Christa Wolf

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Confronting the Fascist Past and Coming to Terms with It

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[In Kindheitsmuster] Wolf's protagonist-narrator writes her account from her present ideological perspective of a committed socialist, but she is too alienated from her childhood self, called "Nelly," to write about her except in the third-person singular. Therefore, as an adult she cannot muster a personal identity solid enough to explore and confront her past self in the first person, as "I." Rather, she addresses herself as "you" in a kind of self-interrogation. Only at the end of the book, when she has relived the child's experiences and worked through those patterns of feeling, thinking and behavior which made her susceptible to Nazism, does she emerge as a person who calls herself "I." Hers is now a self which has been tested in the crucible of an acid self-examination.

The narrator does not consider herself and the child Nelly an isolated case. Rather she takes herself and the child as typical of their generation. In so doing she sheds some light on why it was and is so difficult for even the most responsible members of that generation to confront their participation, willing or unwilling, in Nazi events…. Hers is no self-pitying attempt to excuse that damaged generation, but rather an attempt to teach it to respond to personal and political situations "with appropriate feelings and responsibly." The narrator's self-interrogation extends easily to the reader, who is also included in the "you" of the writer's self-address. Because Nelly's training, experience and responses are so very ordinary (how fear, obedience, denial, selective attention, opportunism, forgetting are learned), the reader of her generation can easily substitute his/her own particulars for Nelly's and recognize underlying conditioned patterns in them…. Wolf's attempt is to get to the heart of Nazism in its earliest day-by-day, ordinary childhood patterns. Her attempt is especially successful when she deals with seemingly trivial childhood incidents which yet have momentous consequences. (pp. 556-57)

Nelly is very much aware that her adult self stems from having been forced to deny too much too early, from having been taught too many techniques of rationalization, self-deception and dishonesty. The book is less successful in integrating facts and figures of the Nazi period into the narrative of childhood events and conditioning, and least convincing in its critique of fascist and imperialist tendencies of the present. In accordance with GDR dogma, Wolf attributes Vietnams and black ghettos only to the West. What is new and courageous in Kindheitsmuster is Wolf's attempt to confront the fascist in herself in all her banality (Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" comes home here with a vengeance). (p. 558)

Ursula Mahlendorf, "Confronting the Fascist Past and Coming to Terms with It," in World Literature Today (copyright 1981 by the University of Oklahoma Press), Vol. 55, No. 4, Autumn, 1981, pp. 553-60.∗

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