Christa Wolf

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Sommerstück

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SOURCE: A review of Sommerstück, in World Literature Today, Vol. 63, No. 4, Autumn, 1989, p. 674.

[In the following review, Blomster offers a mixed assessment of Sommerstück.]

Sommerstück, a loosely woven recollection of an idyllic Mecklenburg summer, is Christa Wolf's 1987 reworking of sketches made in 1982 and 1983; they are in part a by-product of Kein ort. Nirgends (see WLT 53:4, p. 671), which she wrote several years earlier. Although the author concludes her new work with the customary disclaimer about the actuality of persons and events depicted, there is much here that invites autobiographical decoding. Indeed, the book is clearly a Künstlernovelle, in which the central figure is a no-longer-young writer (Wolf turned sixty in April) who experiences a crisis in her relationship to the word. “Unbefangenheit,” that cherished naïveté which Thomas Mann's Gustav von Aschenbach sought to regain in 1911, is no longer hers. She is caught up in the contradiction between the desire to create and the consciousness of her own inadequacy. Art, she stresses, must be nourished with bits of the self of its creator.

A panorama of characters, largely couples of intellectual bent, seek refuge from the city and the society it represents in thatched rural homes of the northern Democratic Republic and in the anachronistic bucolic beauty of the region. All are aware, however, of the deception in which they are involved. The once-magnificent permanence of their surroundings underscores the transitory nature of their own lives. As in Rilke's Duino Elegies, the things of this world are rapidly losing their contours; their salvation is beyond the reach of those who sense the devastating decay that threatens their lives. Moreover, it is from this perspective that Sommerstück is a sequel to Wolf's earlier work Nachdenken über Christa T., wherein a boy who bit the head from a frog pointed to the ills of the new society. Here a mole that comes up out of the ground, its hind quarters infested with worms, becomes a symbol of the age. Elsewhere most readers will want to see Wolf's friend Maxi Wander behind Steffi, the woman here dying of cancer who is the central figure's principal protagonist in the final section of the book. Wolf identifies her disease with the “social cancer” of the age.

Sommerstück is an interesting and revealing—if largely unsuccessful—work. Wolf herself defines the difficulty that she was not able to overcome in assembling her collage of individual stories; it was, she states, “as always, blending the simultaneity of many events into a linear narrative.” The book is slated for publication in the GDR by Aufbau in a special edition with drawings by Harwig Hamer.

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