To Be Recognized Again: Christa Wolf’s Paradigm of Sincerity

Final proof came from the funeral and subsequent ceremony for Christa Wolf, who had died on December 1, 2011, in Berlin: The non-presence of western intellectuals, western politicians, and western colleagues besides Günter Grass was striking. It became more than obvious on this day, once again: The Wall between East and West Germany had not really fallen; at least not on a mental or emotional level. Asking for reasons, one will arrive at a whole array of what still seem to be characteristic features of eastern and of western daily life, behavior, and writing practices. All in all, it is just not true that there is one German literature after 1989. It seems to exist only in many minds, constructed by media, performances, and public lectures, most of them shaped by a specific West German perspective.

This West German perspective also shaped the image of Christa Wolf: During the last two decades of her life the once internationally celebrated author had been accused of having written a sort of “autoritätsgläubige Stillhalteliteratur”¹ during the GDR regime and then of having acted like a Stasi victim or even a resistance fighter right after the crash of the system, despite the fact that she had cooperated with the Stasi for a short time.

Given all this and given the changed attitude towards Christa Wolf as a person and as a writer in the early 1990s, after the so-called “Literaturstreit,” the literary debate about her, and the IM defamation campaign, how do we read her texts today? How do we read her once recognized masterpieces written and published before 1989, such as Nachdenken über Christa T. or Kassandra? And how do we judge her more recent texts written after the fall of the Wall? Has our attitude towards her as a writer changed in light of her recent death?

In the following minutes I would like to draw your attention to the representation of sincerity (Aufrichtigkeit) in Christa Wolf’s texts, to her credibility as an author, and to her role as a “moral authority” for many of her readers and for many years. “[A]lles, was wir aussprechen, muß wahr sein, weil wir es empfinden: Da haben Sie mein poetisches Bekenntnis,” Wolf’s Günderrode says in Kein Ort. Nirgends (1979).² Much the same can be said of her own writing: Language for Wolf was an indicator of sincerity. A “true” voice is a voice speaking on the basis of self-experienced feelings only. In what follows, I will mainly focus on and question the link between “sincerity” and the “true” voice of the author’s and narrator’s own experience. In drawing a line between Wolf’s texts written before 1989, such as Nachdenken über Christa T. or Kassandra, and her texts written after the fall of the Berlin Wall and after the “Literaturstreit,” such as Medea and Leibhaftig, I focus on the historical contexts in order to define the parameters of the term “experience.” I will argue that Wolf did not shy away from representing negative affects in order to allow her protagonists to speak critically with a “true” voice. While offering some interpretations of the representation of fear and mourning in her texts, I will finally demonstrate how all this relates to the “fallen integrity” of former “IM Margarete” that was cited in the media in the early nineties—and still is being invoked, even after her death.

Wolf’s 1968 novel Nachdenken über Christa T. tells about a female character who died of leukemia and whose sensitivity the narrator contrasts with the superficiality of the “Hopp-Hopp-Menschen,” the “Tatsachenmenschen,” the “Phantasielosen”³ who cause confusion and fear in Christa T. The narrator describes the protagonist’s “Hang, zu dichten, dichtzumachen die schöne, helle, feste Welt, die ihr Teil sein sollte,”⁴ because “Dichten, dicht machen, die Sprache hilft.”⁵ Here in the narrator’s reflections on Christa T., it becomes obvious that language and writing are the only means to counter confusion and fear for both the first-person narrator and her late friend Christa...