An Allegory from Atlantis
[In the following review of Medea, Watkins provides an overview of Wolf's literary career, thematic preoccupations, and the complex political context of her work.]
She comes from a small, poor country in the East where the trees are hung with goatskin bags full of human bones, swinging in the breeze, to a western state so powerful, arrogant and rich that even the dead lie buried with food, jewellery and horses in their gorgeously furnished tombs; from a childhood full of secrets—‘but everything in Colchis was full of dark secrets’—to the glittering city-state of Corinth, whose people affect to have no secrets at all: though, ‘how much they hold it against you if you express doubts about their happiness.’1
Thus Medea, in the first work of fiction since the reunification of Germany by the ex-GDR's foremost writer, Christa Wolf. But this is a Medea very different from the powerful and impassioned heroine of Euripides, the mature and furious woman whose grief and anger, when she is deserted by her adored husband Jason, is so devastating that she is ready to destroy her own children in her all-consuming, all-purifying rage. The tragedy of Wolf's Medea lies in politics, not in love. In this late German version of the myth, Medea comes to Corinth in the wake of a failed revolt against the authoritarian rule of the king, her father, taking cool advantage of the presence of Jason and his Argonauts, who are in Colchis questing for the Golden Fleece, to escape with them over the Black Sea. Once in Corinth, and married to Jason, Medea finds herself defined as an outsider. The city-state of King Creon is built on the inequality of power and privilege; refugee communities—including her own—live huddled in their ghettoes by the docks and city walls.
But King Creon's situation is precarious: his power rests on the monstrous secret of human sacrifice, of a child slaughtered to ensure the continuation of his reign, and once Medea has discovered the bones buried deep beneath the palace, she begins to pose a threat. The narrative of Wolf's Medea documents the relentless process of the scapegoating of this rebellious easterner, as Medea is first accused of killing her younger brother and then of poisoning the Princess Glauce. Rumours spread that it is she who has caused the earthquake that devastates. Corinth and the plague that follows in its wake; finally, it is even whispered that she has murdered her own children.
‘But who could believe that?’ asks Medea, incredulous.
THE REVENGE OF CHRISTA W.
A fully-fledged political allegory, then, about the scapegoating of a dissenter and about the two German states; and one in which Christa Wolf would seem to be striking back at the calumnies that were heaped upon her own head in the summer of 1990, when the publication of What Remains, a short text based on her own experience of being kept under surveillance by the East German Stasi, became a lightning rod for the huge static clouds of anger and bitterness that were crackling across German skies at the moment of unification. For, at that time, Wolf herself was singled out for a ferocious campaign of victimization by conservative West German critics, who accused her of everything from political cowardice to turn-coatism; from being an official mouth-piece—a Staatsdichterin—to a lack of sincerity both towards herself and towards her fellow citizens; from having a ‘guilty conscience’ to hide to failing in that ‘dreadful and most necessary’ task2 of coming to terms with her own past, of Vergangenheitsbewältigung.
‘Unfair as it may seem,’ wrote Ulrich Greiner in an article on Christa Wolf in Die Zeit in July, 1990, ‘GDR intellectuals must carry the can for history.’3 And, as one of the most pre-eminent GDR writers on the world stage or, as the highly ideological young literary editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Frank Schirrmacher, put it, ‘the only intellectual who seemed to give proof of the spiritual sovereignty and self-sufficiency of the other German state,’4 Christa Wolf was made to stand in for the rest. As the attack became internationalized, even such liberal luminaries as Lorna Sage and Ian Buruma joined in the hunt, with Ian Buruma accusing Wolf in the New York Review of Books of being just the sort of intellectual that the SED state machine needed: ‘[Wolf's] struggles with her personal morality struck a tremendous chord with a people force-fed with propagandistic pap. Yet she never wavered in her political commitment. This made her the ideal writer for a communist regime, for she made it easier for people to live in a quasi-totalitarian state. Indeed she made the personal sacrifices, the spiritual hardship, seem virtuous.’5
Among Wolf's many defenders, on the other hand—who included Günter Grass, Stefan Heym, Wolf Biermann, Walter Jens, Volker Hage and Ivan Nagel—there was a general agreement that the ‘Literary Dispute,’ or Literaturstreit, of 1990 had the aim not simply of discrediting Wolf's own political stance—a cautiously reformist eco-socialist-feminism which has, after all, at least as broad a following in the Federal Republic as in the East—but, rather, of obliterating all traces of GDR culture from the new Germany; and, not least, all traces within that culture of something that aspired to a better world than ‘actually existing socialism,’ and which made of Christa Wolf and others, in Andreas Huyssens's phrase, ‘deputies in the here and now of a socialism yet to come.’6
THE WRONG KIND OF DISSIDENT
It is impossible, therefore, to separate Medea from the context in which it was written, and this in turn necessitates some understanding of the role that Wolf herself has played within German culture that led to her being targeted by the West German Right in the crucial year of 1990. Looking back, it is possible to see Christa Wolf's career as having delineated the forty-year arc of the German Democratic Republic; and her latest work raises the question of how—or whether at all—the profoundly contradictory experiences of the GDR may be located within the new Germany; or, for that matter, within the new Europe.
It is perfectly true that, if Christa Wolf was any kind of dissident at all within the GDR, she was, in the words of one conservative critic, ‘the wrong kind.’ After a Nazi-era childhood in Landsberg—then in Germany, east of the Oder; now Gorzów Wielkopolski in Poland—she joined the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or SED) at the University of Leipzig after the war, where she studied under the author of The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch.7 In her own words she was at that time a loyal comrade, ‘eine gute Genossin.’ For Wolf, as for many of her post-war contemporaries, the SED's analysis of the chaos that they had just lived through not only made sense of the Nazi period but also guaranteed that such things would never happen again. As a gifted young writer and party loyalist she was co-opted onto the Executive Committee of the Writers’ Union in 19558 and by 1963 she was well enough regarded by the authorities to have become a candidate member of the Central Committee of the SED.9
But just as the bumblebee is said to defy all the known laws of aerodynamics when it flies, so Christa Wolf's writings have often soared in complexity, in delicacy, and in their willingness to explore uncomfortable truths far above the somewhat hobnailed politics of the Writers’ Union of the GDR. By the mid-sixties, Wolf was in the forefront of the ‘new wave’ of cultural renewal and experiment in poetry, prose and film that swept through Eastern Europe in the wake of the Khruschevite thaw. Her third novel, The Quest for Christa T., published in 1968, explicitly rejected the diktats of socialist realist fiction by taking as its subject a person who is avowedly ‘unexemplary,’ ‘a life that can't be used as a model.’ Christa T., the central character of the book, first comes to the narrator's attention when they are both still at school when she throws back her head in the middle of the street and blows an imaginary blast on an imaginary trumpet: hooohaaahooo. A note is sounded for freedom.
PAINFUL PLEASURES
The novel charts the important but uneasy relationship between the two girls as they grow to womanhood with the maturing of the new Germany. In comparison to the narrator, Christa T. is a figure of physical confidence and freedom, tearing across the beach in her swimming costume, slim and brown and laughing, as she chases an enormous red and white beachball for her child. She is a force for renewal, arguing passionately that one should ‘never let things become finished, that they should always be originating’; and for self-expression, someone who ‘won't let herself be deprived of the right to live according to the laws of her own being.’
But Wolf evokes the experience of the generation that grew up in East Germany after the Nazi era—the little girl's sensitivity to the casual horrors of the war, and the inner anguish that stays with her after it; the painful pleasures of her intellectual discoveries at university in bomb-blasted Leipzig; the tightly-bound combination of ‘certainty and insecurity’ with which her generation set out to build the new ‘socialist order’; and the slow emptying-out of that dream in the years that follow as the passionate late-night debates turn into sterile state monologues; the young woman's struggle with the compromises of teaching, with marriage and bringing up her daughters—only to question it in the most stark and poignant form.
For Christa T. begins to sense that the future that her generation is striving for is always being pushed along in front of them, that they will never really catch up with it. Insistently, she demands of the narrator, ‘Are you really living today, at this moment?’ Near the end of her life, she begins to feel like a caged animal, that she cannot break out of the deadly welter of banal actions and clichés. In evoking this restless, unsettling, demanding personality, someone who never really fits in, Wolf brings to life all the difficult, desirable, troubling things that a good society should make space for and which the GDR, palpably, does not; for Christa T. dies of leukaemia in the mid-1960s, at the age of thirty-five.
SOCIALIST, NOT REALIST
Formally, as well as in its subject matter, The Quest for Christa T. breaks completely with the socialist realist mode. ‘Concrete episodes float like small islands within the stream of my thoughts: that is the structure of the novel,’ Wolf wrote when she began working on the book.10 The narrator's own complex feelings about her material, her hopes, her misgivings, her thinking as she writes, all form a part of this reconstructed life, the author's presence consciously permeating the text. ‘As I write, I search. This very search is what I must record, as honestly, as exactly as possible.’11 This ‘recording of the search’ within the writing process was something that Wolf was to take much further in her next major work, Kindheitsmuster, or Patterns of Childhood, translated in English as A Model Childhood. Here Wolf confronts the explosive subject of the Nazi era, not in the prescribed socialist realist mode of model anti-fascist heroes or exemplary instances of newly-raised class consciousness, but through the far more dangerous route of plunging back into her own subjective experience and childhood memories of growing up under Nazi rule and of her eager teenage participation in the Bund Deutscher Mädchen.12
The narrative of Kindheitsmuster operates simultaneously within three different time-frames: one strand of the narrative evokes the intense immediacy of a little girl's small-town life during the period 1933–46; a second layer recounts an exploratory journey undertaken in 1971 back to Wolf's native town, east of the Oder. The third strand tracks the author's own struggle to go back into her past during the actual period of writing the manuscript, between 1972 and 1975: the faltering, sometimes frightening processes of remembrance, the internal and external pressures to conform. The author's consciousness of herself as a historical subject thus becomes a conscious dimension of the work, the ‘author's dimension’: the problem of the writing, in Karin McPherson's phrase, is ‘made transparent in the narration itself.’13
CINEMA AND LITERATURE
‘Prose should strive to be unfilmable,’14 Wolf has written: meaning that, in an age dominated by the visual image, narrative prose can only win a role for itself by doing that which cannot be done in any other medium; by evoking, for example, the multi-dimensionality of consciousness, the sense of depth that feeling and association, memory, comparison, awareness of past and future, bring to the lived present moment of human experience, and which what Wolf calls the ‘flat’ visual medium of film cannot approach—unless it resorts to the use of an accompanying monologue or, in other words, to spoken narrative prose.
The prose of Kindheitsmuster is in this sense supremely ‘unfilmable,’ gliding as effortlessly as thought between memory, dream, and experience: from the recollection that comes into the narrator's head on the car journey east, for example, of the cleaning girl who had told her, when she was eight, of how the girl and her family had hidden in the basement, crying, on the night in 1933 when ex-Communist Party members in their town had burnt the Party flags—for they were communists—to the local newspaper's accounts of the event (‘the population of L. stood shoulder-to-shoulder along the main streets, waiting for the SS and SA torchlight parade …’); to the writer's own search for the experiences that would evoke the complex reality of that night—what were the people's feelings as they lined the streets? Were there any beads of sweat—of fear? Did their palms grow damp as they waited? The narrative slips into the third person to see that world again through the little child who was there: ‘One had to watch adults’ eyes, not their mouths, when they spoke.’ Their eyes began to glitter when they pronounced certain words: ‘oversexed’; ‘consumption’; ‘alien blood.’
Published in 1976, Kindheitsmuster established Christa Wolf's importance as a writer on the world stage just as the relative cultural thaw in East Germany that had accompanied the post-1971 détente with the Federal Republic came to an abrupt and traumatic end. In the autumn of 1976, the SED authorities clamped down hard on the independent culture that had begun to flourish in the GDR—partly, perhaps, motivated by fear of contamination from the strike wave that had erupted in Poland that summer, partly through authoritarian impatience with the critical and independent Left that was beginning to emerge in East Germany, encouraged by contacts with the radical groups in West Berlin.
AN ENEMY OF SOCIALISM
The sudden turn was signalled by the refusal to allow the dissident leftist singer Wolf Biermann to return home to the GDR after performing at a concert in Cologne. Those who had signed an open letter of protest about Biermann's treatment, Wolf included, were described by Vice-Minister of Culture Klaus Höpcke as ‘enemies of socialism’ and were singled out for punishment. Wolf's flat was placed under surveillance, Wolf was removed from the Executive Committee of the Writers’ Union and her husband, the writer and critic Gerhard Wolf, was expelled from both the Writers’ Union and the Party. Soon afterwards, Wolf suffered a heart attack.15
It is this period that Wolf describes in What Remains, written in 1979, an intensely realised interior monologue, some sixty pages long, in which the writer attempts to chart the inner landscape of her own fear in the face of hostile state surveillance. It begins from the moment that the narrator gets up in the morning, to peer out of her window to check whether the car is still there in the car-park across the street: a car ‘with three stout, able-bodied young men in it,’ with their nylon jackets and thermos flasks, watching her flat. The narrative tracks the course of those ‘incessant interior monologues’ in which the narrator finds herself trapped, tracing the mounting levels of her fear as it rises towards semi-hysteria, and her shocked sense of paralysis as she realises that she has been staring out of the window towards the car park, transfixed, for an interminable length of time. Battling with the inner voices of her fear, the narrator gropes for a ‘self’ who will act in this situation—‘I myself. But who was that? Which of the multiple beings from which “myself” was composed? The one that wanted to know itself? The one that wanted to protect itself? Or that third one that was still tempted to dance to the same tune as the young gentlemen there outside my door?’
The course of the day that follows is permeated by the awareness of the shadowy army of the police state: of the third ear present in the phone conversation, of the other, unknown readers of her mail. Yet it ends with a moment of epiphany that recalls the ‘forward yearning’ towards what has ‘not-yet-become’ of Wolf's old teacher, Ernst Bloch.16 The narrator gives a public reading at a cultural centre. In the discussion that follows, a young woman introduces the word ‘future’—‘a word we're all helpless against and which is capable of changing the atmosphere of any room,’ thinks the narrator. How was a liveable future for themselves and for their children to grow out of the present situation? While the writer is shaken with fear on the young woman's behalf, other hands go up, repeating and enlarging the theme. The frozen isolation of the writer's day, so chillingly evoked, gives way in the semi-darkness of the auditorium to the sudden, surprising warmth of human solidarity. The problematic ‘I, myself’ resolves itself simply and movingly as the ‘terrible habit of speaking for others’ fades away and ‘everyone spoke for themselves.’
HOPES AND FEARS
It is the impetus of this discussion that makes the narrator pick up her pen to write. What remains, what will remain, of the socialist project? What is still true? Those who would attack Wolf for political cowardice in 1990 missed the point. The enduring value of What Remains lies not in any heroism against the state but precisely in its nerve-tingling evocation of the inner world of a genuine political fear, an experience which has not, alas, been banished by the defeat of world communism; although the contradictory yearning for the values that one once shared with that same state is perhaps specific to those suffering repression under a regime of pseudo- or would-be progressive aspirations.
The manuscript of What Remains could not, of course, be published in the East. Christa Wolf turned instead to history, exploring the theme of the alienation of the writer under censorship through the experience of the early German Romantics in No Place on Earth (1979) and that of militarism and male domination in Cassandra (1983), her superb evocation of the Trojan War.17
It was not until the autumn of 1989, when protesters had thronged to the candlelight vigils outside the Gethsemane Church, when the Monday evening demonstrations in Leipzig had swelled from hundreds to tens of thousands, and when a million had marched for reform through the streets of East Berlin, that Christa Wolf got out the manuscript of What Remains and reworked it—to what extent, we do not know. Arguably, it might have been better if, at this stage, Wolf had made use of the multi-layered prose that she had developed in Kindheitsmuster in order to signal within the text the changes that she made in 1989; or, perhaps, to have situated the earlier text within a later one; although none of this would have made any difference to the storm that broke over her head when What Remains was published in the summer of 1990.
By that time, the brief moment of East Germany's ‘October revolution’ was long gone. The huge popular movement for reform had collapsed in the face of an even larger fact: that of the Federal Republic, the huge, powerful and, above all, fully functioning state next door. Into the vacuum thus created in the East rushed the triumphalist ideologues of the West, ready to do battle with the last vestiges of GDR culture; and Christa Wolf, as has been seen, was made to stand in for the rest.
But the Literaturstreit that followed the publication of What Remains quickly passed beyond the question of Christa Wolf's relationship to the literary establishment of the old regime to take up the role of German literature as a whole.18 In an echo of the calls made during the German ‘Historians’ Dispute’ of 1986 for Germany to be done with berating itself about the concentration camps and become a ‘normal’ country like the rest,19 both Ulrich Greiner and Frank Schirrmacher went on from their attacks on What Remains to argue that it was time for German literature to become ‘normal,’ too. Literature in both East and West Germany had been burdened for too long by the ‘extra-literary tasks’ imposed by the shadow of Auschwitz, it was argued. Art had not been allowed to be itself. Instead, it had been constantly enlisted in the service of some other cause—‘bourgeois morality, the class struggle, humanistic goals or ecological catastrophe.’ Now, with German unification, the situation had at last changed. German literature and morality need no longer continue with their ‘marriage of convenience.’20
RETURNING TO NORMALITY
In an article entitled ‘Farewell to the Literature of the Federal Republic,’21 published on the eve of unification, Schirrmacher called for a ‘paradigm shift’ away from the writers who had dominated West German literature since the Sixties—Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Uwe Johnson, Peter Weiss, Erich Fried and others—referring to them as ‘Zivilisationsliteraten’ types who, obsessed with a moral-historical coming-to-terms with the fascist past, were preventing literary history from flowing on its ‘normal’—that is, purely literary—course.
The persuasively energetic conservative literary theorist Karl Heinz Bohrer also welcomed the chance to be done with socially committed literature from both East Germany and West. Bohrer had already argued that the moral burden of Auschwitz had merely tightened the Enlightenment strait-jacket that had restricted German literature since Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. Evil and laughter, the two great exponents of the ‘uncontrolled imagination,’ had been made taboo by an extra-literary ‘consciousness of responsibility’21 in response to the horrors of the concentration camps—a curious charge, one might think, to lay against the author of The Tin Drum. The ‘art for art's sake’ tradition of French symbolism, English aestheticism and high modernism had been placed under quarantine. Bohrer called instead for a return not just to the powerful tradition of German Romanticism—to which, of course, Christa Wolf and other GDR writers had turned in search of models of censored, alienated, free-roaming fore-bearers—but for a literary practice that would ‘rescue the eternal in art from the transience of the present.’23 Paradigmatically, in twentieth century terms, Ernst Jünger versus Heinrich Böll.24
Christa Wolf's Medea comes to us, then, charged with the political and ideological context in which it was written. It is, first of all, a rebuttal of the Right's call for a divorce between German literature, morality and politics, for this is a novel concerned above all with social themes; an allegory, in part, of the recent history of the two German states. It is a story about the workings of power and the failure of opposition, set in the darkest of times; about the nature of fear and about the creation of a scapegoat onto which the community's own worst fears can be projected, in order to safeguard the rule of power.
THE CORINTHIAN SHORE
As in Cassandra, Wolf manages to evoke the sensuous reality of the Bronze Age world with the simplest of touches: Medea sitting on a coil of rope on the Argo's deck, the night sky above her, the waters calm, the waves washing quietly against the sides of the ship; or the stone-hewn corridors of the palace of Corinth, the entrance to the secret passageway hidden behind an animal pelt on the wall. But, in contrast to the luminous sunsets of Cassandra's Troy, the landscape here is dark and harsh, the Black Sea troubled. Medea flees her homeland with Jason and his Argonauts under cover of the night and arrives beneath low, forbidding clouds on the gloomy Corinthian shore; she crawls in darkness through the mud and rock of the underground passages that lie beneath the palace of Corinth, following the mad old queen, to discover the bones—the ‘meagre, childish skull, fine-boned shoulder blades, brittle spinal column’—that are the evidence of the murderous secret on which rests King Creon's power.
Images of sickness and death pervade the novel; earthquake and plague bring forebodings of the country's fall. Corinth is described as being in the grip of a malady, a disease that ‘might at any moment take a self-destructive turn’; its people live in a state of constant terror, dependent on the tiniest changes in the atmosphere surrounding the powerful, so that the real terror, the earthquake, seems to many like a liberation when it comes.
The story is recounted in the form of eleven interior monologues, each voice itself seeming to arise out of its own interior darkness, each one driven by fear or uneasiness, by hatred, ambition, distrust. Jason here is a weak and troubled figure with his glory-days long behind him and the Argo rotting in dry-dock. He struggles to keep abreast of the faction fights in the palace, deeply alarmed by Medea's rash desire to uncover the truth. Clever, resentful, scheming Agameda, once Medea's favourite pupil, is determined to make a success of her new life in Corinth and plots Medea's downfall in a series of secret palace meetings with the king's chief political advisor, Akamas: ‘We made a game of our plans, which grew more and more refined, and played it in an unreal atmosphere, as though no one could be affected by our playing. If one wishes to think freely and effectively at the same time, this is a very useful method …’ The monologues overlap, succeeding one another, building to a sense of doom: the outcome seems closed from the start, predetermined by the balance of forces. The self-interest of those in power will vanquish those who question the grounds on which that power rests.
THE DANGERS OF MEMORY
Memory here is not, as in Kindheitsmuster, an active, reappropriating force, chasing down the historical truth through layer after layer of suppression, denial, forgetfulness, but rather something that is itself under threat: the true nature of quite recent events seems to disappear even as one speaks of them. ‘But you know the real story,’ Medea says to her loyal maid when the rumours that she has killed her own brother first start to circulate. ‘I know it. I'll always know it,’ Lyssa replies, and Medea understands: ‘that meant that not everyone always would.’ The evocation of the past has become a slippery, often dangerous business, unleashing the furies of fundamentalism in Colchis and, in Corinth, the hunger for a return to human sacrifice in order to appease the vengeful gods. ‘We can't deal with the fragments of the past anyway we like,’ Medea comes to feel, ‘piecing them together or ripping them apart just to suit our convenience …’
The rebellious woman as outsider, questioning and testing the values of her society and its ability to enable ‘the free development of all’ has always played a crucial role in Christa Wolf's fiction. In The Quest for Christa T., the very purpose of the work itself is an attempt to integrate the challenging, difficult, desirable qualities of this outsider into the narrator's culture. The heroine of Cassandra—written between 1980 and 1983, when both the international women's movement and the pan-German and pan-European peace movements that arose against the siting of American nuclear missiles in the UK and West Germany were asserting themselves most strongly—finds her warnings go unheeded and has to break her ties with the Palace; but she does so in the context of an alternative world, that of the Cybele-worshippers on the slopes of Mount Ida, the religion of her old nurse and maidservant; of the people who meet at the old teacher Anchises's house, outside the city, to talk, to eat and drink, to ‘live their freedom.’ ‘“They” exist!’ cries Cassandra, at one point. There is a place for her in the rebel culture, outside the walls.
Medea, too, would seem to possess all the qualities that the Corinthians need: she is a healer, something of a new age figure in fact, who believes in the free flow of all life forces and in the emotions as a creative source of thought, whereas the class-conscious Corinthians are reserved and suspicious, their bodies stiff, their faces distorted and tight-lipped. Medea is brave enough to confront the truth and thinks the Corinthians should do the same; they are afraid, and can deal with their fear only by shifting it on to her.
MEDEA'S FLIGHT
But Medea is alienated from the society around her to a far greater degree than any of her predecessors in Wolf's work and is, from the start, far more alone than they. Chased from her own homeland, she is a foreigner in Corinth, a city where outsiders are despised as dangerous and inferior breeds, distanced by court intrigue from her conformist husband and cut off, too, from her fellow Colchian refugees, who have ‘jerry-built themselves a dream world out of pure grief and homesickness, and out of rage at the treatment they get from the Corinthians’—another example of a utopia gone sour.25 Nor does she have any identification with the Corinthian women, who seem to her like ‘tamed house pets’ while to them Medea is a wild woman, a barbarian. In the end, vilified, spat upon, rejected, nothing is left to her but to curse the Corinthians and their state. ‘Is it possible to imagine a world, a time, where I would have a place?’ Medea asks, at the end of the book. ‘There's no one I could ask. That's the answer.’
In Wolf's earlier works, the figure of the rebellious woman has herself always been torn by conflict, experiencing within herself the tensions between conformity and self-expression, between comfortable denial and hard truth. In Medea, on the contrary, Medea is ‘an innocent victim, free of inner conflict,’ utterly convinced of her own rightness. As Leukon—the Corinthian intellectual whose fate is to understand everything yet to be able to do nothing—puts it, ‘the rift did not run through her, but gaped between her and those who had slandered and condemned her, who drove her through the city, insulted her, spat upon her.’
This idealization of the scapegoated victim is not necessarily helpful in the writer's avowed aim of rescuing Medea from our misjudgement—from a misjudgement ‘of her and of ourselves,’ as Wolf puts it in the short Foreword to Medea, the only place in the narration where we hear the writer's own voice. Lacking ambivalence and inner conflict, Medea is also denied the ability to grow through conflict, to develop. In the past, Wolf has used the ‘writer's dimension’ to introduce problems of doubt and ambivalence, to continue to ask difficult questions even where there are no answers to give; and also, importantly, to provide a work of prose fiction with its necessary element of what Wolf has called ‘contemporaneity and commitment.’26 In The Quest for Christa T.,Kindheismuster and Accident, this dimension forms a conscious part of the narration itself, while Cassandra was published together with an accompanying set of essays on the context of its creation, so that a sense of the problematics of the fictional undertaking accompanies us as we read. In Medea, by contrast, there is only this brief Foreword to suggest what our relationship might be with ‘this uneasy shape that seeks to step out from the shadows of misjudgement,’ this wild woman ‘in whom our time meets us.’
TIGHT-LIPPED RESISTANCE
In the context of its times, of the vicious and uncalled-for attacks on Christa Wolf in the German Literaturstreit, this reticence may seem an understandable defensiveness: Medea may be read as a novel of resistance, tight-lipped but brave; but there is, nevertheless, a feeling about it of a mouth clamped shut. It would be ironic indeed if the triumphant ride of the free-market cultural juggernaut across the German Republic were to lead to the extinction of such painstaking explorations of the individual subject's role in making and being made by history as Wolf has given us in the past.
Christa Wolf's work has always contained a tension between the yearning for a better future and the bleak reality of the present world: the young Christa T. jumps up from the communist pamphlets she has been reading, thinking, ‘Yes, this is the way to ourselves,’ only to be confronted with the brutality outside her window where a group of schoolboys are smashing a nestful of magpie's eggs against a rock. Nevertheless, the element of hope has always been present, represented in Kindheitsmuster by the free and independent-minded figure of the narrator's daughter, Lenka, and by the young woman who speaks the word ‘future’ at the Cultural Centre meeting in What Remains. In Cassandra, the women on the slopes of Mount Ida, knowing that they are lost, still speculate about who will come after them and what message for the future they might leave.
In Medea the only basis for hope seems to lie in the tiny artists’ community that Medea stumbles across when, pursued by the Corinthian mob through the plague-struck city into an area of narrow paths and squat clay hovels, she is rescued by the sculptor, Oistros. The sculptor's house is a place of calm and creativity, where people can still talk freely, ‘people who won't let themselves be dragged into the gears that turn the Corinthian cosmos.’ At the end of the book, Medea declares herself to be without hope, without fear: ‘free.’ Posterity, she has been assured, will know her only as a child-murderess. But Oistros, the sculptor, is still working, his house damaged but not totally destroyed by the earthquake. He is struggling to carve a sculpture of figures locked in a furious, endless embrace.
‘The need to write in a new way follows a new way of living in the world,’ Wolf wrote in 1973.27 Either ‘we can announce … that the death of prose is nigh …’ or ‘“honestly” admit our failure and act accordingly by lapsing into silence … A third possibility remains: to try to stand one's ground, by continuing to produce. To stand one's ground against whom? And why?’
Notes
-
I would like to thank Gus Fagan for kindly giving me access to his archive on the Literaturstreit and related material, and Gareth Dale for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this review. I would also like to express my gratitude to Renate Rechtien and Inge Weber-Newth for allowing me to attend a stimulating seminar on Christa Wolf at the University of North London in May, 1998; to Tariq Ali for his critical reading of earlier drafts, and much else; and to Robin Blackburn and Sebastian Budgen for their encouragement and help.
-
Ulrich Greiner, ‘Keiner ist frei von Schuld,’ Die Zeit, 27 July 1990.
-
Ibid.
-
Frank Schirrmacher, ‘Dem Druck des härteren, strengeren Lebens standhalten,’ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 2 June 1990. Cited in Stephen Brockmann, ‘The Reunification Debate,’ New German Critique 52, Winter 1991.
-
Ian Buruma, ‘There's No Place Like Heimat,’ New York Review of Books, 20 December 1990.
-
Andreas Huyssen, ‘After the Wall: The Failure of German Intellectuals,’ New German Critique 52, Winter 1991.
-
For a discussion of the influence on Wolf's work of Bloch's philosophy, see Jack Zipes, Introduction to Divided Heaven, New York 1976; Andreas Huyssen, ‘Auf den Spuren Ernst Blochs. Nachdenken über Christa Wolf,’ in Klaus Sauer, ed., Christa Wolf Materialienhuch, 1979, cited in Robert Sayre and Michael Löwy, ‘Romanticism as a Feminist Vision: The Quest of Christa Wolf,’ New German Critique 64, Winter 1995. Huyssen suggests that Bloch may be the original of the figure of Anchises in Wolf's Cassandra, the wise old teacher ‘who taught us to hope with our feet on the ground.’ (‘His mouth is laughing,’ Cassandra's maid points out, ‘but his high, bald forehead is sad.’ Christa Wolf, Cassandra, London 1984, p 91.)
-
In 1959, Wolf moved with her young family to the industrial city of Halle and took up work in a railway factory, in accordance with the Party line that socialist writers should immerse themselves in the life of the industrial proletariat. The experience was reflected in her second novel, Divided Heaven, Halle 1963 (New York 1976). It was during this period that Wolf herself collaborated—somewhat ineffectually—with the Stasi, an episode pounced upon by her critics when the files were published in 1993.
-
Her candidature was revoked when Wolf refused to support the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
-
‘Interview with Myself’ (1966) in Christa Wolf, The Writer's Dimension, London 1993; Die Dimension des Autors, Berlin and Weimar 1986.
-
Ibid.
-
German Girls’ League, the girls’ equivalent of the Hitler Youth.
-
Karin McPherson, Introduction, The Fourth Dimension: Interviews with Christa Wolf, London 1988.
-
Christa Wolf, ‘Reading and Writing,’ The Writer's Dimension.
-
See Robert Sayre and Michael Löwy, ‘Romanticism as a Feminist Vision: The Quest of Christa Wolf.’
-
Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Massachusetts 1995.
-
Cassandra, far more than What Remains, is the work in which Christa Wolf explores the sense of guilt of one who feels that she has conformed for too long with the dictates of those in power. Cassandra, the proud and privileged priestess and seer, King Priam's favourite daughter, berates herself again and again for how slow she has been to take a stand, how her privileges have intruded between herself and the ‘most necessary insights,’ how the differences that she had taken such pride in between herself and the rigidly conformist old priestess amounted to little more than ‘inner reservations.’ She recalls with shame the time she cried out to Eumelos, the Chief of Police, ‘Believe me! I want the same things you people do!’ to which Eumelos replies, with pursed lips, ‘Excellent. Then you will support our measures,’ and leaves her standing there ‘like a dumb clod.’ Why, Cassandra asks herself, when she finally did discover the truth, that there is no Helen, that the Trojan War is being fought simply over access to the Dardanelles and for the honour of the House of Priam, why did she not say so to the people? Why only tell Eumelos? ‘Because the Eumelos inside me forbade it.’ And when finally she does manage to stand up in the Council and say ‘No’ to Priam, what pain she feels at the loss of ‘everything that she has called “father”.’
-
For the key texts of the Literaturstreit see Thomas Anz, ed., Es geht nicht um Christa Wolf: Der Literaturstreit im vereinten Deutschland, Munich 1991. In English, Keith Bullivant, The Future of German Literature, Oxford 1994; Stephen Brockmann, ‘The Politics of German Literature,’ Monatshefte, vol. 84, no. 1, 1992; see also the special issue of New German Critique 52, Winter 1991.
-
The 1986 Historikerstreit or ‘Historians’ Dispute’ over twentieth-century German history began with an article by Ernst Nolte, ‘Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will’ (‘The Past that Will Not Go Away’), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 6 June 1986, which immediately drew forth powerful responses from Jürgen Habermas and others. Nolte argued for a ‘relativization’ of the concentration camps and of the ‘so-called annihilation of the Jews’ in the context of other crimes against humanity, echoing the German right's long-standing demand for ‘the decriminalization of our history as the precondition for a normal national consciousness’ (‘Erklärung des Deutschlandrats vom Dezember 1983,’ Nation Europa 34.1, January 1984). Thus Franz Josef Strauss, leader of the Bavarian CSU for example: ‘We must end the attempt to limit German history to the twelve years of Hitler. We must emerge from the dismal Third Reich and become a normal nation again.’ (The New York Times, 13 January 1987). Both cited in Hans-Georg Betz, ‘Deutschlandpolitik,’ New German Critique 44, Spring/Summer 1988.
-
Ulrich Greiner, ‘Die deutsche Gesinnungsästhetik,’ Die Zeit, 8 October 1990. Cited in Bullivant, p. 6.
-
Frank Schirrmacher, ‘Abschied von der Literatur der Bundesrepublik,’ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 2 October 1990.
-
Karl Heinz Bohrer, Nach der Natur, 1988. Cited in Brockmann, ‘The Politics of German Literature,’ p. 52.
-
Karl Heinz Bohrer, ‘Die Ästhetik am Ausgang ihrer Unmündigkeit’ Merkur 43, 1990.
-
Stephen Brockmann points out that Sascha Anderson, the ‘entrepreneurial literary spirit’ behind East Berlin's supposedly oppositional Prenzlauer Berg poetry movement and one of the more perfidious Stasi agents on the GDR literary scene, was also advocating an art-for-art's-sake autonomy from social and political engagement. See Stephen Brockmann, ‘German Literary Debates after the Collapse,’ German Life and Letters vol. 47, no. 2 April 1994.
-
Marianne Macdonald points out that ‘In Africa, Haiti and Ireland, as in other colonized countries, performances of Medea (have been) staged as an affirmation of liberty. The play … is co-opted as a weapon directed at the oppressor's heart.’ See Marianne Macdonald, ‘Medea as Politician and Diva,’ in James J. Clauss and Sarah Iles Johnston, eds., Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy and Art, 1997.
-
Christa Wolf, ‘Reading and Writing,’ The Writer's Dimension.
-
Ibid.
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.