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  • Remembering What Remained: German Studies Association 2012 Presidential Address
  • Stephen Brockmann

When Christa Wolf died at the beginning of December, 2011, I was getting ready to go to a conference at the University of Alberta on another German writer, Heinrich von Kleist, who had died two centuries earlier. The two writers, of course, could hardly be more different. One was a man, the other a woman. One died at an early age, the other lived to a ripe old age. One was a suicide, the other had a strong will to live. One wrote highly dramatic works that were often full of violence. The other wrote self-reflective and self-reflexive works in which, often, very little happens. And yet the two German writers, Kleist and Wolf, are connected by more than just the coincidence of deaths that occurred two centuries apart and by the fact that both died and are commemorated in Berlin-Brandenburg. After all, Christa Wolf had devoted one of her books, Kein Ort. Nirgends (1979) partly to Kleist. Kleist’s personal and political struggles at the beginning of the nineteenth century clearly resonated with the East German feminist writer in the 1970s.

What particularly connects Wolf to Kleist is a troubled but intimate relationship to political power in Germany. Both struggled with and suffered from the established powers of their time, but both were also closely connected to those powers. Kleist, after all, came from a family with a long and distinguished tradition of military service, and his support for Prussia in the Wars of Liberation is well known and extended to the literature that he wrote, such as Die Hermannschlacht (1808) or Prinz Friedrich von Homburg (1809–1810), which ends with the famous proclamation, “In Staub mit allen Feinden Brandenburgs!”1 Christa Wolf, for her part, had for a number of years been a candidate member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in the former German Democratic Republic, a successor state to Kleist’s Kingdom of Prussia—in the Central Committee long enough, at any rate, to have experienced the notorious Eleventh Plenum of the Central Committee of the SED in December of 1965, at which critical writers and filmmakers, including Wolf herself, were attacked, and to have argued personally in favor of the criticized artists in the [End Page 347] face of the assembled East German socialist leadership: one relatively young woman against a group of dominant older men.

Two years later Wolf was no longer a member of the Central Committee and was about to publish her most famous novel, Nachdenken über Christa T., which was, with its emphasis on the anything-but-exemplary life of one imperfect woman, among other things, a clear attack on party dogmatism. And yet, a little over two decades later, in a declaration with the telling title “Für unser Land,” Wolf was still urging her fellow citizens to support socialism and its German incarnation in the GDR: “Noch haben wir die Chance, in gleichberechtigter Nachbarschaft zu allen Staaten Europas eine sozialistische Alternative zur Bundesrepublik zu entwickeln. Noch können wir uns besinnen auf die antifaschistischen und humanistischen Ideale, von denen wir einst ausgegangen sind.”2 Only a few weeks earlier, at the massive demonstration in Berlin on November 4, 1989, had come Wolf’s conjuration: “Stell dir vor, es ist Sozialismus, und keiner geht weg.”3 Both writers, Kleist and Wolf, were loyal to their German state, in spite of, or because of, the suffering those states caused them, but both were also critical. They were both members of the loyal opposition. Both supported doomed causes that brought them pain and suffering. As early as 1963 Wolf had quoted Anna Seghers’s dictum about German Romantics from 1935: “Diese deutschen Dichter schrieben Hymnen auf ihr Land, an dessen gesellschaftlicher Mauer sie ihre Stirnen wund rieben. Sie liebten gleichwohl ihr Land.”4 This description fits perfectly for both Kleist and Wolf. In her last major published book, Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud, Wolf wrote: “Stand über ihm [dem DDR-Staat, SB] von Anfang an nicht das Menetekel des Untergangs: Ins Nichts mit ihm?”5 And of course Kleist has...

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