See No Evil
The Quest for Christa T. (re-issued to coincide with the publication of Christa Wolf's more recent novel, A Model Childhood) anticipates many of the themes and preoccupations of the later work: the fallibility of memory and the compulsion to remember, the tension between fiction and fact, the struggle for a form commensurable with experience, writing as a means of self-definition and of understanding others…. Christa T's experiences suggest with admirable economy the large-scale horrors of Nazi Germany and, in the post-war world, initial euphoria and progressive disillusionment with the Communist slogans which superseded the Nazi ones. Yet for all its sombre aspects, and despite Christa T's early death, the novel is ultimately an affirmation of individual resilience in the face of evil and adversity. Christa T's moments of happiness, the solace which she finds in literature and in writing her poems, her craving to "see" and the affection she inspires, all indicate that her wish "simply to be a human being" is capable of at least a limited fulfillment.
More than twice as long as its predecessor, A Model Childhood is also more complex, more explicit and bleaker in tone…. Throughout the novel she struggles to answer the insistent question: "How did we become what we are today?"
The attempt at an answer involves her in "a game in and with the second person and the third person, for the purpose of their fusion." It is a difficult and desperate game, in which the narrator refers to herself as "you" and to the child she once was as "Nelly", using a technique which substitutes for linear narrative an intricate web woven from strands of the present in which she is writing, the recent past of the visit to her home town and the remoter past of Nelly's childhood in Nazi Germany. The strands are inseparable. The adult's reactions to the last throes of the war in Vietnam and the carnage in Chile before and after Allende's murder mingle with the child's experience of burning synagogues and ruined cities, to show a woman tormented by recurrent cruelty, inhumanity and danger.
Thomas Mann is one of many writers alluded to in both novels, though his influence is most clearly discernible in A Model Childhood. The mention of Mario and the Magician in a conversation between the narrator and her daughter points subtly but unmistakably to the brilliant depiction of Nelly's confirmation party, where the photographer Andrack re-enacts the role of Mann's sinister Cipolla. Like Mann, Christa Wolf uses the performance of the magician/hypnotist as a metaphor for the way in which Fascism enslaves the minds of its willing victims, and breaks the resistance of the less willing. But there is one chilling difference. The deluded Mario, when roused from his delusion, shoots the man who has gulled him into mistaking ugliness for beauty. Nelly's cousin Astrid, after performing antics which her relatives find embarrassing and distasteful, trains what she believes to be a rifle not at her manipulator, but at the heart of her disapproving Uncle Walter. Thomas Mann wrote Mario and the Magician in 1929 as a warning to his fellow countrymen of the corrupting effects of Fascism already evident in Italy, and ends his story with the downfall of the dictator figure. Christa Wolf, writing between 1972 and 1975, ends her account of Andrack's performance with an example of how his destructive power can be stronger than the ties of natural affection, and there is no hint of his coming to grief. It is an ominous change of emphasis which suggests that delusion can persist and recur, and also that it cannot be dramatically ended with the death of a dictator.
This is a disquieting novel, not least in its revelation of how easy it was to hoodwink many ordinary people about the nature of the Nazi régime. The narrator depicts the insidious advance of Nazism among the innocents of the 1930s, the naïveté with which often decent people succumbed to the appeal of romanticized brutality, the lure of banners, songs and emotional rallies….
A Model Childhood is remarkable for the honesty and courage with which it carries on the often painful struggle to arrive at the truth about the past. The tentativeness of the novel's beginning is matched by the inconclusiveness of its end: "Has memory done its duty? Or has it proven—by the act of misleading—that it's impossible to escape the mortal sin of our time: the desire not to come to grips with oneself?"
Margaret McHaffie, "See No Evil," in The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1982; reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission), No. 4131, June 4, 1982, p. 608.
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