[In the following review, Herf discusses Wolf's disillusionment over the German reunification and criticizes Wolf's failure, or refusal, to acknowledge the inadequacies and transgressions of the former East German government.]

Though communism collapsed everywhere in Europe in 1989, the German Democratic Republic was the only one of the communist nation-states to disappear completely and become absorbed into another country, the Federal Republic of Germany. In the essays, the lectures, and the interviews collected in this book, Christa Wolf, the most prominent novelist and essayist to emerge from East Germany, and a leading member of the loyal opposition to the old communist regime, expresses her regrets about that disappearance. In her treatment of the collapse of communism, she conveys the sense of the utter defeat of her political hopes, lashes out in anger and defensiveness at the victors’ “phantoms” that offer a distorted picture of the GDR, and attempts to provide examples of the better aspects of East Germany.

Wolf wrote to and for critics of the East German government who accepted the fundamental postulate of official antifascism. It was East Germany, and not West Germany, that had truly faced the Nazi past, purged its elites, and built a regime based on memory rather than amnesia about the crimes of Nazism. Hence Wolf rejects the replacement of these East German realities with the idea that the GDR was “nothing but a repellent monotony of oppression and scarcity” and that “no one in the eastern provinces has anything to be proud of. …” She believes that this notion rests to a great extent on West German ignorance. In place of these phantoms of oppression, she recalls the legacy of antifascism and the quietly dissenting intelligentsia who nurtured the critical spirit that contributed to the revolution of 1989.

Wolf's pride in the GDR is evident in a fervent defense of the four decades of accomplishments of the East Berlin Academy of Arts. It comes through clearly in her admiring essay about Anna Seghers, the novelist and communist who was one of the leading cultural figures of East German antifascism. In 1992, Wolf expressed the hope that what Seghers's generation of communist intellectuals accomplished would not be “permanently consigned to oblivion.” The same pride is evident, too, in the exchanges of letters reprinted here with Jürgen Habermas and Günter Grass, which display her sense of being part of a common tradition of critical leftist German intellectuals; and in her admiring discussion of the paintings of the Spanish-born East German painter Nuria Quevedo. Wolf wants to recall aspects of East German life that West Germans did not understand, owing to their political hostility (or to the successful efforts of the East German dictatorship to obscure these realities from outsiders—a cause that she does not examine).

For many of Wolf's East German compatriots, the collapse of the dictatorship and the dismantling of the ubiquitous Stasi provided a long overdue opportunity to speak publicly about the nature of the East German dictatorship, to do research in freshly opened archives, to say at last what was previously forbidden—in short, to seek the truth and to make it public. Yet, as her bitter essay “Wasteland Berlin 1990” makes evident, Wolf prefers to speak of being caught between “a hopeless past and a future without prospects—for many people.” Rather than stress the value of truth for building a new polity and a new society, she focuses on how the revelations of the extent to which friends and families betrayed one another while failing to resist the government in the past were disabling. They left many

unable to walk the hard path from dependency to independent adulthood now that they have seen the revelations about their nation, and awakening from euphoria have fallen prey to disappointment, depression, hate and self-hate verging on self-destruction? A lot of betrayal has taken place in this city and it is still going on. … There is a driven, anxious, unscrupulous life and activity going on here under the surface; everyone sells what he can, including himself.

Wolf is eloquent in describing this scoundrel time, but her tone leads one to ask if she would have preferred to learn less about the past.

In the early 1990s, Wolf might have used her prestige and her reputation to support dissidents seeking to uncover truths so long repressed. Instead, reeling from the loss of her country, she writes of East Germany that “I loved this country.” The former dissident now speaks as one of the losers. This is not altogether surprising. In her dissidence to the old regime, Wolf was bound to it as well. No wonder she complains that “the people of the East are supposed to give up everything, not just what they found disturbing or unacceptable; they are being asked to deny, in retrospect, that their lives had value.”

I am among those who warned, long before October 3, 1990, that unification would make self-critical examination of our past much more difficult, insofar as unification amounted to the larger, wealthier part of Germany annexing the smaller, poorer part. At the time I had not yet realized the full extent of the West's attitude of defensiveness toward us, which borders on actual loathing. The tendencies to demonize the GDR, to turn it into a phantom and its inhabitants into monsters while disregarding history as much as possible, were only beginning to show themselves.

The result was that West Germans now had a view of the GDR that was “totally removed from reality,” and this in turn was pushing former citizens of East Germany toward defensiveness and obstinacy. In such a situation, self-critical analysis was made “inexpressibly more difficult by attacks from ignorant or malevolent victors.”

The reader of these essays (these apologetics, really) who is unfamiliar with Germany since unification might entertain the mistaken notion that the effort to grasp the truth about the East German past has been primarily the result of the efforts of West German victors. In fact, other leading members of the East German opposition, such as Rainer Eppelmann, Joachim Gauck, and Konrad Weiss, a few former members of the ruling party and its intellectual establishment, and former East German historians now at work at Humboldt University and at the Research Center in Contemporary History in Potsdam, have all performed pioneering work into the history of the East German dictatorship. Our knowledge of this regime—of its economic, social, cultural, and foreign policies—has grown enormously as a result of their efforts.

German unification entailed a purge of the old elites that far exceeded anything undertaken in the other ex-communist countries of Europe. And it proceeded—this is essential to understanding the bitterness of Wolf and others—with a thoroughness and a scope that contrasted sharply with West Germany's policy of reintegration of all but the most compromised of ex-Nazi German elites in the Adenauer era of the 1950s. Literally thousands of East German government officials, diplomats, soldiers, and industrial managers lost their power, their prestige, and their jobs—which were then filled by West Germans—in the years following German unification. This was the case also with researchers, editors, and professors. Departments of Marxism-Leninism were abolished. Large parts of faculties in the social sciences and history lost their jobs, and were replaced with historians and social scientists trained in West Germany who were studying the similarities and the differences between “the two German dictatorships.” Now the embittered losers of German unification vote for the Party for Democratic Socialism (PDS), the successor to the East German Socialist Unity Party, and criticize efforts to examine the repressive character of the old regime, especially when they come from the “Wessies.” Wolf's book expresses the “Ossies’” mixture of apologia, defensiveness, and anger in the years after unification.

In her novel The Quest for Christa T., which appeared in 1968, Wolf defended the right of her protagonist to a private life, a life of melancholy emotions and feelings that did not fit at all well with the heroic caricatures of Stalinist optimism. Especially since her dissent from official literary norms at the Eleventh Plenum of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party in 1965, Wolf occupied a space between official recognition and the deviant Nischengesellschaft, or “society of niches,” in which she and others could criticize official culture and dream of a new and different—but still socialist—German Democratic Republic. In 1976, she added to her record of political incorrectness when she joined fifteen other East German writers to protest the expulsion from East Germany of the folk singer and poet Wolf Biermann. Though she herself briefly considered leaving, Wolf was among those who “stayed along with every Tom, Dick and Harry, every Hinz and Kunz in niches, under observation, in the small catastrophes of the TRANSITIONAL SOCIETY among people who did not know that Troy is falling.”

For Wolf, the trauma of Nazism and the proclaimed antifascism of the East German regime was at the core of her reasons for staying and fighting for change from within. In the early 1950s, when she was in her twenties, she “met comrades who had come out of the concentration camps, out of the prisons, back from exile, impressive people—today I still believe they were among the most interesting people you could meet in Germany at that time—and our guilty conscience about them was another big reason for our commitment to their cause.” Their cause was East German communism, its official antifascist legitimation, and its associated claim that in East Germany and only in East Germany was there a serious effort to confront the crimes of the Nazi past. For Wolf, the great aura that surrounded the founding generation precluded revolt, especially since the only German alternative appeared to be the Federal Republic.

The critical spirit that Wolf tried to foster was a critical spirit that drew on leftist utopianism. In her speech of November 4, 1989 in East Berlin, at the largest mass demonstration in the history of the GDR, Wolf said, “Picture this: Socialism arrives and no one goes away!” But this was not to come to pass. Instead, the writings collected in Parting from Phantoms document the collapse of these hopes and their replacement with a bitter and despairing mood of defeat and lost opportunities. By the autumn of 1990, a year after the wall was no more, East Germany had ceased to exist, replaced with breathtaking speed by a unified Germany. Worse, at the time of the first free elections to be held in eastern Germany since 1933, when voters abandoned the East German leftist dissidents who had fought for a better socialism in the GDR in favor of Helmut Kohl's promises of market-driven prosperity, Wolf and others denounced German unification as an “Anschluss.” An Anschluss!

In her speeches and her essays of the early 1990s, Wolf warned of a possible estrangement between West Germans and East Germans if, “in the rapid annexation of the GDR by the German Federal Republic … East Germany's history is publicly suppressed. …” At the same time, she acknowledged that the hopes of the oppositional intelligentsia for a “revolutionary revival of our country” after the fall of the old regime appear “to have been mistaken.” Their hopes had collapsed because East German Communism lasted so long:

Our uprising appears to have come years too late. The damage to many people and to the country runs too deep. The unbridled abuse of power has discredited and undermined the values in whose name the abuse occurred. In a period of a few weeks we have seen our chances to make a new start at an alternative society vanish before our eyes, and seen the very existence of our nation vanish with them. A defeat does not become less painful because you are able to explain the reasons for it; nor less disturbing, if it is a repetition of the past. Is this left-wing nostalgia?

But now other and strikingly nationalist sloganeers marched in the streets. With the end of dictatorship, literature and art were no longer “forced to do the work of the press.” What seemed so daring before 1989 could now be expressed by the public. Wolf maintained that literature still had a public responsibility, a role “to investigate the blind spots in our past and to accompany us into our changing future.”

In Parting from Phantoms, however, much of Wolf's ire is directed precisely against post-unification efforts to examine those blind spots. She fails to mention the most stunning and impressive statement of self-scrutiny to emerge from East German politics after 1989, namely the statement unanimously adopted in April, 1990, by the East German Volkskammer. In that statement, the first democratically elected parliament in East Germany denounced the policies of the German Democratic Republic toward the Jews and toward the state of Israel, asked the Jewish people for forgiveness for these policies, and promised to try to make up for forty years of East German hostility. The Volkskammer also accepted the burden of the Holocaust—something the West German government had done in 1951—as well as the burden of the crimes committed against the peoples of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during World War II, and expressed shame and regret for East German participation in the invasion of Czechoslovakia in summer 1968.

Here was the preeminent East German attempt to look at the most glaring blind spots of East German history. It preceded German unification by six months, and it was not at all the result of a slavish East German conformism in the process of an Anschluss. Given her stated desire to examine the blind spots of German history and do away with phantoms, it is puzzling that Wolf does not examine or identify with this most important first step in that direction, one that grew out of the East German opposition.

Wolf inveighs against demonization and phantoms, but she doesn't tell us which parts of the West German view of East Germany are false, or where Westerners have struck an improper balance between the Stasi and the Wall, on the one hand, and her dissenting intelligentsia on the other. Was it false, or an example of “demonization,” to describe the GDR as a dictatorship; to point out that the Berlin Wall and the armed border literally made the country a giant prison hundreds of whose citizens were shot and killed while trying to escape; to reveal that East Germany left behind an environmental disaster on a scale that shocked West Germany's environmental Green Party, and an inefficient and obsolete industrial base that stunned Western economic experts who had naively believed East German economic statistics? Was the Stasi a phantom of the Western triumphalist imagination? Were the 2.7 million people who fled from East to West Germany between 1949 to 1961 also among the “ignorant and malevolent victors” who were utterly misinformed about East Germany as well? Did the Communist regime not suppress all political opposition and stifle intellectual and cultural freedom?

And then there is the matter of the Jews and the GDR. Christa Wolf devotes not a single sentence to this issue. In 1990, neo-Nazi vandals painted swastikas and wrote “Jew pig” on the graves of Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel. Shortly thereafter, in an introduction to a speech by the German literary critic Hans Mayer, Wolf wrote that “back in the early fifties, when you were a professor in Leipzig and I was a student, no one could have convinced us that this would happen.” Yet Wolf must have been sufficiently well informed to have known something about the central blind spot in the history of East German antifascism, that is, its handling of “the Jewish question.”

As an SED party member in the 1950s, or as an attendee at party conferences in that terrible period, Wolf must have read articles in Neues Deutschland, the party organ, alleging the existence of a vast and powerful international conspiracy of Jews, Zionists, and American imperialists whose purpose was to destroy communism in Europe. Among the generation of German Communists whom she admired as a young woman, she surely knew that many who returned from exile and from the concentration camps, Jews and non-Jews, were arrested, fired from party positions, or forced to flee to the West to avoid arrest. Some did so out of well-founded fears of Communist varieties of anti-Semitism during the “anti-cosmopolitan” purges.

Following the purges, Wolf may have attended or read of East German memorials to victims of fascism which marginalized or repressed the specifically Jewish dimension of Nazi criminality. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, she surely saw reports in the East German press of East German political leaders and diplomats traveling to Arab states when they were at war with Israel, supporting the “Zionism is racism” resolution in the United Nations in the 1970s, and thundering against the “the Tel Aviv-Bonn-Washington axis.” She knew of Walter Ulbricht's famous speech during the Six Day War in 1967, in which he declared his support for the Arab states, and she must have read in the East German press about the subsequent twenty-five years of fervent and unswerving economic, diplomatic, and military support for Arab and Palestinian armed attacks on Israel.

The Volkskammer declaration of April 1990 fully acknowledged and expressed regret for this disgraceful history of German communist antagonism to the Jewish state, and for this refusal to offer financial restitution to the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. In these same years, however, Christa Wolf was so intent on defending the wonderful and misunderstood qualities of East Germany that she appears not to understand why well-informed observers—not “ignorant or malevolent victors”—would conclude that the policies of the East German government regarding Jewish matters were utterly despicable and morally inexcusable.