Mapping Morality in Postwar German Women’s Fiction: Christa Wolf, Ingeborg Drewitz and Grete Weil (review)

Where have we been? Where are we now? Where will our next steps take us and who will be with us? Michelle Mattson’s final thoughts in the conclusion to her monograph, Mapping Morality in Postwar German Women’s Fiction, summarize her approach to her analysis, a reflection on moral choices posed by the individual but situated within sociohistorical contexts and studied through literature. In her introduction and her first two chapters on “The Individual, Memory, and History” and “Feminism, the Self, and Community,” Mattson explores the techniques that the authors Christa Wolf, Ingeborg Drewitz, and Grete Weil use to answer the question of how the characters see themselves in relation to their historical present, their past, and their responsibility to family and friends, local groups, and even global communities (5). Her innovative use of language to imply a social, historical, and personal web of interdependence is one facet of her contribution to scholarly research on memory. The extended metaphor of “mapping” explores the “question chains” between events and spaces (187).

Mattson adroitly discusses the body of literature about these authors, and points the reader to essential scholars and their interpretive approaches concerning memory. She includes scholarship from anthropologists like Michael Kinney, who explores how a changing political climate affects recall of memories (22), and social historians like Maurice Halbwachs, who wrote a seminal work on memory before he was sent to Buchenwald (25), and Pierre Nora’s work on collective memory. Each scholar’s approach is presented, along with Mattson’s understanding of why his or her theories, or at least aspects of them, are helpful in studying these authors and their works. She also explores the contribution of feminism to the discussion of ethical choices, such as that of Margaret Urban Walker and her critique of Euro-American ethical traditions (57). Mattson thus prepares her analyses by first “mapping” her path in constructing her research questions and use of theory, considering both the more obvious and the more complicated aspects of her study of memory and the literature of these three women authors.

The quotes from the texts in the three author-centered chapters, and the English translations, are especially helpful. Her chapter on Drewitz, who wrote one of the first plays about the Holocaust and personal responsibility, emphasizes the presence of a web of connections between individuals, community, and international events. In her Eis auf der Elbe, the protagonist hears the news of the Cuban missile crisis and remembers the supply planes over Berlin in the late 1940s, and then the physical work of renovating an apartment, illustrating what she calls “imbrication” of memory and the personal present (75). Mattson also discusses how the historical present is incorporated in self-narration in order to create a sense of the whole in chaotic times. Christa Wolf’s works illustrate the connection between the historical present and her characters’ mundane experiences, modeling a habit of considering our mutual interdependence and interconnectedness. Here Mattson considers Wolf’s perception of connection, as well as a distribution of responsibility (134), and relates this to Urban Walker’s concept of morality as an interpersonal practice of individuals who are at some level interdependent (125). The chapter on Weil explores her characters and the ethics of care.

Mattson then weaves the examples from Weil’s texts together with the scholarship of mapping the moral basis of feminist ethics. All three authors create characters who, though not responsible for international events, attempt to “remap the lines of connections between individuals and communities” (179). Moral deliberation and moral reflections expressed by the characters in these authors’ stories are more than abstractions: they are embedded in the family, the individual experience of women in relationships. Mattson’s “topographies” (192) of individual characters’ lives and choices provide the reader with a reflection on the connections, however faint, between historical context and the...