Introduction: Remembering Christa Wolf

“Daß die Zeit uns verkennen muß, ist ein Gesetz.”

(Kein Ort. Nirgends¹)

Laid to rest in the Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof among other major figures of postwar German culture (among them Heiner Müller, Stephan Hermlin, Hans Mayer, Bertolt Brecht, Anna Seghers), Christa Wolf was long heralded as “die gesamtdeutsche Autorin,” a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize. After 1989 in unified Germany, however, she was often consigned to an identity as “DDR Schriftstellerin” or “Staatsdichterin,” as can be seen in the limited resonance of her final major work, Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud (2010).² While published responses to the news of her death on December 1, 2011, were strikingly muted, some commentators did grasp the opportunity to reopen the old debates and accusations about Wolf’s integrity and her loyalty to a bygone regime, taking one last chance to topple another GDR literary monument.

In view of the significance of Christa Wolf—herself a trained Germanistin—in German, indeed European history; in the world of letters; and in the teaching of German and/or Feminist Studies here and abroad since 1968, several GSA members³ decided that it would be appropriate to commemorate her at the 2012 GSA annual conference. A call was issued for papers that would take cognizance of her death and suggest some possible parameters for a fresh assessment of her considerable oeuvre. The response to the call for papers was telling: scholars from eleven countries, including the United States, promptly submitted proposals that reflected continued worldwide scholarly interest in Wolf’s literary achievement. This response, unfortunately, also meant that not all contributions could be included in the series of six panels that were presented at the 2012 GSA Annual Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, under the rubric “Remembering Christa Wolf.” Given interest in the series at the conference, the editor of the German Studies Review invited us to submit a few of the papers, as they were presented, as a “snapshot” of the conference proceedings. Again, we faced a difficult choice, but finally selected two papers that offered a broad approach to the topic. The papers by Professor Christine Kanz of Ghent University and Dr. Daniela Colombo from the Kantonsschule Romanshorn appear here as examples of reflections on Wolf’s literary oeuvre that seek neither to monumentalize her nor to dismantle her stature in the annals of postwar German literature.

In an interview with Arno Widmann that appeared in the Frankfurter Rundschau in 2008, Wolf asserted, “Ich habe immer aus einem Konflikt heraus geschrieben.”⁴ Without confusing autobiography and fiction, these contributors, each in her own way, examine the connection between autobiographical experience and Wolf’s essayistic and fictional thematizations of both alienation (Colombo) and sincerity (Kanz). Thus, as Daniela Colombo convincingly demonstrates, the alienation and Angst evident in Wolf’s texts since the publication of Nachdenken über Christa T. (1968)⁵ can be traced back to their basis in personal experience, up to and including the series of ad feminam defamations that proliferated following the 2010 publication of Stadt der Engel. These same works likewise bracket Christine Kanz’s analysis of Wolf’s quest for “sincerity” (Aufrichtigkeit) in her texts. Significantly, both Kanz and Colombo reference the way in which Wolf’s texts are grounded in her experience of Angst.

In another passage in Kein Ort. Nirgends, Günderrode—whose remarks on the inevitability of a writer being misjudged form the epigraph to this introduction—asserts, “Daß ich schreiben muß, steht mir fest. Es ist eine Sehnsucht in mir, mein Leben in einer bleibenden Form auszusprechen.”⁶ Much remains to be done as we now begin to consider what will be the case with Christa Wolf herself.