Rebel within a Cause
[In the following review of What Remains and The Writer's Dimension, Benn defends Wolf against public condemnation for her socialist beliefs.]
Angry citizens may have pulled Lenin from his plinth in an orgy of symbolic fury, but the reputations of far more subtle figures have suffered in the post-communist reckoning. Most saddening, perhaps, are the attacks currently directed at the east German novelist and essayist Christa Wolf. Before 1989, Wolf occupied an ambiguous but unique position of prominence both within the GDR and the west; since 1989 she has been castigated, particularly in West Germany, for both her actions and inaction. What should be made of this reversal of fortune?
Criticism of Wolf has turned on two distinct, rather sensational accusations: first, that the delay in publishing Was bleibt—her autobiographical tale of surveillance by the Stasi, the GDR's secret police, in the late 1970s—until after the fall of the wall was a disingenuous attempt to claim retrospective victim status. More recently, it has been suggested that Wolf herself was an “unofficial co-worker” for the Stasi in the late 1950s, along with other prominent GDR writers such as Heiner Müller.
Beyond her own country, Wolf is a distinguished rather than a famous figure; something of a minority taste. Even so, for western media raised on the simplicities of the cold war, the “did she, didn't she?” question fascinates from whatever angle (victim or perpetrator?) far more than the wider political meaning of the affair.
Yet the Wolf debate does not make sense within the spy paradigm at all. Wolf's action in 1959–62 stemmed itself from misplaced cold war certainties, from her belief in the absolute rights of a state that grew out of the defeat of fascism. In that sense, hers was a political act, however chilling or wrong, rather than a betrayal of stated or lived beliefs—our usual definition of espionage. So, too, we should see the attack on Wolf as part of a wider assault on the generation that believed anything was better than fascism: even a rotting state socialism.
And, broader yet, does the case not arise from a confusion in just about everyone's mind—east and west—about the public role of the writer, and whether it lies in not just savouring but saving the world? Should writers be as grand in their deeds as in their words? How should we untangle the fraught connection not just between words and action, but between public figures and private character?
It's a debate that has less resonance in the west, where writers are increasingly marginalised as political figures and instead granted the often puerile status of a limited fame. Not so within the GDR where, as novelist Monika Maron has written, writers were “a particularly spoiled group … [not just in] the privileges given to them by the power elite … [but in] the respect with which they were greeted even by people not accustomed to reading books.”
Wolf herself was almost a state laureate, yet she was also celebrated in the west for a presumed covert dissidence within “really existing” socialism, particularly in her expert use of slave language: the expression of dissatisfaction and contradiction in so subtle a way, it escaped the crudity of the censor. I can still remember my thrill at reading Virago's blurb-description of Christa Wolf as “a committed socialist of independent temper”: at last, a Jane Austen heroine yanked to noble ideals!
We should not doubt that Wolf increasingly lived out this tension to the full. Certainly, Was bleibt (What Remains) shows a finely tuned awareness of the contradictions and failure of someone in Wolf's position. Here is a writer, watched by three agents of the state she is beginning to disbelieve, paralysed by the gap between her “old language” (I guess: the language of state socialism) and her inability to speak out loud the “new language” (I guess: the very words that came with the end of the GDR).
Dissidents appeal to her as the Great Writer, but she can do nothing for them. Of one young poet, she writes, “He could have been my son. I believed I could foresee the fate awaiting him. They would stop at nothing. The young gentleman standing in front of my door would not hesitate to pass through his door. A moat. Would I have to jump over it?” Yet in another passage, she states, “Every day I told myself that a privileged life like mine could only be justified by attempting to go beyond the borders of the sayable, knowing full well that border violations of any kind are punished.”
As a text, What Remains is uncompromising. It clearly states not only Wolf's isolation, but her growing disillusionment with what remains of the GDR and its slogans: GROWTH PROSPERITY STABILITY, words ominously hoisted over a reading given at the end of the story. But as a text that remained in a drawer, it of course stood for nothing at all. It had no material reality, no life.
Put it against the testimonies of We Were the People and one understands the full extent of the failure of all semi-official writers in the GDR. Through a persistent and lovingly critical interview technique, [Dirk] Philipsen draws out the complexity and bravery of the GDR dissidents—feminists, church people, trade unionists—who suffered exile, imprisonment, job loss and routine fear as a result of their protests. Theirs is a quite different story from the state laureates.
Yet even here we should be very careful, those of us who have never lived under “dictatorship” of any kind: those of us who know nothing about power and vanity and fear and ordinary cowardice, and how these work themselves out in each individual. Yes, we can sneer that Christa Wolf could—and did—ring Erich Honecker directly when her own daughter was arrested in a demonstration.
Yes, we can sneer at the extensive privileges. But then we must remember that she was also courageous—in her own way: that the record shows public opposition to the expulsion of Wolf Biermann and the censoring of other colleagues. Nor did Wolf ever go after positions in the official Writers’ Union.
There is no cynicism in Wolf. Her aim, if eventually hopeless, is always to reconcile the old and new languages.
Nowhere is this more poignantly expressed than in her essays and interviews at the time of the fall of the Wall. Here is no easy condemnation of the lust for consumer goods, but again the expressed desire to reconcile a utopian version of socialism with “what the young people have to say … I do indeed hope that this is a defeat for Stalinism. I still hope that what you call ‘utopia’ is not being defeated along with it.”
Again and again, ever more desperately, she urges dialogue between those who are going and those who are staying. More valuable yet, she offers analysis: “People of my generation have talked very little to our children about our childhood in the Nazi time, about the break up in 1945 and about our attempts to ‘find our place for ourselves’ in a new society based on new social principles. And then came the second collapse, brought on by the revelations about Stalin.
“It is uncanny how these unresolved issues—that's a very unemotional term for what I have in mind—persist throughout the generations. No doubt we could discover what those effects are, if we were to thoroughly question the young people who are leaving East Germany.”
In another essay, Wolf echoes the cry of a woman of her own generation—the cry of the parent as well as the political believer: “What did we do wrong?” But if she stands as a scorned member of a generation whom fascism blinded to the dangers of state socialism, it is a failure shared by many in West Germany and a wider Europe; not just Wolf's alone.
Nor is it a failure profound enough to discredit her as a writer. In such works as A Model Childhood, The Search for Christa T. and even What Remains, Wolf remains one of the very few to have grappled with the silences of both the fascist and socialist phases of her country, turning the slave language of dissidence to good account.
She is important for grander reasons yet: Wolf has always understood our need to find a difficult and complex language to express a difficult and complex life, our need not to be seduced by the quick and easy in the electronic era; our belief in truth itself.
So she argues passionately in The Writer's Dimension: “Prose creates people. It breaks down deadly oversimplifications by showing all the possible ways there are to be human.” It is a sad irony that Wolf has herself fallen victim to oversimplification while showing us, at the same time, that writers are human: timid as well as brave, bold and silent all at once.
Yet she remains—with the likes of Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing (once upon a time), Susan Sontag and, in a minor key, Grace Paley—as one of the most important political writers of her time; one rooted in her time. I salute her for that.
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