Christa Wolf: A Companion ed. by Sonja E. Klocke and Jennifer R. Hosek (review)

This important collection of essays on Christa Wolf (fourteen individual essays, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography) generally takes a thematic approach to her works, rather than focusing individually on specific works. In doing so, the authors present numerous unique and useful insights into the ways in which Wolf's literature developed new, evolving concerns over time and they tie together many of the most important themes that run through those works. Even when essays deal with individual works, they also concern themselves with overarching themes and concerns. In short, the approaches taken by most of these essayists are quite fresh and provide readers and with new and thought-provoking perspectives and possibilities for understanding Wolf's amazing literary work.

The introduction to the volume, written by the two editors, Sonja E. Klocke and Jennifer R. Hosek, sets the tone of freshness and new possibilities for understanding Wolf's work. It traces her life, her writing, and her most important literary themes and concerns, from her early works in the 1960s to those from the last years of her life. One can find other introductions in English to or about Wolf's works that provide useful overviews of the phases and development over time of her literary works and major concerns, generally in the political, cultural, and social context of the GDR—such as Grace Paley's introduction to the English-language volume of Wolf's essays, The Author's Dimension: Selected Essays(1993) and Karin McPherson's introduction to The Fourth Dimension: Interviews with Christa Wolf(1988). The difference, however, is that the editors' perspective in the volume is that of "looking back" at all of this from "the present," hence the title of this introduction: "Reading Christa Wolf in the Twenty-First Century." It is also clear that this introduction and most of the essays in the volume are written in the context of new global, political, social, cultural, and environmental realities and challenges.

The individual essays are all well written and display significant research as well as innovative approaches to the works and topics discussed. As suggested above, the bibliography at the end of the book is unusually extensive for a collection of this kind. Curtis Swope's essay, "Modernity and the City in Christa Wolf's Oeuvre of the 1960s," the first in the volume, focuses on Wolf's earliest published writings: Moskauer Novelle(1961), the novel and film Der geteilte Himmel(1963, 1964), and the short story "Unter den Linden" (1974). The essay begins with an outline of Swope's approach to those works: looking at how Wolf sees cities "as a hard-nosed social observer willing to arrive at the subjective via an unvarnished account of the conditions of daily life" (36). The essayist describes the ways in which Wolf wanders through and observes how modern cities have often altered and even ruined the social experiences of their inhabitants' daily lives, yet sometimes do still provide "a site for the reproduction of the rituals and emotions that sustain everyday human life" (41). It's in these personal observations of the narrators that Swope finds Wolf's oft-discussed "subjective authenticity" at work. The second essay, by Regine Criser, "Narrative Topographies in Christa Wolf's Oeuvre," expands on the city space theme and adds as important aspects of "topographies" the concept of and interest in the role of "space" and "spatiality" in Wolf's works. She correctly points out how space, in general, as well as specific spaces provide far more than a frame for the activities of the protagonists, but also alter their activities and perceptions in significant ways. Criser shows how this occurs by calling our attention to how spaces such as the city, factories, the countryside, and other remembered spaces and places affect them in profound ways. She also shows how the different spaces often serve to rupture and...