by Grace Paley
And so we came to her apartment in East Berlin on Friedrichstrasse, trolleys rumbling by. I wanted to cry out, Don’t give up the trolley for the bus; your cars are bad enough. But of course my German was only a failed street Yiddish of about twenty words and her English had just begun. Still we became friends. For me, a lucky mystery.
When you read these transcribed talks, essays, interviews, you’ll be reading Christa Wolf’s political and literary history in the country which, after Allied shaping, became, in 1949, the German Democratic Republic, the special concern of the U.S.S.R. Berlin, itself divided, was stuck in the GDR’s chest. Eventually the Wall was built, graffiti on one side, soldiers with guns on the other.
Between 1949 and 1959, Christa Wolf studied German literature in Leipzig and Jena, married Gerhard Wolf, a critic and poet, had two daughters, worked in a factory in industrial Halle, hoping to become the worker-artist the First Bitterfeld Conference wanted her (and all other artists) to become. This is described at the end of her talk at the Second Bitterfeld Conference. She worked for the GDR Writers’ Union and edited Neue Deutsche Literatur and several contemporary anthologies.
Then what? How does a person, a young woman, learn enough, live enough, read and listen enough to finally become one of the most important European writers, to break through the walls of her own early understanding and narrow education in “the snares of theory,” as she writes? Of course she was by nature thoughtful, interested, loved her native language and its speakers. She also hated not to be truthful, not to know what had really happened.
It’s a vital fact that she was a citizen of a small country, its history fractured right at the decisive years of her entrance into young womanhood. She was needed—an experience most American writers don’t have too often. The country was poor but lively with direction, socialist direction, newness happening all around her among the ruins, idealism, and a way to turn away from a shameful national past. In a review of Fred Wander’s book The Seventh Well, she says, “After the war, we had to learn to live under the eyes of nations that shuddered at our name.”
At the Second Bitterfeld Conference in 1966, she began her talk by discussing at some length the values of art in a socialist art-valuing society. She described the envy of West German youth at the breadth of the GDR literary themes. Having put participants at a certain smug ease, she offered a couple of harsh stories of repressive narrow-mindedness in the GDR, one about a writer sent to talk to a work-crew leader, in which the true facts of the worker’s life censor him out of the story; the second about a schoolboy who notices the deadly imposition of stereotypes and falsifications in his textbooks. She urged her audience to be more self-critical, the writers to be less fearful.
She must have been thinking of her next book, The Quest for Christa T., which was published in 1968. It’s about a young woman who cannot, will not, live the rhythm of that society (and dies young). It’s an exploration for Christa Wolf, through Christa T., of what it means to say, to be “I,” “the difficulty of saying ‘I.’” In “Interview with Myself,” she asks: Will others be interested? She’s not sure, but trusts that her whole life and experience, which grow out of an intense concern for the development of her society, will evoke problems and questions in her that are important to others. “My questions are what structure the book—not events.” The book did provoke discussion, criticism, and censorship.
Another question she asks herself: “So, while working on this book, you have found out how you ought to write in the future?” She answers: “On the contrary. I have tried out one road, which I cannot take a second time … I have discovered that one must try at all costs to break out of the ring of what we know or think we know about ourselves, and go beyond it.”
This “Interview with Myself” is only one example of Wolf’s need to demystify the artist and her work. In essays and interviews over the years, she offers explications and meditations that may be useful to herself and her readers. Doing so probably frees her to make her novels as complex as they need to be and still feel she has included the reader. I like her solution. I think it’s right to say whenever possible, and if asked: This is the way I journeyed into the unknown individual soul, bumping into history, society, and myself at every turn.
Patterns of Childhood was published in 1976. It is another fictional autobiographical journey, this time to the near, unspoken, hardly-to-be-borne German past, in which the child who saw, who knew, is hidden. The adult who pushed her aside, forgot and suppressed her, now must find and know her. Wolf called this kind of labor “subjective authenticity,” in which “authenticity” makes the word “truthfulness” look like a barely scratched surface. How hard that must have been to write, how much harder life itself became.
In that year, Wolf Biermann, a popular singer and composer, was allowed to travel to an engagement in West Berlin. He was not allowed to return. Wolf wrote: “1976 was a caesura in cultural policy development in our country, outwardly indicated by Wolf Biermann’s expatriation … A group of authors became aware that their direct collaboration, the kind they themselves could answer for and thought was right, was no longer needed. We are socialists, after all. We lived as socialists in the GDR because that’s where we wanted to be involved. To be utterly cast back on literature brought about a crisis for the individual, an existential crisis.” It must have been a political crisis, too. As one of the signers of a protest letter to the government, Wolf was dismissed from the executive board of the Berlin section of the Writers’ Union. In a 1983 interview, she agreed with me that she had been stopped by that experience and the repression that followed. In another place she wrote: “It was the origin for me among others of working with the material of such lives as Günderrode’s and Kleist’s.”
These conflicts, this falling back on literature, became No Place on Earth, which I think of as a play of mourning for the Romantic writers of the early nineteenth century—Günderrode, Kleist, Büchner—who were sentenced to suicide and madness. “They wrote hymns to their country,” Anna Seghers said, “against the walls of whose society they beat their heads.” No Place on Earth is the wonderfully invented work in which the characters speak their own words from their letters and poems. The silencing of Biermann’s expatriation had given Wolf the gift of new form.
There are several essays on Karoline von Günderrode and Bettina von Arnim in The Author’s Dimension. Wolf examines their lives and work almost as if they could be our teachers, if only we would pay attention to their personal pain in the historic moment. But it is the hard-squeezed lives of Günderrode in the early nineteenth century and Ingeborg Bachmann in the twentieth that lie heaviest on Christa Wolf’s good mind.
Heaviest … As much as she cared about her contemporaries and her elders like Anna Seghers or Bertolt Brecht, it was the weight of Ingeborg Bachmann’s work, its difficulty and mystery, its social consciousness trapped with no way to turn but death, that influenced her most. It made her think back to the other Germans a hundred and fifty, two hundred years earlier, walled in their particular German geography and culture; it made her decide not to die—or leave the GDR, her country, its walls. She and Gerhard would remain. She would struggle on her own terms and answer through work, her literary work, since she and others were prevented from speaking on radio or television and from political reporting.
When she presented the Kleist Prize to Thomas Brasch in 1987, she remembered how she had failed to persuade him to remain in the GDR in 1976. She said: “Contradiction is too cozy a word for the permanent friction forced on writers of the modern era … Brasch stands between two systems of value both of which confront him with false alternative values.”
Wolf’s fear of coming holocausts to bury all holocausts, a fear normal to any European who had lived through one or two twentieth-century world wars, culminated in the important work Cassandra, accompanied by four essays, accounts of reading and travel with Gerhard Wolf to Athens and Crete, methodology, and history. There is a determination to go
back in time, to get under it all, that place, that time, ancient Greece, which offered to literature forever, by way of great Homer’s song, war and a trivialization of ordinary life and, of course, female life.
I think that one of the aspects of Wolf’s work that bothers—I mean enrages—the male critics of West Germany, apart from her disinterest in Hemingway, is her criticism of male hierarchical modes, her disinterest in the hero. “As long as there are victors,” there’s not too much hope for the world. The only hero is the anti-heroine Cassandra, who sees how decent Aeneas will finally, going forth, only re-create the same patriarchal system. “We have no chance against a time that needs heroes.” Cassandra sees her death before her, and all the other deaths. She can’t do much, but she can see. That is her task on earth, to see, to teach seeing, to tell.
I have not talked about Accident, a book I admire. It’s about Chernobyl, a brother’s brain operation, a woman’s ordinary anxious day, “the significance of daily structure,” which Christa Wolf says she learned, little by little, by living in the country for half of each year. It’s a short book that moves gracefully from newscast to the garden vegetables, to the children on the phone, to the hospital operating room.
And then What Remains: a collection of older stories, including a novella describing Wolf’s surveillance by the East German secret police a number of years ago. This story infuriated West German critics, who thought she should have published it much earlier. It was a jumping-off point for a scapegoating attack on Christa Wolf which held her responsible for all GDR corruption, bureaucratic crime, and political repression. This campaign chose to disregard Wolf’s work which, in fiction and talk and interview, dealt with the life of the individual in a stultifying society, the pathetic condition of education, which, she pointed out, prepared young people for a life of dependent thinking, the untold stories of German literary history, as well as German difficulties in facing the Nazi past and the complicity of those still alive—her own generation.
The last part of this collection includes some short pieces, a report on a reading in Mecklenburg, “We Don’t Know How … to think directly, to tell, we never learned in school.” I’d like to quote from another essay, “Momentary Interruption”:
November 4, 1989, in Alexander Square in East Berlin was the moment when artists, intellectuals, and other groups in our society came together … That moment was by no means just a fortunate accident, as amazed Western reporters interpreted it. It was the … climax of a long process in which literary and theater people, peace groups, and other groups had been coming together under the aegis of the Church, to meet and share talk … and drew encouragement for action. For years we addressed certain tasks in what we intended as our opposition literature: to name the conflicts which for a long time were expressed nowhere else, and thus to generate or strengthen a critical attitude in readers; to encourage them to resist lies, hypocrisy … to keep alive our language and the other traditions of German literature and history from which attempts were made to cut us off …
This talk was given at the University of Hildesheim when Wolf received an honorary doctorate in January 1990. In it there is also the sad sentence: “Our uprising appears to have come years too late.”
Yes. As the young people ran laughing through Hungary into the West and the Wall corridors were opened and the Wall taken down, crumb by stony crumb, and the German election approached, and the currency changed, it was clear that an autonomous free democratic socialist East German nation would not be born. Certainly, when the cry “We are the people” changed to “We are one people,” the heady hopeful weeks in East Berlin and Leipzig, the long candlelight vigils, talk, argument, dissent, and planning ended. Freedom, unemployment, and colonization of East Germany began. As Christa Wolf writes:
[The] politicians, economic managers, and party officials need a fatherland to carry on their enterprises. There is no motherland in sight, no more than before.
—1992
Coat upon a Stick
Coat upon a Stick is about an old man, a Jew living and praying in one of the last synagogues of the Lower East Side. His old body suffers pain; his soul, a thin little prayer-soaked soul, is starved by deceit and fear. It is terrified of memory. Throughout the day of this book he is actually unable not to steal, cheat, or proudly outwit any adversary he may meet—at the newspaper stand or the supermarket. But these are only the little, ten-cent crimes of late, bitter poverty. (With the same furtiveness—as though ashamed—he secretly gives away his only coat to a friend in a wheelchair.) When young, he betrayed a young woman, robbed the man who helped him get to the United States from Russia, deceived his co-workers, chiseled his customers. He has never forgiven his son, Carl, who grew up with a burden of Orthodoxy too heavy for the second-generation boy. Carl has a sensible son of his own, about to be bar mitzvahed. He tries to visit from time to guilty time, to make peace with his father’s insulted love. The old man’s rage against Carl for leaving home, the secure house of Jewish law, is a terrible sound in this book, an unforgiving cry torn out of the old man’s throat again and again.
The other old men—and the rabbi, in his cynical, hopeless way—are not much better, only a couple of dollars richer. Then, out of this narrow mean world that Norman Fruchter has shown us with relentless unsentimentality, Zitomer, one of their own, suddenly rises out of the congregation, ablaze with revelation. This community, he shouts, does not live by the Ten Commandments. They probably don’t even know them. Do they understand that the commandments were given to Moses to guide the moral life of the people of Israel for the next thousands and thousands of years—to define them among barbarians—that the commandments are the basic law written by God’s own hand in stone? He interrupts the services, stops to harangue the men at work in their stores, even in front of customers. Though the prophets are not mentioned too often, Zitomer’s voice is the scream of Amos, or maybe Micah crying out against landlords and profiteers. Zitomer’s name carries in its Russian parts the four possible meanings: “Jew,” “to live,” “peace,” and “world.” This may be accidental, but I hear it.
And so the central dialogues of the book are created. The Law of Moses and the prophets’ dreams are set in opposition to the laws and strictures of the priests. Still we may wonder, the book wonders—was it the moral law or was it the priests’ laws that gathered the Jews up into a net, a net that kept most of them from falling into Rome, Christianity? There were knots whichever way they turned. During the hundreds of years of European Jew hatred, that net must have seemed to be the very fabric of God’s love. The people turned inward, turned their backs to the oppressor, and became fistfuls of men and women in a great dispersion, a people who for almost two millennia created communities that did not engage in aggressive war.
I said dialogues. And there are dialogues. This is a very Jewish, constantly talking work. It believes that what happens inside a person’s head is dialogue, not stream of consciousness or third-person reporting. Free association is just right for psychology, but these Jews are made of history and they talk in long, hard sentences, especially to themselves. They are the tradition of argument and discussion learned in yeshivas and shuls. In the midst of ritual obedience they somehow keep the adversarial conversation going with themselves, each other, or with the God who has always been pressed to answer questions, to be responsive. What were the final plans for Sodom? Should Israel or should Israel not have a king? The prophets themselves often felt unequal to their moral tasks, which occasionally included too much traveling. Why me? asked Jonah, and went in the opposite direction.
But somewhere in Jewish consciousness, sour and sad, is God’s recorded answer to Moses. After so much work and talk on the mountain, Moses longed only to see His face at least once. The answer: “No man shall see me and live.” But finally God gives in a little (as usual). He offers “… while my glory passes by … thou shalt see my back parts but my face shall not be seen.” Thinking of that small impoverished congregation in
Coat upon a Stick, I remembered that passage. Of course He may have said to Himself, “This is probably not the first Jewish joke, but it’s a good one and should last this disobedient, argumentative people a couple of thousand years at least.”
Coat upon a Stick seems to happen on the famous Lower East Side, where once-dense populations of immigrants ate, slept, peddled, worked in small shops, picketed bosses, organized unions, made poems for newspapers. A world, in other words. That population has disappeared into the suburbs, the massive tenements of the Upper West Side. The community is abandoned. Here and there blacks poorer than those remnants of Jews appear, house cleaners of slums or customers in the pathetic Jewish shops.
But where are the women in this book? A couple of landladies, a grumpy wife. There are no women in the synagogue’s balcony, no old wives behind the mechitsa. The patriarchal law of the synagogue, the separation of the sexes, has turned to iron. Finally no women come at all, to the daily stitching and restitching of the law.
Also, where is Germany? The putrefaction of the Holocaust which has touched our Western bodies, slaughter and slaughtered. Where is its taint? This book was written in the earliest sixties. The Holocaust, it’s true, had not yet become that last call by aging survivors whose stories their children manage to tear from them even when they don’t can’t won’t talk. Tell us, tell us, the young beg. What was it like to be a Jew in those days in that place? Tell us before you die so we, the third and fourth generations, can be Jews again. The work of research and publication was not yet complete. Perhaps it—the word “Holocaust”—had not yet become its own definition. Still, Carl, the son, is a TV repairman, a job that was born in the post–World War II world, and he travels to his father’s decimated community from the working-class suburbs of Queens.
