SOURCE: “Who's Afraid of Christa Wolf?,” in Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 3, 1992, pp. 213–21.

[In the following essay, Juers discusses Wolf's concept of “subjective authenticity” and her abiding moral authority as a critic and author despite controversy surrounding Was bleibt.]

The title of Christa Wolf's latest work, Was bleibt, is conspicuously without a question mark—that form of punctuation, or as she has deployed it in her writing, anti-punctuation, which has become a significant feature of her literary signature. ‘Was bleibt’ could mean ‘what remains’ in the sense of ‘what remains to be done,’ or more pitifully, ‘what else could we have done’ (‘was blieb uns übrig’). Or perhaps more exactly, ‘what is/will be left’ (in the sense of ‘when this whole mess is cleaned up’); or it could mean something more positive, an abbreviation of ‘etwas bleibt’ (‘etwas muss bleiben’), to suggest that out of the chaos—that was and in a way still is the GDR—surely some good must be salvaged. Finally the title also carries a more personal message, about growing old, and scanning the significance of one's life. Was bleibt is both the culmination of this author's work and her casting around for new beginnings.¹ Set in the ‘last days’ of East Berlin (the story is actually set in 1979: thus the decline of East Berlin was being recorded on Christa Wolf's calendar for at least a decade), a day in the life of the author, its continuous present documents the self-destruction of a place and a time but not of the central character, who is threatened but holds firm, just as we have seen it before in Wolf's earlier works, Moskauer Novelle (Moscow Novella), Der geteilte Himmel (Divided Heaven), Nachdenken über Christa T. (The Quest for Christa T.), Kein ort. Nirgends (No Place on Earth), and Kassandra (Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays).² ‘Holding firm’ suggests a special sense of gravity. It is this sense of gravity in the work of Christa Wolf that I wish to explore now.

Christa Wolf has argued that ‘pure literary criticism is often a mistake’—

If critics cannot bring themselves to relate their own observations to the subjectivity expressed in the book, if they can't openly adopt a position on it, then their criticism will always be constricted … Some critics try to hide behind a pseudo-objectivity, but their own personal inhibitions as people and as literary critics are so obvious in every line they write that one is forced to laugh.³

Christa Wolf is not joking. Indeed, most often, she is critic and novelist tightly coiled into one. It would be terrible, therefore, to make such a mistake—as a critic, to forget my subjectivity in response to her work, to commit pseudo-objectivity and be laughed at. For this author's laughter would be no ordinary laughter. It would be serious. It would weigh down my conscience as the impact of her work already weighs down my mind.

This is the reason. Christa Wolf has led a literary and critical crusade against indifference and for subjectivity, or as she calls it, subjective authenticity.⁴ It has been suggested that her reputation as an internationally acclaimed writer is based specifically on her seriousness as a writer on moral questions.

However, placing aesthetics in the service of ethics and becoming subjectively authentic has not been easy for her. Firstly, it was unfashionable and secondly, it was uncomfortable. For in its most immediate expression, ‘subjective authenticity’ is wholly dependent on the most consistently intense physical and emotional reactions. I would not like to postulate that there is no complexity in this process and I would not like to suggest that there is no pleasure. But it seems that in the work of Christa Wolf the purest form of subjective authenticity is in the experience of pain. Angst (fear), Schreck (shock), Zorn (anger), Enttäuschung (disappointment), Kummer (grief), Unruhe (anxiety), Schlaflosigkeit (insomnia), Trostlosigkeit (despair), Beklemmung (oppression), Verletzungen (injury), blankes Grauen (sheer dread): such is the catalogue of pain from her latest and shortest novel. And this is how she describes it there: ‘Der rasende, blanke Schmerz hatte von mir Besitz ergriffen, sich in mir eingenistet und ein anderes Wesen aus mir gemacht’ (I was possessed of an intensely violent pain, which had colonised me and transformed me entirely). What kind of pain? The pain of alienation. ‘Ich war in der Fremde’ (I was in a foreign land).⁵

From hope, desire, the appreciation of a friendship, food, landscape, from humour, even from wit, but most often from fear and pain—deep and terrible wounds which through description and inscription she will not allow to heal—from the realm of emotions there comes what she has called an ‘effervescence’ and a ‘tingling,’ like an electric current transmitting messages. It is produced from an accumulated ‘inner restlessness,’ like a migration of feelings within the territory of one person. It is also a call to action as she describes it, in her case the act of writing and speaking and remembering, and even prophesying. The author is like the Cassandra of Aeschylus: ‘… in [whose] muttered fear lies more than meets the sight: with stunning pain, like a brute serpent's bite, her whispered cry crashes upon the ear.’⁶

The reader's ear. For like Cassandra, the experience of painful knowledge is not something Christa Wolf wishes to keep to herself. One of her aims in writing is to let the reader share in the work of creating her fictions, to let the reader see the author, to inspire what she has called ‘productive tensions between the author and the reader.’

Another of her aims is that she would like literature ‘to drain every ounce of my energy.’⁷ Her energy and my energy. She was once asked, with all that intensity, and pain, and fear, and commitment, whether she did not run the risk of making herself ill. To which she answered that it's OK to write about illness too. This answer encourages me to make a rather blunt critical confession. I want to tell you that most of Christa Wolf's work gives me a headache. Having read and reread her work—of which there is a lot, novels, essays, stories, criticism, interviews, the work-ethic being an important part of her system of values—you can imagine how I've suffered, the packets of Disprin I've swallowed, wondering at times if this is what she really meant by effervescence. In the process of reading her works there is such an accumulation of anxiety and pain that what remains, when the headaches fade, is a firm conviction that she has succeeded in creating those necessary productive tensions between herself the author and myself the reader.

It is not exactly an equal partnership however. I develop a creeping suspicion that the concept of ‘subjective authenticity’ is a form of authorial assertion, an enchantment of a kind, but also a shackling. The author/reader relationship feels terribly claustrophobic at times, overcrowded, as if one's immediate attention and involvement are being stretched beyond their capacity. I begin to think of the relationship as a trap, a new kind of Gothic, and for ‘authenticity’ I read ‘authority’—making the ruling concept ‘subjective authority.’

Christa Wolf says of her heroine Kassandra, ‘die Gefangene nahm mich gefangen’ (I was taken prisoner by the prisoner herself).⁸ For the reader this chain of imprisonment continues. As she describes in Was bleibt this process is no mere abstraction. There she gives the example of the young girl who turns up at her doorstep with a manuscript, which Christa Wolf reads and praises while she herself is under surveillance, her every move being ‘read’ and appraised. In talking to the girl the narrator finds out that she has just been released from a year in prison where she had been sterilised under cover of a kidney operation.

Through this meeting the author's own sense of imprisonment and paranoia are confirmed and sharpened. The ordinariness of her everyday existence as she relates its rituals—eating, writing, sleeping, phonecalls—takes on a very dark dimension. Imprisonment, imagined or real, is one thing. But involuntary sterilisation lifts it to the level of a great crime, against humanity and against women in particular. And it carries with it a certain awesome historical echo. The GDR is linked to Nazi Germany.

From the writer to reader to writer. This is indeed a curious circle. In the case of the Kassandra narrative, it begins with the author's desperate attempts to become a modern medium for the captured Trojan woman, lending her voice to Kassandra's enforced silence. From simple compassion—there is rape, murder, intrigue, enslavement, humiliation to hang our emotions on—the textual and intellectual and emotive density of the writing almost materialises a living Kassandra. Similarly, the author almost achieves a spiritual possession. ‘Sie besetzte mich’ Wolf says, ‘she claimed me.’⁹ The captured woman captivates. I stress the ‘almost’ because despite the strenuous effort the author doesn't quite reach her subject.

The phantom of Kassandra is established by the author's desire and obsession with prophecy, her Frankensteinian rendering of human fragments. As an important aspect of the pain-complex in Wolf's writing, failure is thus inevitably built into her texts. There is always the striving for ever more difficult questions of morality, from the past and from within the condition of subjective authenticity, which can never be perfectly achieved, of course. Always the falling short, leaving many questions unanswered. At such moments, first poised and tense, then collapsed in upon themselves—what Wolf herself has described variously as ‘das Zusammenbrechen aller Alternative’ (the failure of all alternatives), ‘Hoffnungsmüdigkeit’ (the exhaustion of hope), or simply ‘Verlorenheit’ (loss)—the reader, this reader, feels compassion more for Christa Wolf the writer in her Kafkaesque dilemma than for Kassandra the tragic heroine.¹⁰

Christa Wolf has more than once referred to her debt to readers. She has said that it is their direct criticism, their questions at public meetings, but above all their letters, which have sustained her as a writer, particularly at times when she was low on fuel for her creative phoenix.

It was the community of readers that would return the writer to herself, that would prove her existence when she was tending a barely flickering ‘subjective authenticity.’ Thus a morality of reciprocity is established—what Christa Wolf has called ‘Zusammenarbeit mit Andersdenkenden’ (collaboration with those whose thinking is at variance with one's own).¹¹ And just as the author never abandoned her unattainable subjects—be they the utopian state or the Trojan woman—so it becomes almost impossible for the suffering reader to abandon this author.

The bond is based on an understanding of the connection between speech and pain. Therefore Christa Wolf is afraid for the girl who visits her in Was bleibt; she wants to tell her that great talent is murdered in German prisons (making poignant use of the present tense); she wants to teach the girl about fear (‘fürchten lernen’ like in the fairy-tale) and about survival. In Kassandra Wolf writes (perhaps with reference to the creative potential of headaches): ‘Wer wird, und wann, die Sprache wiederfinden. Einer, dem ein Schmerz den Schädel spaltet, wird es sein.’ (Who will rediscover speech, and when. It will be someone whose skull is split open with pain).¹²

The reader necessarily becomes curious to know how this author obtained such a knowledge of pain, and turns to the biography for clues. Christa Wolf was born Christa Ihlenfeld in 1929 in Landsberg east of the Oder River. She attended high school there from 1939–1945. Her home town, which she revisited as an adult and which is the background of her autobiographical work, Kindheitsmuster (A Model Childhood), is now a Polish town.

Since she left Landsberg in the great postwar migration from East to West Christa Wolf has been a refugee, someone not-quite-at-home, living under a ‘divided heaven’ (the title of her second work), a condition which she calls in her last work, Was bleibt, ‘not being at home in her own place.’

And yet, remaining in Germany, indeed, proclaiming her socialist loyalty to the dream of a new Germany and writing in the German language and literary tradition, she does not appear to be an exile at all.

By the end of the war, when she was sixteen, however, ‘something had been seriously damaged’ and it became the sense of ‘something missing’ that inspired her to write.¹³ While the person had survived, the place and the time disintegrated around her. Kein ort. Nirgends, translated as No Place on Earth, is about that kind of exile, as is Kassandra and Was bleibt. A Model Childhood is a documentary of the ruins, an autobiographical reconstruction. The author has confessed she cannot identify with her own childhood character in that book. That child, she claims, is just one of several people wandering around inside her.¹⁴ Alienated from their time and place, they are resettled in a narrative time and place constituted by the author's ‘subjective authenticity,’ the latter in turn becoming a historical and geographical substitute for the ruins.

Christa Ihlenfeld was resettled in Mecklenburg. She destroyed the diary she had kept during the war. Studying German and Philosophy at university in Jena and Leipzig, she chose ‘realism’ for a thesis topic. Studying Marx she became a member of the SED, the Socialist Unity Party, in 1949. She married in 1951 and became Christa Wolf: all new beginnings. Above all she fell head over heels for the promised miracle of a new life in the GDR. It was an intense commitment. In an essay written in 1966 the enthusiasm still sparkled:

What we can say is that in this part of Germany, dominated by the Nazis twenty years ago and inhabited by embittered, confused and hate-filled people, the foundations have been laid for human beings to live reasonably together. Reason, we call it socialism, has penetrated into everyday life. It is the measure, the ideal, by which we judge how praise or blame is to be meted out. If we record this in our history books as a fact in our day and the decisive thing in our progress, I do not think we shall have to correct it later on.¹⁵

In the end, when the wall came down, becoming yet another ruin, Christa Wolf was still clinging to the socialist ideal that had been her lifeline. Now we may want to laugh instead. That is what a large section of the media has been doing. They had caught her, they thought, in the act of being hopelessly, historically, in the wrong. The moral prophetess who had so often admonished the West was now a mere puff-ball. That part of Germany of which Christa Wolf was so proud is no longer producing its own history books. As the GDR bureaucrats had been blinded by their politics so Christa Wolf had been blinded by her ideal.¹⁶

However, while she appeared to be unswerving in her adherence to socialism, as a student of literature in the 1950s, a critic, literary editor and member of the executive committee of the writers’ union, spokeswoman for socialist realism, dedicated communist, for a short time worker in a railway factory, writer, and later lecturer, Christa Wolf emerged somewhat obliquely but none the less vehemently, as a political dissident, a militant peace activist and a feminist. Most significant for her transformation, as chronicled in her work, has been the shift from ‘Sachlichkeit’ (objectivity) to ‘Innerlichkeit’ (subjectivity), from socialist realism to experiments with the dialectics of self, which she has also marked out as a progression from exclamation marks to question marks.

It has been a long and complicated stage of pupation. Not only had she been a candidate for the Communist Party's Central Committee from 1963–67, but for all her dissidence she still did not resign from the Party until 1989—at which some (rather self-righteous) critics have been horrified: it was just a little too late, they thought. They forgot, or did not want to relinquish their recent boost of Western Schadenfreude, to admit that she was always and increasingly outspokenly critical of GDR bureaucracy—indeed that she was herself more than once a victim of suspicious policy enforcements and a staunch supporter of other such victims.

Christa Wolf's admiration of the dissenting spirit was first most recognisably written into the heroine of The Quest for Christa T. published in 1968. For this she was severely criticised, her SED candidature was cancelled, and the book was not reprinted in the GDR for five years (while in the West publishers were overwhelmed by the demand for this novel). In 1977 Christa Wolf lost her position as writers’ union president and her husband lost both his union and party membership, because of their open support of Wolf Biermann. It was at such times that she depended most on direct contact with her readers. Furthermore, in the early 1980s she was obliged to produce two versions of her Kassandra work, consisting of a biographical narrative and four essays, one version for the East and one for the West.

No matter how absurd Christa Wolf's adventures in GDR wonderland now look to us, she has placed her moral integrity on public display by numerous, and some agonised examples of self-criticism, which includes criticism of her earliest, socialist realist work.

The fluctuations of her status aside, there remains a specific centre to her work which is beyond reproach.

It is not that she writes well and thinks deeply, not that she has inherited and criticised and expanded an existing literary tradition of grand dimensions, and not the ‘aesthetics of resistance’ that inform her political, environmental and feminist positions.

At the centre of her work there is nothing less than a historical catastrophe. She has admitted that ‘the intellectual realisation that one has made a mistake [and some would argue that her loyalties to the GDR were just that] is easier to bear than the emotion of shame.’ She is interested above all in what one learns from such emotions. She has also said that ‘a past like fascism envelops us like a wave’ and indeed a sense of calamity rarely leaves her writing.¹⁷

In 1968, when she was gathering up that ‘inner restlessness’ that led to her major turning points, she felt that ‘the curious, jerky story of her generation ought to be written sometime.’ As there were not many takers for this suggestion, and those already treating this topic seemed somehow inadequate to the task, she did it herself, with Model Childhood, published in 1977.

It was a difficult book for her to write. Going back to her home town, she did not expect to find parts of her self located quite so far back in a primitive past. She found she could use Landsberg—as place and as concept—to inform the catastrophe.

Thus she has written of Auschwitz, it was ‘a world in which evil and destruction were declared normal and felt by many to be normal … a world in which all the signs were reversed … a nightmare.’¹⁸ She wrote that it was a ‘riddle’ still unsolved, for which even ‘correct’ social and economic analyses—Marxist analyses—were inadequate. From this point on her criticism of ‘reason’ (or socialism) expanded and the cracks widened. What she was probably unaware of at the earlier stage of her recognition, was that while ‘reason’ would play tricks on her and one day, as incarnated in the GDR, it would disappear completely, what would remain would be the cracks themselves, the wounds and the pain. This was the counter-logic that the riddle demanded. The millions who were killed are not something she comes to terms with, not something she intends to get over. It is an uncomfortable existence, full of contradictions, but she cherishes the pain as the main current for the transmission of emotions and ideas, and above all, for a morality that had gone missing.

Christa Wolf's work is always about death. In Model Childhood her autobiographical childhood self, whom she calls Nelly, lies down in a potato-furrow, in all innocence, enjoying the summer warmth. When she gets up she leaves an imprint which looks like a coffin. Postmodern perhaps, constructed on several levels and from various points of view, Model Childhood is above all a literary post-mortem.

The counter-logic with which Christa Wolf begins to arm herself is simple enough. If the soft, blue sky—a ‘bluebell’ sky—with innocent pink clouds, is spread above Buchenwald, if innocence is guilty, if normal is abnormal, if there are terrible crimes being committed and all around no one sees these crimes, then the only thing to do is to surrender one's nostalgia for the past. Her generation is banished from nostalgia. The innocent past is a taboo, a sheer impossibility. She sets out ‘to learn to see, to strain the memory, not to let it get lost.’

Her writing is always in the service of memory, as a recognition of one's responsibility for the past. And ultimately it is memory, as a repeated moral act, which is her work, writing being merely the form it takes. Thus, for Christa Wolf, memory is a craft to which even narrative and poetics, and certainly the comfort of the reader, must at times be sacrificed. When accused of complexity, her response has been that some things cannot be expressed otherwise.

Not being able to remember means not being able to imagine the future. And loss of memory is equated with alienation—what another German writer, Heinrich Böll, has called ‘Distanzierungskrankheit’ (detachment-disease). He once remarked that in Germany emotions are regarded as a kind of ‘syphilis of the soul.’¹⁹

It has also been suggested by Böll that there is something distinctly Eastern, in the sense of ‘oriental’ or ‘exotic’ in the cultural traditions of eastern Germany: the home of Romanticism (of course with all the connotations of its perversions), introversion, speculative philosophies.²⁰ Strangely, then, it is in Christa Wolf's adherence to a tradition of ‘Innerlichkeit,’ of subjectivity, which she calls the ‘fourth dimension,’ that almost mystic and certainly feminist intensity of her writing, and in her struggle to establish herself within a politics of emotion, that she can be regarded now, perhaps more than ever, as an East German writer. And having subjected herself so rigorously and for so long to ‘authenticity,’ Christa Wolf the author and psychopomp has become the most interesting character of her narratives. At the end of Was bleibt she writes: ‘Eines Tages, dachte ich, werde ich sprechen können, ganz leicht und frei’ (One day, I thought, I would be able to speak quite easily and openly).²¹ While it is easy to understand her desire, it is difficult to imagine that she could ever abandon her burdens.

Notes

1. Was bleibt (Frankfurt am Main, 1990).

2. In order of publication 1961, 1963, 1968, 1976, 1979, 1983.

3. From a discussion at Ohio State University, 1985. Published in The Fourth Dimension: Interviews with Christa Wolf (trans. H. Pilkington, London, 1988) p. 106.

4. From a conversation with H. Kaufmann, 1976, in The Fourth Dimension, pp. 17–38.

5. Was bleibt, p. 33.

6. From a conversation with J. Walther, 1973, in The Fourth Dimension, pp. 3–5. Aeschylus, The Oresteian Trilogy, Penguin Classics, 1956, lines 1164–68, p. 83.

7. From a discussion at the GDR Academy of Arts, 1975, in The Fourth Dimension, p. 61 and p. 16.

8. Voraussetzungen einer Erzählung: Kassandra, (Frankfurt am Main, 1983), p. 10.

9. Voraussetzungen, p. 10.

10. Voraussetzungen, pp. 15, 75, 94.

11. Voraussetzungen, p. 116.

12. Kassandra, p. 10.

13. From a discussion, 1975. In The Fourth Dimension, p. 40 and p. 51.

14. The Fourth Dimension, p. 45.

15. Christa Wolf, The Reader and the Writer, (trans. Joan Becker, New York, 1977), p. 26.

16. To mention only two, there was Peter Graves, ‘Not above reproach,’ TLS, August 24–30, 1990, and Ian Buruma, ‘There's no place like Heimat,’ The New York Review of Books, vol XXXVII, no 20, pp. 34–43.

17. The Fourth Dimension, pp. 56 and 24.

18. The Reader and the Writer, p. 104.

19. Heinrich Böll Werke: Interviews I—1961–1978 (Cologne, 1978), pp. 713, 225.

20. References to this idea in Franz Baumer, Köpfe des 20. Jahrhundert, (1988).

21. Was bleibt, p. 107.