Christa Wolf

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Gesammelte Erzählungen

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SOURCE: A review of Gesammelte Erzählungen, in World Literature Today, Vol. 64, No. 2, Spring, 1990, p. 303.

[In the following review, Blomster discusses the value of the content in Gesammelte Erzählungen.]

“One has to have attended Christa Wolf's readings in the GDR to realize how her moral authority has grown with the years,” wrote Marlies Menge in Die Zeit in the days following the catastrophic fortieth-anniversary celebration in the author's homeland. “Questions are put to her not as an author but as a prophet.” Read in the light of current events, the seven short narratives collected in Gesammelte Erzählungen (they were written between 1960 and 1971) strike the reader with a cogency that validates Menge's observation. Even in “Blickwechsel,” the 1960 story that touches upon experiences more fully developed in Christa T. (1968) and Kindheitsmuster (1977; see WLT 51:4, p. 611), there is an undertow of troubled discontent that clearly anticipates the unhappy situation in which the GDR has found itself in recent months.

Since the Aufbau Verlag exercises its now-customary editorial frugality, bibliographic information will be of value to the reader of Wolf's collection. “Dienstag,” first printed in the West in 1980, makes its first East German appearance here. “Juninachmittag” was published (in German) in both Denmark and Japan before Luchterhand included it in the West German Gesammelte Erzählungen of 1980 (see WLT 55:2, p. 310). “Unter den Linden,” the Hoffmannesque “Neue Lebensansichten eines Katers,” and “Selbstversuch” all were part of Aufbau's Unter den Linden of 1974. “Kleiner Ausflug nach H.” from the 1980 Luchterhand collection makes its GDR debut here. It is regrettable that Moskauer Novelle, Wolf's first major effort, could not have been included as well. The long novella, first published in 1961, has not been reprinted since 1966 and is today not readily available. The Aufbau Gesammelte Erzählungen is one of many publications honoring Wolf on her sixtieth birthday in 1989.

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The Alienation of ‘I’: Christa Wolf and Militarism