Christa Wolf
[In the following essay, Gunew discusses Wolf's humanist perspective, her studies of collective memory, and the social construction of identity, particularly female identity, in A Model Childhood, Cassandra, and other works.]
For Margrit Braun and Hansi Foks, and for Christa W. who almost came to Australia.
My major interest was to try to find out where it actually started—this appalling split between people and society? When did the division of labor influence people so decisively that literature was pushed farther and farther out of that sphere which society understood and defined as important, essential—indeed present! At the same time, the feminine element is also forced out of society; that's a process which began much earlier, however.
(C. Wolf, New German Critique, 27)
The above was part of Christa Wolf's answer as to why she, an East German, had written a novel about the early German Romantics (No Place on Earth) who are traditionally dismissed as a group of over-privileged intellectual elitists. Her answer went on to describe them, instead, as one of the few groups committed to social experimentation and change on the eve of the industrial era, after which reality became paralysed by institutions. It is gratifying for our Western understanding to have it confirmed that, as we suspected, East Germany is bristling with bureaucracy and institutions. At the same time it is disconcerting to discover that Wolf's preoccupation with the question why produce literature, should echo Terry Eagleton's latest book on the question why produce criticism? They converge to some extent in their answers: Eagleton advocates the critic's return to social responsibility and revolutionary intervention:
What surely is true is that no examination of criticism's relation to the classical public sphere can end without considering its relation to the contemporary caricatured form of that sphere, the culture industry. Just as the eighteenth-century bourgeois critic found a role in the cultural politics of the public sphere, so the contemporary socialist or feminist critic must be defined by an engagement in the cultural politics of late capitalism. Both strategies are equally remote from an isolated concern with the ‘literary text.’ ‘The constructing of a proletarian public sphere,’ Brenkman argues, ‘… requires a persistent struggle against the symbolic forms by which the mass-mediated public sphere constitutes subjectivity and puts it under the dominance of the commodity.’ The role of the contemporary critic is to resist that dominance by re-connecting the symbolic to the political, engaging through both discourse and practice with the process by which repressed needs, interests and desires may assume the cultural forms which could weld them into a collective political force.1
Wolf reiterates in all her books what seems to be a related concern with the writer as authentic witness interrogating official orthodoxies. For post-modernists, increasingly confined by the privatised interactions of readers and texts, it is sobering to be confronted by a writing context in which the function of literature has recently been described as a kind of consciousness-raising process designed to facilitate debate on those issues excluded from official public discourses.2 Sobering because for post-modernists discourses on the responsibility of the individual to society tend to be viewed as overly prescriptive, falsely consensual and to be replaced, as quickly as possible, with decentred subjects and decentred networks of power relations. Otherwise, what happens to the marginal who are always designated as objects rather than subjects? The problem with decentering is that it also makes organised political action difficult; it is hard to play now you see me, now you don't, when you are trying to change the world. And this is where Wolf's seemingly old-fashioned humanism needs to be re-appraised.
Her writing constantly explores the interaction of marginal and dominant groups in relation to the responsibility of the individual. The individual, however, is not simply the unified subject of liberal humanism, the origin and end of meaning, but rather a subject-in-process who is both constituted by official discourses as well as learning to question them from positions constructed on the basis of deviant experience. The most fearful and dehumanising state in Wolf's world is to be an object simply constructed by others instead of producing one's own tentative authenticity and taking responsibility for one's own perspective. For example, A Model Childhood, her book on growing up in Nazi Germany which first brought her to world attention, harrowingly reconstructs the process whereby collective guilt arises out of the accretion of individual silences. The price of such survival is examined through a double narrative frame in which the narrator travels through present-day East Germany with her husband, brother and daughter trying to explain to her child, in particular, the conditions under which she, as a child, evolved. From being the traditional objects of modern world-history, the Germans become, through the narrator, Nelly, the subjects who finally take responsibility for their own viewpoints.
Indeed, one of the prime functions of literature is described by Wolf as the painfully acquired discipline of remembering which runs counter to the instinct, or will, to forget: ‘Remembering things is swimming against the current of forgetting—strenuous movement.’3 The will to forget enables one to survive in the face of traumatic experiences but the cost is a repressed and debilitating guilt: ‘To be inconsiderate—without looking back—as a basic requirement for survival; one of the prerequisites that separate the living from survivors.’4 The process of remembering comprises an acutely painful re-examination of debris (photographs, diaries, and places), censored and edited to shape a spurious consistency and superficial calm. False representations of time (photos, letters) as much as of place:
The network of the streets in your childhood town has been indelibly imprinted on your—and everybody else's—mind as the basic model for the layout of marketplaces, churches, streets, and rivers. Now it exists only in part, modified, in an altered form, because it gives you away too much, points out tracks which must be erased; for you are forced to shuffle the details in order to get closer to the facts.
(A Model Childhood)
The individual memories are submerged in the collective memory, or, rather, collective forgetting. Thus Nelly's irritation at family photos which tender the specious resolutions of fairytales and their happy endings and which offer hindrance rather than help in the process of retracing individual silences within the collective alibis and false stories: ‘Chronic blindness. And the question cannot be: How can they live with their conscience?, but: What kind of circumstances are those that cause a collective loss of conscience?’
If photographs and even places obstruct memory, what about language itself? Not only the individual writer's will to forget, but language too becomes an obstacle to memory. Encased in the present language of collective amnesia, how is it possible to rediscover that former language in the past which affirmed a different climate of arrogance, of certainty, certainly not of acknowledged guilt? What role did language play in that reality? The languages of Nazi Germany are organised around silences and distortions: ‘He wasn't asking a question. He didn't have the strength for one … Interrogative, declarative, or exclamatory sentences could no longer—or not yet—be used. Many, Nelly among them, lapsed into silence.’ Nelly learns to read faces rather than listen to words. That language is the prime socialising force is reiterated in the later books, usually in the context of an anxiety concerning the growth of yet another ‘augur's language’ for the chosen few.5 At the same time, and this becomes the saving glimmer of hope which facilitates the progress from object to subject, there is something else which eludes this socialising process, illustrated by the phrase, ‘No, not that!.’
In fact, I often wonder what prevented the worst, since moral instincts are not inborn and we were deprived of all contact with the morals of a highly developed culture. So why were all the humane instincts not rooted out? Whence came that abrupt retreat, on a few occasions sharply etched on the memory, that I now think were decisive? Whence—since there was silence all around—that disturbing warning from within, on three or four occasions, that one did not want to follow up and that could be summed up in two words: Not that!
(The Reader and the Writer)
This awareness returns in another version in A Model Childhood when the narrator encounters a eugenicist Nazi fairy-tale.
It shall be truthfully said that, 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?
Language, as Wolf points out in her Büchner Prize acceptance speech, enables scientists and politicians to erect a screen between their own feelings (individual responsibility) and their work or public actions.6 But it is possible for the hegemony of language to be disrupted: No, not that! Another language: Kein ort. Nirgends (no place, nowhere). Utopia?
What self, from where, articulates this disruption? The position of authentic witness is not bestowed, it must be earned. Both A Model Childhood and the latest book, Cassandra, are structured around pilgrimages. It is not simply a matter of adopting the first person and of assuming that all the rest will follow:
Don't ask your contemporaries certain questions. Because it is unbearable to think the tiny word ‘I’ in connection with the word ‘Auschwitz.’ ‘I’ in the past conditional: I would have. I might have. I could have. Done it. Obeyed orders.
In that case, no faces. The ability to remember lies dormant. Still to this day: a feeling of relief, if you're honest. And the realisation that language acts as a filter in the process of minting expressions. It filters: in the sense of what is desired. In the sense of what is mentionable. In the sense of what has been established. How can established behaviour be forced to yield spontaneous expression?
(A Model Childhood)
The witness bears a responsibility to the self as well as to an audience; ‘I will continue a witness even if there is no longer one single human being left to demand my testimony,’ says Cassandra. Which is not to negate the responsibility to an audience, that crucial relationship to the public sphere, intersection of the domestic and the social, to which Wolf (and Eagleton) refer constantly. But responsibility to the self, or selves, is not an unproblematic idealism or essentialism, for the self in Wolf's work is very much a subject-in-process, fragmented by contradictions and repressions: ‘Nelly realises that she is several different girls.’ In A Model Childhood there is the public self who practises until she can keep her arm raised in the Nazi salute for the full length of the anthem, and there is that private, largely suppressed, self who is, at times, able to respond with: No, not that!
Although the subject is riven by contradictions this must not result in paralysis, there is no excuse for post-modernist meta-reflections or for inaction:
So as to preclude misunderstandings: living in contradictions is my fundamental form of life—it's not something I find or have ever found negative. Certainly it can be uncomfortable, also very irritating; it can make you doubt yourself; only it's not shattering or fatal when it's a question of contradictions that move each other toward solutions. It now seems to me that there are fewer and fewer productive contradictions and that the number of unlivable alternatives is increasing. That's precisely the source of so many people's tension, that they feel they've gotten into a corner.7
For to admit only the public self is to assent to a living death, ‘the bliss of conformity … when Bruno Jordan (Nelly's father) … opted, as a social being, for the thousands and against himself.’ When the responsibility of interrogative and self-conscious witness is declined, the self is, to an extent, killed by being reduced to an object constituted by public discourse alone.
There is a moment in A Model Childhood when the narrator's daughter, in present-day Germany, is shown a photograph of a Vietnamese atrocity:
Lenka is a child of this century. She knows about murderers and isn't interested in what makes them tick. What does a person feel who photographs murderers in the course of their assignments, instead of trying to prevent the murders: that's what she'd like to know. Nothing, you say. Probably nothing.
What beasts, says Lenka. She can't look for long at pictures or documentaries showing torture or death scenes, or would-be suicides on the edges of skyscraper roofs. She always thinks of the man behind the camera who is taking pictures instead of helping. She rejects the common division of roles: the one who must die, the one who will be the cause of the death, but the third person stands by and records what the second does to the first.
Represented here is the eternal tableau: the victim, the oppressor and, perhaps the worst of all, the inauthentic and collusive witness. Can those who reduce others and history itself to objects afford to do this to themselves? The interrogation, quoted above, of the first-person in relation to Auschwitz, is partially answered at a later stage when the young Nelly meets a concentration-camp survivor and finds that like her ‘he was unable to laugh. That was the first minute point of contact between them.’ Neither victims nor their oppressors must become simply objects. The point of contact which is only the beginning in the earlier book is extended in the later Cassandra:
It appears that—since when did this happen exactly?—I can no longer view Cassandra as a tragic figure. I do not think she saw herself that way. Does her contemporaneity lie in the way she learns to deal with pain? So, is pain the point at which I assimilate her, a particular kind of pain, the pain of becoming a knowing subject?
Unlike Nelly in A Model Childhood whose story is told in the third person, Cassandra narrates her own story, is the subject of her own history. In this instance the first-person carries connotations of a death-bed confession, for the pilgrimage which frames her story is towards her own death. What escapes this deterministic scheme is her warning. As she moves inexorably towards her own extinction she analyses retrospectively the process of mass extinction: war, the paradigmatic war in Western culture between Greece and Troy. It is that war upon which all subsequent myths of heroism, which ensure the perpetuation of war, are founded. What better place to begin to dismantle the mentality of war in the face of annihilation, both Cassandra's own death and the possible one of the narrator-author in the four essays attached to the novel: ‘How can you teach younger people the technique of living without alternatives, and yet living? When did it begin? we ask. Was this course of events inevitable?’ At the same time that war itself is deconstructed, alternative models for living are suggested. In this case the alternative consists of an apparently old-fashioned feminism which celebrates so-called female values and seeks answers in female communities. But as with Wolf's humanism, which turns out not to be simply based on the unified liberal bourgeois subject, so here too the feminism is not that of the unproblematic essential female. Feminist values also are seen to be in-process.
What about the concept of models themselves?
A model is used for demonstration. To demonstrate is derived from the Latin ‘monstrum,’ which originally meant ‘showpiece,’ or ‘model,’ which suits you perfectly. But ‘monstrum’ can also become ‘monster’ in today's sense of the word.
(A Model Childhood)
Both exemplum and monster—the model life is of course monstrous. Nelly learns of her exemplary monstrosity in retrospect, as does Cassandra, the prophet whom no one believes. Cassandra is set apart in her special role of priestess and king's daughter from the beginning and, in a reverse journey from that of Nelly, rediscovers her links with the community, those unexemplary lives celebrated in another earlier book, The Quest for Christa T. The narrator of the four essays flanking the Cassandra story attempts to imagine not only the past but, as well, an unimaginable non-future: ‘We, the people of today, don't put anything past anybody. We think that anything is possible. This may be the most important difference between our era and the preceding ones.’ The danger and seduction of this future lies in the fact that it may be unimaginable.
Cassandra's discourse constructs the exemplary hero Achilles, the monster: ‘The naked hideous male gratification. If that exists, everything is possible.’ When he is not killing the young men physically he kills them psychically, through his ‘heroic’ example. Increasingly, his monstrous presence haunts the previously idyllic world of the Minoans.
Everything that we are unable to achieve was attributed to them: the ability to find meaning in their work; to integrate themselves into a social and religious community without an accompanying need to reduce themselves to an automatic level of functioning; to live without internal and external violence—an island of perfection.
No place on earth is safe now, however, not even Australia. Increasingly the Minoans learn from the Greeks how to be heroes, how to reduce others to non-human objects, exemplified by the growing division between the men and the women: ‘the men of both sides seemed to have joined forces against our women.’ The process began with the abduction of Helen, not her actual abduction because it is soon realised by both camps that Paris brought a phantom, an absence, but her abduction in the sense of her metamorphosis from human into eidolon:
The word ‘wraith’ = ‘idol’ from the Greek eidolon = image. The woman is deprived of her living memory, and an image which others make of her is foisted upon her in its place: the hideous process of petrification, objectification, performed on living flesh. Now she is classed among the objects, among the res mancipi—like children, slaves, property, livestock—which their owner can turn over to someone else via the legal procedure of mancipatio.
Cassandra is forced, progressively, to see the men about her, former friends and brothers, retreating into Achilles’ model. Within Troy the palace guard Eumelos becomes the mirror image of Achilles and his men become like those modern men who work with nuclear weapons and fear ‘societal death more than uncertain physical death.’ The beginning of that process, illustrated by men turning women into objects, is briefly encountered in the earlier A Model Childhood in the compulsory medical examination of all the women (but not the men) by the occupying Soviet army. In the Cassandra essays the narrator observes the subservient behaviour of modern women towards men while speculating that Aeschylus was not really interested in Cassandra at all, merely in establishing father-right over mother-right.8
The alternative model emerges from the marginal world of the outcast and forgotten, mainly women, whom Cassandra encounters outside the palace walls. It is a world ruled by Cybele rather than the treacherous Apollo. In a parallel structure, the narrator of the four essays meets the emissaries of the goddess in the shape of two American feminists who seek traces of matriarchal civilisation in Crete. The forgotten ones know about each other and Cassandra learns from them to become a knowing subject, moving from the sweet temptations of privilege and conformity to the acknowledgement of oppression. Not that it becomes simply a matter of men versus women or the celebration of the eternal female. Among the women is the exemplum, the monster, Penthesilea the Amazon queen who imitates the male model. That option is encountered elsewhere in Wolf's writings, notably in her analysis of Büchner's female protagonists who aspire to be as good as men: ‘her entrance into the citadel subjects her to its laws!’9 Thus Penthesilea too chooses the laws of the citadel and death. Similarly, towards the end of the Cassandra essays, the narrator refers to another doomed woman subject, the writer Ingeborg Bachmann: ‘I claim that every woman in this century and in our culture sphere who has ventured into male-dominated institutions—“literature” and “aesthetics” are such institutions—must have experienced the desire for self-destruction.’ Wolf explores the difficult territory between women constructed by male culture and language (internalised by many women), and women as something else which escapes the unequal binary opposition of male: not-male. The alternative world, the utopia in the caves outside Troy, contains men also, Anchises and Aeneas, but not heroes, not even Penthesilea. Clytemnestra too is a woman who has succumbed to the laws of the citadel. Cassandra, although finally killed within the citadel, has first testified that there is more than the insanity of the citadel. This was her role, rather than being saved with Aeneas who, in spite of himself, became another war-renewing hero.
In the ‘conditions of a narrative,’ the enabling essays around the novel, the narrator seeks matriarchies but recognises at the same time that women cannot merely continue to be the custodians of the ‘good, everyday life.’ They must not take refuge in the femininity already constructed for them, the inverse of the citadel: ‘Autonomy is a task for everyone, and women who treat their femininity as a value they can fall back on act fundamentally as they were trained to act. They act to the challenge which reality poses to them as whole persons with a large-scale evasive maneuver.’ From being objects women must, painfully, become knowing and writing subjects. Where else will survival come from?
About reality. The insane fact that in all the ‘civilised’ industrialised nations, literature, if it is realistic, speaks a completely different language from any and all public disclosures. As if every country existed twice over. As if every resident existed twice over: once as himself and as the potential perceiver of an artistic presentation; second, as an object of statistics, publicity, agitation, advertisement, political propaganda.
As for turning things into objects: Isn't that the principal source of violence? The fetishizing of vital, contradictory people and processes, within public notifications, until they have rigidified into ready-made parts and stage scenery: dead themselves, killing others.
To what extent is there really such a thing as ‘women's writing’? To the extent that women, for historical and biological reasons, experience a different reality than men. Experience a different reality than men and express it. To the extent that women belong not to the rulers but to the ruled, and have done so for centuries. To the extent that they are the objects of objects, second-degree objects, frequently the objects of men who are themselves objects, and so, in terms of their social position, unqualified members of the subculture. To the extent that they stop wearing themselves out trying to integrate themselves into the prevailing delusional systems. To the extent that, writing and living, they aim at autonomy. In this case they encounter the men who aim at autonomy. Autonomous people, nations, and systems can promote each other's welfare; they do not have to fight each other like those whose inner insecurity and immaturity continually demand the demarcation of limits and postures of intimidation.
Cassandra
Notes
-
Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism, (Verso, London), p. 123.
-
B. Einhorn, ‘Socialist Emancipation: the Women's Movement in the German Democratic Republic,’ Women's Studies International Quarterly, 4/4, p. 449.
-
The Reader and the Writer, p. 192.
-
A Model Childhood, p. 334.
-
The Reader and the Writer, p. 18.
-
Christa Wolf, ‘Shall I Garnish a Metaphor with Almond Blossom?’ Büchner Prize Acceptance Speech, New German Critique, 23, p. 10.
-
Christa Wolf, ‘Culture is What you Experience: An Interview with Christa Wolf,’ New German Critique, 27, p. 93.
-
Robert Fagles argues a similar case in the introductory essay to his translation of the Oresteia (Penguin, 1966/77).
-
New German Critique, 23, p. 8.
Works Cited
A Model Childhood (Virago).
The Reader and the Writer: Essays, Sketches, Memories (International Publishers, New York, 1977).
No Place on Earth (Virago, hardback).
Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays (Virago).
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.