipped for life. Intelligent, all right. Too sensitive, brooding unproductively, full of scruples” (CT 74). Indeed, how could Christa have believed in her social worth when she did not fit the social norm, let alone the icons? Not that she did not believe in her country. She speaks about her deep “agreement with her time.” She may not have agreed with the narrator's opinion (often erroneously attributed to Christa T.) that their new world would always be their cause and that, among all the alternatives, there was not one worth turning around for (CT 55). Yet she ardently wished for such a world. But, if she could not doubt the society in which she lived, then only self-doubt remained, corroding her creative worth, too. The major reasons for Christa's inability to become a writer, however, are rooted in her unmitigated restlessness. She lives at continual odds with the world.

The image of Christa's peculiar walk, leaning forward as if against a slight but constant obstacle, captures her persistent struggle to move deterrents to her self-realization out of her way. She was always an outsider, deliberately excluding herself, asserting her right to live by her own laws. She recoiled from any “branding iron whose mark would determine with which herd she had to go to which barn.” She could not conform to the “new man,” who believes that the key to health is adaptation and who has, consequently, relinquished any moral responsibility, like her former student Hammurabi, who became a physician. She could not identify with these “Hopp-Hopp-Menschen,” people who forge thoughtlessly ahead, revere facts, and lack imagination. She could not easily follow rules or work with regularity. She was able to oversleep a final exam, wake up happy, and invent a plausible explanation without scruples. And, rather than study for a team project, endangering everyone's grade, she would read Fyodor Dostoevsky and think about this Russian writer's idea that only the softest could conquer the hardest. Her inability to adapt to the norm may render her “unzeitgemäβ,” not in harmony with the time; it may disqualify her as a model, but not as a friend. She was not a loner. Even Hopp-Hopp-Menschen, like the successful writer Blasing, who “worked on his career” and “brought his vocabulary to the level of the capital” (Berlin), were part of her social circle. Her unwillingness to conform was not motivated by rebellion; she just wanted to be herself—an innocence more threatening than open rebellion, more vulnerable, and more powerful at the same time—the very reason why the narrator is presenting Christa T. to us.

Wolf thought that “literature, just like our society, attends especially to the restless. Depicting people to whom restlessness is alien—the self-satisfied, flat, all too compliant ones—that seems rather boring and unproductive” (DI 33). Christa T. is the epitome of restlessness that extended to body and mind. The narrator pegged Christa T. as someone who would just come and go already in high school; one who did not need others and, therefore, did not seek acceptance by her classmates—a fragile self-sufficiency, however, and a defensive pose that she tried to overcome by marriage and motherhood. In Berlin Christa walked for hours after school, wondering whether behind the lighted windows there were others infected by this restlessness. Into her diary she then entered the line: “Longing, you bird with the lightest of sleep” (CT 41). She left her family, even though it would have been sensible to stay. But she needed to leave behind what was too familiar, what did not pose a challenge any longer. She loved motion more than reaching the goal. Christa hated the word complete or completely because it signaled an end, a dead end. She deplored the concept “facts”—too definitive. “How could everything that happens become a fact for everyone?” She, Christa T., chose the facts that suited her, like everyone else (CT 171). She was apprehensive about any kind of commitment. Even her relationship with Justus was conditional upon not making any promises. The need for order, a form of commitment, did not affect her way of keeping house or paperwork.

In Christa's penchant for change, in her aversion to completion, lies the key to her inability to write. She felt great reluctance to commit her thoughts to the definitive word, because “everything, once ‘placed’ on the page—this very word!—is so hard to set in motion again, which is why one must, from the start, keep it alive, even while it is forming, within. It must constantly be created, that is the key. One must never, never allow it to be finished. Only, how can that be done?” (CT 166). Christa is always striving—a female twentieth-century Faust.

Christa's dilemma manifests itself in deep despair, which is magnified by an unhappy love affair. “Kostja or the beauty,” as Christa called him, was a fellow student. They spent poetic moments together, and when he left her for the blonde Inge—alluding to a character in Thomas Mann's “Tonio Kröger” who resembles a Hopp-Hopp-Mensch—Christa had a breakdown. In a literature seminar treating Friedrich Schiller's drama Kabale und Liebe (“Intrigue and Love”), she had just discussed that unhappy love, in this new society, was no longer reason for suicide. Yet Christa wanted to die. This is the veiled but resonant message in the unmailed letter to her sister. She recalls that as kids they used to encourage each other with the slogan: “When—if not now? When should one live if not in the time one is given?” But this time given to her, she wrote, felt alien, like a wall in which there is no opening for her. “I do not know why I exist. … I know what is wrong about me, but it is still mine. I can't pull it out of me, can I? And yet: I know a way to get rid of all this misery once and for all … I can't quit thinking about that” (CT 74). Living in the company of other people who failed in life was out of the question. Compared to that option, the “other way,” suicide, is “more honorable, more honest. … Also stronger.” Her doctor's diagnosis was death wish due to lack of adjustment. He prescribed therapy: “You are intelligent. … You can learn to adjust” (CT 76).

It did not occur to Christa that it was not she who needed to change. So she tried to adjust, to become a useful member of society through her marriage to Justus (“the just one”), compensating her inability to be a creative writer by the act of procreation. Of course, one could also say that she fled into married life from despair. Initially, she engaged with enthusiasm in the daily activities of housekeeping, child rearing, and husband care. She accompanied Justus on his house calls in order to get acquainted with her community. She even wrote a little, usually on the back of his discarded correspondence and receipts—tentatively, nothing complete. She even built a house to “connect more intimately with life,” a place that was familiar and secure because she had created it. But slowly she felt like her “work was pushing the day forward” and that her two hands were not enough for so much weight. She grew increasingly tired: “Never can one tire as much from what one does than from what one doesn't do or can't do” (CT 138). She began to feel that she was losing “the secret that enabled her to live: the consciousness of who she really was” (CT 156). Her restlessness set in, and she responded to the dreaded banality of her daily life with a brief affair—to find out whether there was still sense in her senses—and by having a child. But she ran out of time to find new options of spiritual survival. This poem is her witness:

Why torture oneself so devilishly?
May never happen again what happened here:
The closeness of two strange souls,
The strangeness of those who are close …

The fatal cancer, arrested during her years of contentment, returned. “Piece by piece she takes herself, something takes her back.” She died shortly after the birth of her third child.

The narrator had wanted to present Christa T.'s life as a success. How could a story of failure to realize one's ardent desire, the inability to adjust to the demands of society, a story of despair and death, be a story of success? In spite of her personal failings, her lack of tangible achievements, Christa T. did not give up. Within the sliver of time allotted to her, thirty-five years, she explored earnestly the wide range of her strengths and weaknesses—especially the latter. She created opportunities to experience the emotional spectrum of joy and pain: disappointment, pride, jealousy, loneliness, pleasure, fear. “She did not try to run away, which many people began to do, especially in those years” (CT 59). Whether that meant escaping to the West or evading personal responsibility, she stood her ground, defending her place in life and filling her space with her individuality. She represents what her generation should have been. Her legacy inspired a tale of courage to live and to be oneself at a time of adversity.

The reactions to The Quest for Christa T. were strong. Critics in East and West engaged in spirited debates—unique in the history of postwar German literary criticism. A special volume is devoted to the collection and assessment of the most important critiques: Manfred Behn's Wirkungsgeschichte von Christa Wolf's “Nachdenken über Christa T.,” 1978 (The Reception of Christa Wolf's “The Quest for Christa T.”). In the West Wolf's most severe critic, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, led the overwhelming praise when he judged The Quest for Christa T. one of the few significant German novels of the 1960s. The book quickly became the object of serious literary inquiry, which continues to this day.

The East reacted less to the literary value and more to the political implications of the text. Christa Wolf presented issues that had not yet been discussed publicly. Her antiheroine, merely by her unorthodox character, had called into question the convictions of her fellow citizens and, by extension, the regime of the GDR. At the Sixth Congress of Writers in May 1969 Wolf's novel, which was the focus of discussion, was generally rejected on ideological grounds. In essence the author was accused of inadequate observance of dogma and reminded that it was not the mission of socialism to erect memorials for individuality. It must have been a bitter pill when the Mitteldeutsche Verlag, her own publisher, in an act of self-criticism, stated publicly that Christa Wolf was incapable of distancing herself from her heroine, that pessimism is the aesthetic tenor of this book, and that Wolf's ultimate answer is generally humanistic (not socialistic). She was told that The Quest for Christa T., like Divided Heaven, was a failure and that she should quit writing.

Not surprisingly, Wolf switched to the publishing house Aufbau-Verlag Berlin and Weimar, because even in East Germany there were unequivocal words of praise for the book and admiration for the author—the socialist as moralist and therapist. The conflict depicted in the novel, subjectivity versus conformity, was, with unintentional irony, mirrored by its critiques. Fortunately, in the end the book's reception was a happy one: the accolades soon silenced the ideologues, in East and West. Wolf's readers responded to Christa T.'s quest more sympathetically than Wolf could have wished. Feelings associated with illness, death, mourning, and loss could finally be discussed publicly, a therapeutic process indispensable to personal and social health. The Theodor Fontane Prize for Art and Literature in 1973, conferred by the GDR, officially acknowledged Wolf's accomplishment. For Christa Wolf personally, writing The Quest for Christa T. conveyed a new freedom as an author; according to her former teacher Hans Mayer (a West German citizen since 1963), Wolf had come to herself.

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.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Previous

Velvet Prisons

Next

The Good Old Bad Old Days