They Divided the Sky: A Novel by Christa Wolf

Another Time, Another Text

Another Time, Another Text From Divided Heaven to They Divided the Sky Luise von Flotow In the late 1980s, during the years in which the East Bloc was heading into collapse along with East Germany, I spent several long periods in East Berlin, officially attending courses for Germanists at Humboldt University, unofficially getting to know the many different oppositional movements that were gathering strength there: among them the Initiative Frieden und Menschenrechte and the people who assembled at the Umweltbibliothek in the church buildings at the Zionskirchplatz and who used an ancient hand-cranked Gestetner to produce their illegal Umweltblätter (information leaflets on environmental issues and social justice). I met with and interviewed young writers of the Prenzlauer Berg neighbourhood in East Berlin—Rainer Schedlinski (later revealed to be a secret police informant), Wolfgang Koziol and Uwe Kolbe. I acquired a few of their artsy, handmade samizdat journals, talked to literature and art critics and with the help of curator Christoph Tannert organized a large travelling exhibition, through the United States and Canada, of hitherto unshowable artworks, entitled Schrittwechsel [Change of Gait]. It was an intense time, especially as these young, politically uncooperative and critically creative people were news to the West. They were the new generation of the so-called Hineingeborene—people who had been born into the system. At the time (and probably still today), Christa Wolf was the bestknown East German writer of her generation. She had just published Kassandra (1983), a work often read as a feminist rewriting of the ancient misogynist and male-triumphalist myths around the Trojan War, and around war in general. Her status in the West was as important as v vi another time, another text in the East, though different. The younger generation of East Berlin writers I spent time with largely admired and respected her for standing up to the ongoing pressures of East German Kulturpolitik, maintaining her integrity as a writer and functioning in some ways as a protective guardian who would speak out for lesser-known, younger authors who had not yet developed the connections in the West necessary to protect their critical voices. When Wolf produced Störfall in 1987—a response to the Chernobyl disaster—I was witness to the wrangling over who should translate the novel into English, a rather surprising event, as post-war German literature has not often been of great sales interest in North America. In other words, at the time, Wolf was an important and respected figure—on both sides of the Wall, and in German as well as English. Indeed, most of her work was available in English translation, though there were odd stories around some of these translations: the English title of Kindheitsmuster, for instance, changed from A Model Childhood in its first incarnation to Patterns of Childhood in later ones. Perhaps the oddest English translation is the one of Wolf’s first full-length novel, Der geteilte Himmel (1963, trans. 1965), which is set just before and immediately after the building of the Berlin Wall, and had a very loud and controversial reception in East Germany. Despite the ideological “scandals” created around the book and its author, the English translation, Divided Heaven, appeared only eighteen months later, in an East Berlin publishing house, Seven Seas Verlag, presumably in order to export a new young socialist talent to the West. In the late 1980s, an article about this 1965 English translation surfaced via other Germanists1 and opened my eyes to a very particular politics of translation that ruled that version, allegedly grossly distorting Wolf’s German text. I decided to one day re-translate the book. Living in Germany in the early 1990s, I corresponded with Wolf about the project, and tried to locate the 1965 translator, Joan Becker, and find out more about Seven Seas and its policies, but the disruptions caused 1 Eithne O’Connell, Dublin City University, and Marilyn Sibley Fries, University of Michigan, drew my attention to Charlotte Koerner’s text. vii Luise von Flotow by the collapse of the East Bloc presented enormous obstacles. While some help was forthcoming, it was not the moment to pursue matters. Now, almost twenty years later, I have found the time, the publisher2 and some translation funding.3 In what follows I discuss the original German text, its reception in East Germany in 1963, its English translation, Divided Heaven, prepared in East Germany in 1965...