Christa Wolf's Prose: A Landscape of Masks

Author(s): Helen Fehervary

Source: New German Critique, No. 27, Women Writers and Critics (Autumn, 1982), pp. 57-87
Published by: New German Critique
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/487984
Accessed: 14/04/2010 12:41

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ngc.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

New German Critique is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to New German
Critique.

http://www.jstor.org
ChristaWolfs Prose:A Landscapeof Masks*

by Helen Fehervary

I. Authorship
and UnevenDevelopment

Whether we consider her within the context of GDR literature or

literary discussions in the West, Christa Wolf remains idiosyncratic
within the development of contemporary German literature. Wolf
began writing as a committed socialist in the GDR, whose membership
in the SED went as far as her candidacy for the Party'sCentral Commit-
tee in the 1960s. Yet she has always been at odds with the presup-
positions of socialist realism and authoritarian notions of Party
hegemony. She is closer to the traditions of critical Marxism and dis-
sidence, yet she has never shared with Brecht and most representatives
of the avant-garde the idea that modernist abstraction be put into the
service of political and aesthetic functionalism, or that materialistic
forms or "technique," coupled with the historical consciousness of the
author as producer, could be effective media for cultural praxis in
modern industrial societies. Wolfs scepticism toward contemporary
avant-gardism also sets her apart from more recent critical theories as
embodied by Adorno and French poststructuralism. She is at home
neither in the inherited totalities of realism nor in the open-ended
experimental projects of modernism and the avant-garde. Without an
established tradition to account for the radicalism of her work, Wolf's
writing appears to some to be conservative, eclectic and moralistic.
Others more positively inclined defend her within ideological cate-
gories and ascribe to her work the historically and aesthetically obscure
regions of Lebenshilfe: "subjectivity," "authenticity," "utopian vision"
- i.e., moral support.
If there is a possibility of delineating an alternative "third" tradition,
we would have to begin by acknowledging the literaryquality of"retar-
ted" or "uneven" development. Unlike most writers of her generation,
Wolf did not write fiction for publication until she was thirty years old.

* I am
grateful to Leslie Adelson and Charles Miller for their criticism and
suggestions.

57
58 ChristaWolfsProse

In the intervening twenty years, her literary production has been

relatively modest, the pace increasingly accelerated, and the quality
uneven. Most reputable writers begin with at least one stroke of genius
before their thirtieth year, then either come to a crashing halt or
develop an organic, mature work.1 By contrast, Wolfs literary begin-
nings were halting and tenuous; her later writing has become themati-
cally more erratic and formally more radical. We can find an
underlying development in the body of her work, but the changes
from one work to the next are more suggestive of incongruous and
often contradictory aesthetic attitudes than of the usual progressive
development. The transition from TheDividedHeaven (1963) to The
QuestforChristaT.(1968), for example, was not simply a step, or even a
leap, from one kind of literaryform to another. It involved the author's
(much like her character Rita's) eclipse between the "trains"of literary
history before finding the next "vehicle" in which to move on. It
necessitated not only the transformation of form but also the collapse
and regeneration of authorial identity.2 The same can be said of the
transition from A Model Childhood(1976) to No Place on Earth (1979),
where she propels herself backwards into history, from the aesthetic
question raised by the experience of fascist culture to the failure of
early romanticism and the demise of the German salon. The subse-
quent journey backwards from romanticism to early Greek mythol-
ogy in Kassandra(1983) is even more precipitous.
The project of Wolfs writing does not demonstrate the concepts of
literary production and progress, but rather, regressing into history, it
seems to retard progressive development and to brush history against
the grain. At the same time, this project seeks the promise of subjective
agency and historical self-realization: "The difficulty of saying 'I'."3
WolPs literary creation of self (and history), however, rests neither in
the teleological development of the bourgeois individual, nor in the
decentering or deconstruction of this very same individual. In each of
her works, the authorial identity and the narrative voice seem entirely
redefined, different and "other":There are many selves and many his-
tories at work here. Rather than demonstrating the unified and pro-
gressive developmental career of the writer, Christa Wolfs work

1. This pattern evidently applies to all the German classics: Goethe, Schiller,
H6lderlin, Kleist, Bdichner, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Brecht, etc.
2. Rita's breakdown in TheDividedHeaven is synonymous with the author Wolfs
literary crisis during this time. By comparison, Anna Karenina's suicide by throwing
herself under a train is largely a symbolic gesture and has little to do with the author
Tolstoy's literary life.
3. Wolf, TheQuestfor ChristsT., trans. Christopher Middleton (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux/Delta, 1972), pp. 169 and 170. Hereafter cites as CT.
 HelenFehervary 59

exhibitsboth a retrogressiveand expansiveunfoldingof manydiferent

authorial lives.4
Wolfs relationship to literature and history seems to corroborate
the ideas put forth by Ernst Bloch in his essay "Nonsynchronism and
the Obligation to Its Dialectics" (1932):
Not all people exist in the same Now. They do so exter-
nally, by virtue of the fact that they may all be seen
today. But that does not mean that they are living at the
same time with others. Rather, they carryearlier things
with them, things which are intricately involved. [... ]
Moreover, they do not emerge in a hidden way as pre-
viously but rather, they contradict the Now in a very
peculiar way, awry, from the rear. The strength of this
untimely course has become evident; it promised
nothing less than new life, despite its looking to the
old.5

The philosopher Bloch attempted to explain heterogenous social

interests during the 1930s by conceptualizing a perspective on subjec-
tivity based on nonsynchronist development. This perspective can also
apply to literary developments which seem reactionary, retarded or
subjectivistic according to the prevailing critical theories.
Christa Wolf has devoted her entire prose work to creating a dia-
logue with the voices that articulate the historical subjectivity and
uneven development of which Bloch speaks. However, there is a cru-
cial difference between the referential framework of Bloch's theory
and the implications of Wolfs development as a writer. Bloch devel-
oped a theory of nonsynchronism in order to explain the retarded his-
torical development of Others.His theory leaves his own historical
position unaccounted for because it is assumed to be synonymous
with the standpoint of a progressive historical Now. As the voice of the
historical vanguard, Bloch's theory of nonsynchronism continues the
privileging of the present over the past. From this position of the New
his voice is radical and generous enough to understand the distortions
and silences of other voices, but too firmly self-identified as thepro-
gressivediscourse of history to identify with them. By contrast, Wolfs
theory of uneven development is synonymous with her own historical
experience. Nonsynchronism is not a description of Otherness, as it is

ofAlice
4. Cf. the expansion of authorial identity in Gertrude Stein's TheAutobiography
B. Toklasand the narrative relationship to identity and difference in her ThreeLives.
5. Bloch, "Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics," New GermanCriti-
que, 11 (Spring 1977), 22.
60 ChristaWolfs Prose

for Bloch, but a statement of self in one's own language. In her

Biichner-Prize Speech, for example, Wolf speaks not of "they," but
as "we":

The condition of the world is awry, we say as a test, and

we realize: it is true. We could defend this sentence.
The word is not pretty, merely correct, and it is thus a
balm for our ears, lacerated by the clamor of great
words, a small relief also for our conscience, deranged
by too many false, wrongly-used words. Could it per-
haps be the first word of a different, accurate language
that we have in our ear but not yet on our tongue?
[... .] Whoever wants to search for this language would
probably have to endure a nearly complete loss of self-
esteem, of self-consciousness, for all the accustomed
patterns of speech, narration, thought, and literary
composition would no longer be available. Most likely,
one would experience what it really means: to lose
control.6

The loss of control, then, as compared to the linear perpetuation of

production and tradition, is essential to the production of literature,
history and self. Such loss of control would not apply, of course, to the
conscious writing of the literarywork, but to the quality of silence that
exists within the work and between one work and the next. These lap-
ses of language - and the historical lapses they echo - belong to the
writer, not to the work. Given a literaryquality, they call into question
the authority of literary history and assert the preeminence of the
author: as experiential person, not as producer. When Wolf says "the
author is an important person,"7 she recalls Benjamin's concept of the
"author as producer,"8 but she shifts the quality of authorship by
foregrounding the individual. Thus literary history would not only be
the history of its production (the work), but also the history of authorial
experience (the silences as well as the products of the creative
process).9

6. Wolf," 'Shall I Garnish a Metaphor with an Almond Blossom?': Bichner-Prize

Acceptance Speech," New GermanCritique,(Spring/Summer 1981), 5. Hereafter in my
text as BP.
7. Wolf, "The Reader and the Writer," in C.W., TheReaderand the Writer:Essays,
Sketches,Memories,trans.Joan Becker (Berlin/GDR: Seven Seas Books, 1977), p. 206.
8. Cf. Benjamin, "The Author as Producer," in W.B., Reflections: Essays,Aphorisms,
AutobiographicalWritings,ed. Peter Demetz; trans. EdmondJephcott (New York: Har-
court BraceJovanovich, 1978), pp. 220-238.
9. In her correspondence with Lukacs during the realism debate of the 1930s, Anna
 HelenFehervary 61

II. Mythand Gender

The invocation of authorial presence - "When if not now?" (CT,

185) - is a leitmotif in Christa Wolfs entire work. Wolf belongs to the
generation of German authors who grew up under fascism and sur-
vived it at great personal cost: the loss of fantasy and mythic story-
telling; the suppression of the creative immediacy of play; the lack of
reliance on one's legitimacy as historical subject, as author. Fascism
succeeded by political force and, more permanently, by colonizing the
human imagination. It created a spectacle of barbarism that gave
mythic proportions to the most banal historical events and, converse-
ly, transformed the irrational parameters of myth into real history. Its
legacy to the writers of the future who survived was a sense of mythic
deformation and historical arrest. During his exile in the 1930s Brecht
was still able to name the five difficulties he experienced while trying to
write the truth, or to lament in a poem about the impossibility of writ-
ing in lyrical form about nature.10Ten years later Theodor W. Adorno
uttered the words: "To write poetry after Auschwitz would be bar-
baric."" Wolfs writing responds to this problematic by returning
again and again to the contradictory paradigm of fascism and utopian
thinking. However, unlike so many of her contemporaries who stress
the burden of German history and its deformation of ideology and
myth, Wolf points to the absence of subjective agency that could res-
pond authentically to the present before imagining the future. Her
approach to Vergangenheitsbewaltigung (coming to terms with the past)
does not posit the individual in relation to history and myth, but

Seghers argued on behalf of those writers (Kleist, Holderlin, Giinderrode etal.) who for
historical and personal reasons did not exhibit the totality of literary production as
exemplified by Goethe, and she suggested that the notion of realism be expanded to
account for these writers'authorial experiences and the ensuing literaryquality of their
works. Seghers' letters are found in Marxismusund Literatur:Eine Dokumentation in 3
Bdnden,ed. FritzJ. Raddatz, Vol. 2 (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1969), pp. 110-138. Christa
Wolf, who has often acknowledged her literary debt to Seghers, frequently refers to
these letters in her essays. Cf. for example her three essays on Seghers in Lesenund
Schreiben:NeueSammlung(Darmstadt und Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1981), pp. 115-157.
TheReaderand the Writer,a translation of an earlier version of Wolfs collected essays,
contains only the first two essays on Seghers: "Faith in the Terrestial" and "A Visit to
Anna Seghers," op.cit., pp. 111-143. Cf. also Wolfs reference to Seghers in the inter-
view with Wolf in this issue of NGC.
10. Brecht, "Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties," trans. Richard Winston, in B.B.,
Galileo(New York, 1966), pp. 149 ff.; Brecht, "To Posterity," in GermanPoetry,1910-
1975, ed. and trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Urizen, n.d.), pp. 169-173.
11. Adorno, Prismen:Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft(Berlin and Frankfurt/M.: Suhr-
kamp, 1955), p. 31. Unless otherwise indicated, translations from German are my
own.
62 Christa Wolfs Prose

attempts to examine the history of the self in relation to others. Thus

collective guilt would stem from the inability of the individual to fully
experience the present within collective relationships. Wolfs writing
seeks the human faces of subjective agency that have been obscured by
the inherited myths of collective barbarism and collective guilt.12
Writing his "Theses on the Philosophy of History" shortly before his
suicide in France in 1940, Walter Benjamin described "Angelus
Novus" as a mythic archetype that emerged from a confrontation with
the "wreckage" of fascism, yet allowed for the moment of mediation
between past and future:

A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an

angel looking as though he is about to move away from
something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are
staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is
how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned
toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events,
he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wrec-
kage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The
angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make
whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing
from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such
violence that the angel can no longer close them. This
storm irresistably propels him into the future to which
his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him
grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.13
The image of history in Benjamin's "Theses" is not dialectical or
teleological, but one "filled by the presence of the now" (TPH, 261). It
is "the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time
stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present
in which he himself [the historical materialist, i.e., the author, H.F.] is
writing history" (TPH, 262). For Benjamin, historical impasse is syn-
onymous with subjective impasse. Breaks, silences and lapses would
thus be part of historical agency, not deviation. Productivity and pro-
gress would depend not on the rationality of an historical continuum,

12. Cf. Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, TheInabilityto Mourn:Principlesof

CollectiveBehavior,trans. Beverly R. Placzek (New York: Grove Press, 1975); Margarete
Mitscherlich, "Die Frageder Selbstdarstellung:Uberlegungen zu den Autobiographien
von Helene Deutsch, Margaret Mead und Christa Wolf," NeueRundschau,91 (1980),
291-316.
13. Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in W.B., Illuminations,ed.
Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York:Schocken, 1969), pp. 257-258. Hereaf-
ter cited as TPH.
 Helen Fehervary 63

but on the "shock" of recognition that takes cognizance of the "debris"

accumulated in its wake: "Thinking involves not only the flow of
thoughts, but their arrest as well. There thinking suddenly stops in a
configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a
shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad. A historical materialist
[... ] recognized the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or,
put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed
past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the
homogeneous course of history" (TPH, 262-263).
Benjamin's own cultural heritage - messianicJudaism and philo-
sophical Marxism - allowed him to merge myth and history with a
radical concept of subjective authorship, and thus he has left an indel-
ible mark on contemporary theories of history.14The similarities to
Christa Wolf's insistence on authorial presence are self-evident. But
Christa Wolf is also a woman writer who does not have a philosophical
or theological tradition that specifically accounts for her. As a female
author she has been absent - as Other - within messianic time as well
as within the territories of historical materialism. Moreover, the tradi-
tion of women's writing to which she might be assigned (pejoratively
called Frauenliteraturin German) hardly possesses the metaphoric
powers that could "blast" an era out of the course of history.'5 What,
then, does such a revised myth of historical consciousness mean for
her?
Shortly before her suicide in 1943 which, like Benjamin's, was his-
torically linked to fascism, Virginia Woolf reflected on another arche-
typal angel: "the Angel in the House":
The shadow of her wing fell on my page; I heard the
rustling of her skirts in the room. Directly, that is to say,
I took my pen in hand to review that novel by a famous
man, she slipped behind me and whispered: "My dear,
you are a young woman. You are writing about a book

14. Regarding contemporary German literature, cf. Heiner Miller's "Dergliicklose

Engel" (The Hapless Angel), in H.M., Theater-Arbeit (West Berlin: Rotbuch, 1975), p.
18. Cf. also my analysis of Benjamin's and Miiller's texts in "History and Aesthetics in
Bertolt Brecht and Heiner Miiller," New GermanCritique,8 (Spring 1976), 80-109.
15. In this spirit cf. the phallic associations Klaus Theweleit finds in Ernst Bloch's
formulation of "der aufrechte Gang" (standing upright or the upright posture) as a
utopian model within critical theory: Theweleit, Minnerphantasien(Male Fantasies),
Vol. 2: Mdnnerkorper: Zur Psychoanalyse des WeissenTerrors,(Frankfurt am Main: Roter
Stern, 1978), p. 68; for Theweleit's comments regarding Bloch on women cf. Vol. 1:
Frauen,Fluten, Korper,Geschichte,. (Frankfurt am Main: Roter Stern, 1977), pp. 212-
213.
64 ChristaWolfs Prose

that has been written by a man. Be sympathetic; be ten-

der, flatter;deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex.
Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your
own. Above all, be pure." And she made as if to guide
my pen. [ .. ] I turned upon her and caught her by the
throat. I did my best to kill her. [ ... ] Had I not killed
her she would have killed me. She would have plucked
the heart out of my writing. [... ] Thus, whenever I felt
the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo
upon my page, I took up the inkpot anf flung it at her.
She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assis-
tance to her.16

The texts by Benjamin and Woolf both address the discrepancy bet-
ween accumulated historical consciousness and subjective presence.
Yet their respective archetypical "Angels" signify two very different
relationships between authorship and myth. On one level, WoolPs and
Benjamin's "Angels" can be seen as one as the same: He the "Angel of
History" simply reappears as domesticated She in the house. But the
respective author's relationship to the mythic archetype reveals a cru-
cial difference. Whereas Benjamin is still able to rely on a mythological
apparatus in order to formulate a creative experiential relationship to
history, in Woolfs model the myth itself is the killer. Historically, male
authorship has perpetuated itself through myths, while women's liter-
ary quality has largely been restricted to being the myth itself. Woman
has not been the author of literature but its abstraction and muse.'7
Female authorship has essentially impacted on history as a reflective
mirror, not as a primary creative art. Precisely the mythic inspiration
that has guided male authorship has been the inhibition of women's
authorship: When the muse nears the desk of the woman writer she
becomes the "Angel in the House."
Like Benjamin, for whom "thinking suddenly stops in a configura-
tion pregnant [sic!] with tensions" and "gives that configuration a
shock" (TPH, 262), Woolf invokes unconsciousness as a "state of tran-
ce" (PW,240) in which writing is possible. Thus she can kill the "Angel
in the House," just as for Benjamin the human subject can "blast a
specific eraout of the homogeneous course of history" (TPH, 263). For

16. Woolf, "Professions for Women," in V.W., TheDeathof theMothand OtherEssays

(New York:Harcourt BraceJovanovich, 1974), pp. 237-238. Hereafter cited in my text
as PW.
17. Cf. Simone de Beauvior, TheSecondSex, trans. and ed. H.M. Parshley (New York:
Vintage, 1974), pp. 205-206: "Women being the very substance of man's poetic work,
 HelenFehervary 65

Benjamin this moment signifies the renewal of historical conscious-

ness and authorship: The universal human subject remains intact. For
Woolf, the woman writer, this moment culminates in paralysis. Woolf
describes the girl with her pen in hand as the

fisherman lying sunk in dreams on the verge of a deep

lake with a rod held out over the water. She was letting
her imagination sweep unchecked round every rock
and cranny of the world that lies submerged in the
depths of our unconscious being. Now came the expe-
rience, the experience that I believe to be far com-
moner with women writers than with men. The line
raced through the girl's fingers. Her imagination had
rushed away. It had sought the pools, the depths, the
dark placs where the largest fish slumber. And then
there was a smash. There was an explosion. There was
foam and confusion. The imagination had dashed
itself against something hard. [... ] To speak without
figure she had thought of something, something about
the body, about the passions which it was unfitting for
her as a woman to say (PW, 240).

The myth of the "Angel in the House" is not replaced by the female
body, the subject, but by the unknown: at best a persona, a mask. In
WoolPs words; "The Angel was dead; what then remained? You may
say that what remained was a simple and common object - a young
woman in a bedroom with an inkpot. In other words, now that she had
rid herself of falsehood, that young woman had only to be herself. Ah,
but what is 'herself? I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not
know" (PW, 238). Woolf summarizes "two very genuine experiences"
of her writing career: "The first - killing the Angel in the House - I
think I solved. She died. But the second, telling the truth about my own
experiences as a body, I do not think I solved" (PW, 241).
Christa Wolfs uneven development as a writer cannot be satisfac-
torily explained by the historical experience of fascism, nor by the fluc-
tuations of cultural policy and socialist development in the GDR. The
problems of her first work of fiction, MoscowNovella(1961), for exam-
ple, are generally dismissed as a youthful error of socialist realism.
Indeed, the characters are stereotypical, the plot is schematic, the

it is understandable that she should appear as his inspiration: the Muses are women.
[ ... . A Muse creates nothing by herself; she is a calm, wise Sibyl, putting herself with
docility at the service of a master."
66 Christa
WolfsProse

dialogues are contrived, the narration is awkward, and the entire fic-
tional framework is put into the service of an overriding idea. Christa
Wolf herself has described his early work as a "treatise for the propaga-
tion of pious views.""' But the tenets of socialist realism were not the
only prescriptive categories that informed the literarylandscape of her
first fictional work. Commenting on MoscowNovellain 1973, Wolf con-
tinued: "This is what probably must have happened in that text: From
the head, arm, hand, pen, typewriter to the paper, there was not only a
transformation of energy, as required by literature, but a loss of
energy. For fear of losing control of what might explode inside me, I
apparently tried to invent dams, building blocks that could hold a story
together" (SU, 61). The metaphoric similarity to Virginia WoolPs des-
cription of the woman sitting at her desk, facing an empty page with
pen in hand is striking:The author of MoscowNovellahad also been writ-
ing in the shadow of the "Angel in the House." The first attempt to tell
the truth about her "own experiences as a body" would have to be
postponed for several years: until the writing of TheQuestfor Christa
T. (1968).
The literary conventions of MoscowNovellaseem at least as embed-
ded in the tradition of Frauenliteratur as they are in the tradition of
socialist realism. Written in 1959, at the juncture between the recon-
struction literature of the 1950s and the "Bitterfelder Weg" that
addressed the relationship between production and everyday life, Mos-
cowNovellabarely touches on the thematic concerns that constitute the
literature of this time: industrial and agricultural production, class
conflicts, and the development of the positive hero as an allegorical
representation of the state. In this work, production relates to the labor
of friendship, intimacy and love; class conflicts are replaced by the
relationships between the sexes; self-realization is situated in the
notion of human interdependence rather than in the self as embodi-
ment of the state. The socio-political structure of her own GDR society
is strikinglyabsent in Wolfs firstwork of fiction. The plot is set in far-off
Moscow, yet the city of Moscow itself- sketched hurriedly, almost as
an obligatory gesture - is hardly conveyed as a social entity, or even as
a national symbol. The main characterVera's trip to Moscow is rather
the topos for a state of being: a narrativejourney into another space,
another time. Thejourney to Moscow is a thematic detour for a process
of narrative reflection that takes shape in a much more authentic his-
torical manner in TheQuestfor ChristaT. (1968) and A ModelChildhood
(1976).

18. Wolf, "Uber Sinn und Unsinn von Naivitat," in C.W., Lesenund Schreiben:
Neue
Sammlung(Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1981), p. 60. Hereafter cited as SU.
 HelenFehervary 67

The least contrived passages of MoscowNovella dwell on Vera's

memories of the past: the end of the war, the defeat of fascism, and her
first meeting with the Russian soldier Pavel. The first of these passages
reveals a mixing of tenses and the use of the pronoun "I," which never
reoccur in the text and, in retrospect, almost appear to be an involun-
tary lapse. This "lapse" anticipates Christa Wolfs later theoretical
reflections on "losing control" in order to find a new language (BP, 5)
and allows for the brief glimpse of a narrative style that can tell a story
without the self-censorship permeating the rest of the text:

Who cares if it's raining. The first time I met him it was
raining, too. To say we met is a good one. [... ] I panic-
ked at the sight of his gray-brown uniform and bolted
out the door. Once I was in the backyard, I made a
beeline for the parsonage, running like mad across the
fields and climing over fences - all this while it was
raining cats and dogs. And as I'm standing muddy and
breathless in the open door of the parish kitchen,
where a group of women would usually be sitting argu-
ing around the fire, there he sits utterly alone in the
middle of the room.19

But this release of narrative spontaneity soon comes to an abrupt

end, and in the new paragraph the author imposes once more the
stylistic and thematic constraints of her narrative "line":

Vera laughed quietly to herself. The wet asphalt glis-

tened in the circles of light from the street lamps. A soft
rain moistened her face. She turned her collar up, put
her hands deep into her pockets and moved slowly
down the street that was still full of people (MN, 12).

Reminiscent of Virginia Woolfs description of the young woman

writer, the imagination of the author "had dashed itself against some-
thing hard."
Wolfs comments in 1973 on MoscowNovellashed light not only on
her own history as an author, but also on the process by which she
gradually transformed her character Vera into an abstract principle,
a teacher:

19. Wolf, MoskauerNovelle(Halle: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1961), p. 11. Hereafter

cited as MN.
68 Christa
WolfsProse

But a childhood that stretches between private trivi

alities and public fanaticism can possibly find no other
outcome than a surreptitious eccentricity and the
attempt to counteract this with an obvious occupation:
the vocation of a teacher, for example, which I wrote
on all questionnaires up to my twenty-first year. For
years thereafter I moved on the edge of an endeavor
that I never even presumed to think myself capable of.
This cannot simply be explained by the fact that very
young people are rarely able to write prose. There was
an inhibition at work here that could only be overcome
by the experience of severe concussions, and by no
means all at once (SU, 57).

Just as the creative ambitions of women have been channelled since

the nineteenth century into the socially permissible vocations of
teacher and nurse, Wolfs heroine Vera is rarely seen at work in her
actual profession of medical doctor. She transcends her difficulties by
assuming the characteristics of the "eternally feminine." She nurses
Pavel out of his lovesickness for her, even patches up his relationship to
his wife, and teaches him about the benefits of sublimation for the
larger cause of humanity. All this, in fact, keeps her from reflecting suf-
ficiently about her own past and her own history. LikeVera, who at the
end cuts short her journey to return to her other life in the GDR, the
author Wolfs literary project remains truncated in this first work. In
Silvia Bovenschen reminds us of the "detours
Die imaginierteWeiblichkeit
the female imagination must take in order to come into its own."20
Or, the initial detour of MoscowNovellamay have been the path of
least resistance toward being able to write at all. Rooted in nineteenth-
century realism, the prose tradition of Frauenliteraturprovides an
authorial voice, however borrowed or foreign it may be, to the woman
writer whose personal literary heritage is largely absent, or at best
obscured.21 Wolfs first work, in the modest and conservative form of

20. Bovenschen, Die imaginierteWeiblichkeit: Exemplarische Untersuchungen zu kultur-

und literarischenPrdsentationsformen
geschichtlichen des Weiblichen(Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1979), p. 43.
21. The modernists' battle against the omniscient narrator is one more example of
the literaryrevolts of sons against fathers that does not take into account the absence of
women's narrative omniscience. From this perspective it might seem more plausible
that Anna Seghers, who is generally criticized in the West for the "dogmatism" of her
later work, has increasingly exerted her narrative omniscience in her writing -
perhaps as an inadvertent attempt to make up for the previous lack of narrativecontrol
by her own sex in her own language. Luise Rinser exhibits a similar tendency toward
narrativeomniscience and "dogmatism" (in her case Catholicism, not Marxism). It is
 HelenFehervary 69

the nineteenth-century novella, is an attempt to preserve the notion of

a unique, significant (hi)story and thereby to rationalize the vulner-
ability of female authorship. The two available prose alternatives
would have been the abstractionism of the modernist novel or, more
either the
likely, the teleological gesture of the socialist Bildungsroman:
further dismantling of an already fragile literary ego or the increasing
collectivization of an already anonymous authorial self. Seen in this
light, MoscowNovella validates the historically authentic quality of
Wolfs early literary "immaturity" and "naivete." "A certain measure
of self-deception - naivete -, which is continuously drained and con-
tinuously replenished, seems to be necessary for our lives," Christa
Wolf writes in her essay of 1973, entitled "On the Sense and Senseless-
ness of Naivete" (SU, 63). Thus she is able to end her reflections in
praise of folly":
The folly that has many faces, among them those that
go hand in hand with insight and knowledge. The folly
on whose soil the great experiments flourish and
frivolity, cynicism and resignation cannot bear fruit.
The folly that enables us to build houses, plant trees,
- to act, as
bring children into the world, write books
vulnerably, awkwardly and incompletely as we know
how. Which is always more reasonable than to capitu-
late in the face of the many perfect but sometimes
inscrutable techniques of destruction (SU, 67).

III. A Landscapeof Masks

The literary folly of naivete that has "many faces" emerges meta-
"Faces"
phorically in Christa Wolfs writing as a landscape of masks.
and "masks" appear throughout her work and function as alternatives
to the mythological topography that has supported the development
of modern literature. Even the mythic structures of the Enlightenment
that inhabit GDR literature are strikingly absent from her work. There
are no Herculean feats of labor, there is no Promethean revolt, no

surely significant that the two most prolific German women writers of the 20th century,
tradi-
Seghers and Rinser, have succeeded in the public forum of literary history in the
of
tion realism, whereas the foremost women writers in the modernist traditions, Else
Lasker-Schulerand Ingeborg Bachmann, barely survived in the shadows of their more
successful male counterparts. The difference between Seghers/Rinser and Lasker-
Schiiler/Bachmann applies no less to the lives of these writers than it does to their
works. ChristaWolfs literarydevelopment demonstrates the struggle to overcome the
limitations that both of these traditions present for women writers.
70 ChristaWolfs Prose

Odyssean cunning, no Faustian striving for perfection and truth. The

specter of myth does not even function as a point of reference for Marx-
ist deconstruction, as it does for most avant-garde writing in the GDR
since Brecht.22Yet Wolf does not turn the dialectic of Enlightenment
on its head. History is not displaced by subjectivity, political discourse
by individualism, nor the public sphere by the personal. The radical-
ism of her work lies neither in a transcendent nor a private quality, but
in an immanent historicity. Christa Wolf conveys this historicity in the
form of masks.
The mask is not an idea or story, as is myth, but the premonition or
memory of a fact, a gesture, a person, an historical identity. It does not
belong to the tradition of a progressive literaryhistory, but to the tradi-
tion of the historical persona. The mask is the persona of authorship
that hangs suspended between female subjectivity absorbed by myth
and the absence of another system of language. In contrast to the
literary avant-garde's perpetual construction, deconstruction and
reconstruction of myth, the literary quality of the mask allows for the
expansion and multiplication of one literary self into many: literature
as reproduction, not production.
The history of theater illustrates the difference between the arche-
types of myth and mask. Traditionally, myth has informed the objec-
tive dramatization of life on the stage: through concept, story and
meaning. The mask, or the persona of the actor, has mediated the sub-
jective agency of this dramatization: in the physicalization of concepts,
in affective suggestion, and in the individual experience of meaning.
The significance of myth belongs to the theater director; the body of
the mask belongs to its actor. In the course of her work, Christa Wolf
gradually hands over the "theater" of literature to the "actor." She
initiates this process at the end of MoscowNovella:

Vera spent the day alone with her travel preparations

and journal entries. Whatever it was that she did, at the
same time she worked at drawing a mask over her face.
She was unable to be sure about her thoughts and
feelings and so she had to learn to hide them. A layer of
indifferent friendliness had to grow over her face

22. Cf. my articles "Prometheus Rebound: Technology and the Dialectic of Myth,"
The TechnologicalImagination:Theoriesand Fictions,eds. Teresa de Lauretis, Andreas
Huyssen and Kathleen Woodward (Madison: Coda Press, 1980), pp. 95-105; and "Die
erzahlerische Kolonisierung des weiblichen Schweigens: Frau und Arbeit in der DDR-
LiteraturvomMittelalterbiszum Gegenwart,eds.
Literatur,"Arbeitals Themain derdeutschen
Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (Konigstein/Ts.: Althenaum, 1979), pp. 171-
195.
 HelenFehervary 71

which seemed naked to her ever since this night

(MN, 43).

Wolfdescribesthe innerconflictsof her characterin the traditionof

psychologicalrealism.However,drawingthe mask is not only a psy-
chological solution for the characterVera.It is also an aestheticsolu-
tion for the author in attempting to create an authentic literary
character.Betweenthe suffocationof femalenessin mythand, accord-
ing to VirginiaWoolf, the virtual impossibility of "telling the truth
about the [female]body" (PW,241), thereis the possibilityof survival
throughthe mask.The maskprovidesa faceto keep the characterVera
from succumbing to the stereotypicalheroine of Frauenliteratur who
loses herselfin endless "travelpreparations"and "journalentries."It
also defends her againstthe pitfallsof exposing her nakedface - the
impossibilityto write at all.
In the autobiographicalreportage"Tuesday,September27," writ-
ten between MoscowNovellaand TheDividedHeaven,the mask is
directlylinked to the problem of writing.At the end of the text the
narratorstruggleswith her manuscriptof TheDividedHeaven:

I knowthatneitherthe writtenpages nor the sentences

I write today will stay - not one syllable.I write and
then I cross it out again: As always, Rita bolted like
lightningfrom her sleep andwasawake,with no mem-
ory of a dream. Only a factmust have been there. She
triedto hold onto it, it faded. Robertlay beside her.23

The tentativewrittenwords are likened to the face that is fleeting. In

this reportageChristaWolf uses the first person narratorfor the first
time. In so doing she is able to envisiona literarypresencebesides her
characterRita:a third presence in the form of a face, a mask. In The
QuestforChristaT. (1968) this mask becomes the "secretof the third
person":
Her secret,which I'd been lookingfor all the timewe'd
known one another, was a secret no longer. [... ]
Among her papersarevariousfragmentswrittenin the
third person: she,with whom she associated herself,
whom she was careful not to name, for what name

23. Wolf, "Dienstag, der 27. September," in C.W., GesammelteErzdhlungen(Darm-

stadt und Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1980), p. 40.
72 ChristaWolfs Prose

could she have given her? She, who knows she must
always be new, and see anew, over and over again [... ]
I understand the secret of the third person, who is there
without being tangible and who, when circumstances
favor her, can bring down more reality upon herself
than the first person: I. The difficulty of saying "I."
(CT, 196-170).
The anonymity of the third person does not constrict, but allows for a
pluralization of identities. The quoted passage is followed by the
lines:
Was I really asleep? I saw her go by, in all her forms;
saw suddently behind all her transformations the
meaning; understood that it's inept to wish for her to
arrive and stay anywhere (CT, 170).

The literary character Christa T. - the name implies a personal yet

collective identity - is thus herselfa composite of masks. She signifies
the accumulation of authorial presence, of a collective tradition, of
literary history. One of her many forms, or masks, is given a name in
the novel: Sophie La Roche, the first acknowledged woman novelist of
the German Enlightenment. While "playing" her at a costume party,
Christa T. need not wear a mask because, like Sophie La Roche in her
day, she is the mask:

For one is always involuntarily grasping for definitions.

But then came the fancy-dress ball, at which ChristaT.
arrived as Sophie La Roche, though she hadn't dressed
up a all, she wore only her goldish-brown dress with
the exotic pattern, telling everyone who she was sup-
posed to be (CT, 117-118).
In "Self-Experiment" (1972), the female narrator undergoes an
experimental scientific sex-change and, as a man, is called Anders
(Other). The real name of her "I" is never divulged. Both the "I" and
Anders are only partial forms of what might be called a gender, a per-
son, an identity. On the way to this realization, which culminates in a
new form of authorship - "the invention of the person one can love"
-, the narrator/Anders experiences the silence of language and the
conscious inability to self-identify or to name:

Do you know what "person" means? Mask. Role. Real

Self. A prerequisite for language, it seems to me after all
this, must be the existence of at least one of these three
 HelenFehervary 73

conditions. The fact that all of them were lost to me had

to mean virtually total silence. You can't write down
anything about nobody. This explains the three-day
gap in my report.24

At the end ofA ModelChildhood (1976) the narrator affirms the insuf-
ficiency of language and the fluidity of voices and masks. She imagines
a human being who is more than a persona and less than an identifi-
able body or definable shape. This human being does not assert him-
self by his "upright posture" (Bloch: "der aufrechte Gang"),25but
abandons the self to the experience of a world that we know (and fear)
as the limitless Other:

The closer you are to a person, the harder it seems to

fact.
say something conclusive about him;- it's a known
The child who was hidden in me has she come
forth? Or has she been scared into looking for a
the
deeper, more inaccessible hiding place? [ ... ] And
split the first person into the
past, which can still -
second the the third has its hegemony been broken?
Will the voices be still?
I don't know.
At night I shall see - whether waking, whether dream-
tran-
ing - the outline of a human being who [in fluid
sitions will change perpetually], through whom other
hindrance.
persons, adults, children, will pass without
I will be hardly surprised if this outline may also be that
of an animal, a tree, even a house, which anyone who
in
wishes may go in and out at will. Half-conscious, I shall
ever
experience the beautiful waking image drifting
deeper into the dream, into ever new shapes no longer
accessible to words, shapes which I believe I recognize.
Sure of finding myself once again in the world of solid
bodies upon awakening, I shall abandon myself to the
the
experience of dreaming. I shall not revolt against
limits of the expressible.26

24. Wolf, "Self-Experiment: Appendix to a Report," New GermanCritique,13 (Winter

1978), 127.
25. Cf. Bloch, Das PrinzipHoffnung(Frankfurtam Main: Suhrkamp, 1959).
26. Wolf, A ModelChildhood,trans. Ursule Molinaro and Hedwig Rappolt (NewYork:
Farrar,Straus and Giroux, 1980), p. 406-407. The words in brackets are left out in the
American edition.
74 ChristaWolfsProse

Examples such as these abound ChristaWolfs laterwork, where the

appearance of the mask often coincides with the use of the second per-
son, as well as the third. The story "Unter den Linden" (1969) bears a
motto derived from Rahel Varnhagen, is inspired by Rahel's written
accounts of her dreams, and begins by addressing an unnamed Rahel,
as the mask of a potential literary tradition, with the intimate appella-
tion "Du" (you): "Under the Linden Trees is where I always liked to go.
Most of all as you know, alone."27We find a similar relationship in the
essay on Bettine von Arnim (1979), written in the personal form of a
letter. The title of her essay on Karoline von Giinderrode, "The
Shadow of a Dream" (1978), suggests that the brevity of this Romantic
writer's creative life was only the mask of a larger historical presence. In
No Place On Earth(1979) the main characters, Giinderrode and Hein-
rich von Kleist, are positioned like actors - with many roles, many
faces and many masks - on the stage set of the early 19th century
salon. Most recently, the figure of Cassandra(1983) suggests the arche-
typal origins of the literary mask: the mythical voice that speaks but is
not heard can only be perceived as an image, a face frozen by his-
tory, a mask.
In Wolfs Biichner-Prize Speech of 1980 the mask multiplies as
"Rosetta under her many names" (BP, 7). She first becomes Georg
Biichner's other women characters: Marie, Marion, Lena, Julie,
Lucile; then Gerhart Hauptmann's Rose Bernd and Ibsen's Nora; later
she is the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg and the radical vamp
Marlene Dietrich; finally she emerges as Ingeborg Bachmann, the
author. Within the development of Christa Wolfs work, each appear-
ance of a mask anticipates its proliferation as it becomes historically
objectified: in the form of the third person, the second, and finally a
literary name - Sophie La Roche, Rahel Varnhagen, Karoline von
Giinderrode, Heinrich von Kleist, Bettine von Arnim, Georg Biichner,
Rosetta under her many names, Ingeborg Bachmann, Cassandra. All
these masks, personae and names are facets of Christa Wolfs gradual
accumulation of literary history, and at the same time they are expan-
sions of her authorial self. The "difficulty of saying 'I' "is ultimately the
desire not to say 'I.'
For it is the desire to say morethan '.' The mask is a form of relational
being and enables the stripping away of an isolated individual iden-
tity.It is the wish to participate in a body of affinities and not to become
the summation of an individual or collective teleology. In this sense the
mask is the subversive underside of myth and an alternative to man-
kind's progressive journey toward perfection. It is the prophetic

27. Wolf, 'Unter den Linden," in C.W., GesammelteErzdhlungen,p. 65.

 Helen Fehervary 75

answer to the Odyssey of Enlightened Man and outlines a human face

beyond the dialectic of Enlightenment. The mask is the voice that sur-
vives the consolidation of the state and the myth of Odysseus: "Cassan-
dra must have loved Troy more than herself when she dared to
prophesy to her compatriots the downfall of her city" (BP, 11).
Christa Wolf closes her Biichner-Prize essay by suggesting that her
literary identity, like Rosetta "under her many names," is also a mask:
"This skin too will be stripped away and hang in shreds" (BP, 11).
Traditionally, the myth of the satyr Marsyas, follower of the goddess
Cybele and defeated by Apollo in a competition, has defined the his-
torical limitations of the creative voice as mask. In the words of Robert
Graves, Marsyas
stumbled upon the flute [made by Athena] and he went
about Phrygia in Cybele's train, delighting the igno-
rant peasants. They cried out that Apollo himself could
not have made better music, even on his lyre, and Mar-
syas was foolish enough not to contradict them. This,
of course, provoked the anger of Apollo, who invited
him to a contest, the winner of which should inflict
whatever punishment he pleased on the loser.[... ]
The contest proved an equal one, the Muses being
charmed by both instruments, until Apollo cried out
to Marsyas:I challenge you to do with your instrument
as much as I can do with mine. Turn it upside down,
and both play and sing at the same time. This, with a
flute, was manifestly impossible, and Marsyas failed to
meet the challenge. But Apollo reversed his lyre, and
sang such delightful hymns in honor of the Olympian
gods that the Muses could not do less than give the ver-
dict in his favor. Then, for all his pretended sweetness,
Apollo took a most cruel revenge on Marsyas: flaying
him alive and nailing his skin to a pine (or, some say, to
a plane tree), near the source of the river which now
bears his name. [... ] Becoming the acknowledged
god of Music, [Apollo] has ever since played on his
seven-stringed lyre while the gods banquet."28
The myth of Apollo and Marsyas represents the victimization of the
creative popular voice by cultural dogmatism and power. This, for
example, is the interpretation underlying Thomas Brasch's rendering

28. Robert Graves, The GreekMyths,Vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), p.

77.
76 ChristaWolfsProse

of the myth in "Der Zweikampf' (The Duel), one of the prose texts in
the volume he appropriately entitled Vorden VdternSterbendie Sohne
(1967: The Sons Die Before the Fathers). In much of the West German
women's literature of the 1970s, exemplified by Verena Stefan's Shed-
dingof 19 76, the concept of stripped skin or shedding has the opposite
function: the narrator sheds a false, superimposed persona and lang-
uage on the way to find an authentic identity and a true voice. In
Brasch's and Stefan's texts, the metaphor of stripped skin or shedding
has to do with the oppression of absence of literary identity. For
Christa Wolf, the mask is itself a form of identity and, as such, only
one aspect of multiple literary identies. The final words of the
Biichner-Prize Speech - "This skin too will be stripped away and hang
in shreds" - are not simply a negation or affirmation of ChristaWolfs
narrative persona. They also echo the masked personae of other liter-
ary voices and other literary lives.
One of them is Ingeborg Bachmann, who affirmed the literaryego as
an "I without guarantees," and whose writing reveals many variations
of the "yet hardly used, hardly exhausted I: What we consider to be its
fact appears here as an ideal image, elsewhere as a mask, and then
again all at once as its true face."29Another is Ulrike Meinhof, author
and political activist, whose language on death row in 1972-73 is a for-
midable antecendent to Christa Wolfs phrasing in her Bfichner-Prize
Speech eight years later:
A strain to speak in a normal tone of voice, as if speak-
ing loudly, almost roaring -
the feeling of losing speech-
one can no longer identify the meanings of words, only
guess them -
the use of hissing sounds - s, p, tz, sch - is absolutely
unbearable-
guards, visitors, the courtyard seem to be out of
celluloid
headaches-
flashes-
sentence formation, grammar, syntax - out of
control -
While writing: two lines - at the end of the second line
one cannot retain the begining of the first -
the feeling of extinguishing internally -

29. Ingeborg Bachmann, "The I That Writes" (Third Frankfurt Lecture), in I.B.,
Werke,Vol. 4 (Miinchen: R. Piper, 1978), p. 229.
 Helen Fehervary 77

[ ...]
The feeling that time and space are interlocked -
the feeling of being in a room of distorted mirrors -
reeling -
Afterwards: a terrible euphoria, hearing something
-the acoustic difference between night and day -
The feeling that time is running out now, the brain
expands once more, over the weeks the spinal cord
gives way again -
The feeling that one's skin has been stripped away.30

By way of association, the last line of Christa Wolfs Buichner-Prize

essay cites the last line of the above text by Ulrike Meinhof. It is signifi-
cant that Wolfs essay does not resort to the myth of Meinhof that
belongs to both the Right and the Left: Ulrike the woman who was the
foremost revolutionary spirit of recent German history and at the same
time its victim. In citing her language, rather than her image or her
story, the essay affirms Ulrike MeinhoPs subjective agency and creates
a dialogue with the invisible and hence unfinished potential of her his-
torical authorship. She is not the "new myth" of progress that "could
incite passion but not love" (BP, 6). Like Cassandra, the voice of the
person behind the myth, she "must have loved Troy more than her-
self' (BP, 11). Ulrike MeinhoPs historical presence, as one aspect of
Rosetta "under her many names," is expanded, not canonized. She is
not the heroic victim but a masked persona "definable by what she is
not" (BP, 22). The unnamed Ulrike Meinhofemerges in our reading of
the Bichner-Prize essay as an author of"a different, accurate language
that we have in our ear but not yet on our tongue," as a contemporary
example of one who has actively "searched for this language" and has
"experienced what it really means: to lose control" (BP, 5).
Just as ChristaWolfs writing extends beyond the traditionalconfines
of Frauenliteratur,symbolized by the "Angel in the House," her literary
project supersedes the patriarchalmyths of the Left that have been per-
petuated by the "citadel of reason" (BP, 6).and its progressive teleology
of myth. By acknowledging the "fear [that] leaps into the vacant
spaces" (BP, 5) of history, Wolfs language creates associations and
affinites that defy the "mortician literature [... ] no longer offering
euphoria but only enthanasia" (BP, 4). "Today," she writes, "literature
must be peace-research" (BP, 10). This literary project of peace begins
with a dialogue between Others, a commonality based on difference.
Similar to the principle of pentimento, it is mediated historically by a

30. Quoted in Peter Brfickner, UlrikeMarieMeinhofunddiedeutschenVerhiiltnisse(West

Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 1976), p. 157).
78 ChristaWolfsProse

landscape of masks. Such a landscape involves the participation of the

reader as well as the writer and thus obscures the traditional boun-
daries between the language of literature and the creative agencies of
historical experience. "This is language on the other side of belief, but
language nevertheless," Christa Wolf writes about Ingeborg Bach-
mann's last poem. "One who expresses herself completely does not
cancel herself out: the wish for obliteration remains as a witness. Her
part will not vanish" (BP, 10).
The words of the reader/writer ChristaWolf that resurrect Ingeborg
Bachmann from the Bachmann myth created by the "mortician litera-
ture" simultaneously elicit in us as readers and writers the memory of
Ulrike Meinhof, the human subject behind the myth of terrorism.
Within the masked landscape of Wolfs essays, Ingeborg Bachmann
and Ulrike Meinhof emerge as two contemporary faces of authorship:
one literary, one political. Together they form a short-lived yet inter-
related project of "peace-research." Although they have been con-
demned by political history to "extinguish internally,"31(Meinhof),
and by literary history to writing with the "burned hand on the nature
of fire"32(Bachmann), their "part will not vanish." "It is the person
who remembers - not memory," Christa Wolf writes in A Model
Childhood."The person who has learned to see [the self] not as 'I' but as
'you.' "3

IV. TheReaderand the Writer:IngeborgBachmannand ChristaWolf

In her essay on Bettine von Arnim, Christa Wolf quotes Bettine in a

letter to Karoline von Giinderrode: "I can write no fragments, I can
only write to you."34 As an alternative to the many fragments in the his-
tory of German literature since the Romantics and Biichner, Wolfs
prose incorporates, either explicity or implicitly, the "you" of the
reader into its narrative structure. The "you" is not an abstract, anony-
mous addressee, as suggested, for example, by Max Frisch's "The
Public as Partner"(1967). It is not a partner constructed by the aesthe-
tic or social imagination, but a known historical agent whose impact
directly affects the formation of the literary work.
The German salon of the late 18th and early 19th centuries provides
the historical model for WolPs aesthetic of the reader and the writer. In
her book on Rahel Varnhagen, Hannah Arendt writes: "The salons

31. Ibid.
32. Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina, in I.B., Werke,Vol. 3, p. 245.
33. Wolf, A ModelChildhood,p. 118.
34. Wolf, "Nun ja! Das nichste Leben geht aber heute an: Ein Brief iiber die Bet-
tine," in C.W., Lesenund Schreiben,p. 315.
 Helen Fehervary 79

were the meeting placesof those who had learnedto representthem-

selves throughconverstation.The actorcan alwaysbe the 'seeming'of
himself'35In the salon women took the art of letterwritingone step
furtherand came face to facein orderto speakand simultaneouslylis-
ten to each other. For Germanwomen writers,the salon - not the
novel of realism - provided the most viable forum for public dis-
course.Itwasa newkindof "theater"in whichtherewasno need foran
audience, for this theaterwas not the representationof life but its ver-
bal enactment. In the salon there was also no third literarycategory
which, as narrator,abstractlyguided conversationor, as reader,pas-
sivelyobservedand absorbedit. The formof the salondemandedsub-
jectivity - as intersubjectivity- on everyone's part. In the salon,
subjectivityand Otherness were two sides of the same persona,
becauseno one wasable to speakalone orforothers.The artof conver-
sationassumed the human presenceof a literarypartner,an activelis-
tener,a real"reader."Likethe epistolaryform, the saloncan be seen as
a genre:women'sconceptionof the dramaperhaps- which, inciden-
tally,would answerthe tedious questionas to why women don't often
writeplays.Yetunlike the epistolarygenre, writtenin domestic isola-
tion, the salon was a public institutionwhich establisheddomesticity
and conversationas the centerof literarylife. The salon imaginedthat
there could not be literaryauthenticityor authorshipwithout recip-
rocity. It was a literaryutopia whose participantsmight have trans-
formed the genresof the novel and the drama,had it not been for the
ensuing Restorationand its culturalconservatism.The rest is literary
history: the myths of the domestic tragedy and the monumental
social novel.
Christa Wolfs writing can be seen as incorporatingthe public
sphereof the salon in prose form.The literarytraditionof the salon is
based on the social relationsof affectiveperceptionand communica-
tion between Others, on the pattern of human interaction called
friendship.As an aestheticcategory,this patternof interactioncan be
distinguishedfrom the systemof kinship,basedon male bonding,that
permeatesthe dominantmythsof literaryhistoryand compriseswhat
we call tradition.36Agnes Heller's distinction between her personal

35. Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen:TheLifeof a Jewish Woman,trans. Richard and

Clara Winston (New York: Harcourt BraceJovanovich, 1974), p. 38.
36. Cf. the countless variations of Oedipus, Odysseus and Faust, invocations of
Orestes and Hamlet, and the ensuing revolts of literarysons against literaryfathers, fic-
tional brothers against brothers, in order to perpetuate the inherited lineage and pro-
duce future kin. The primary Others within the system of kinship are women, existing
in isolation as idealized or castrating projections of the central characters. Cf.
Theweleit's analysis of the "white nurse" and the "red whore" inMdinnerphantasien, Vol.
1, pp. 96-216.
80 ChristaWolfs Prose

history and the heritage of her philosophical discipline exemplifies

this discrepancy:

I was three years old when my father first told me the

parable of the three rings. [... ] Since then my rela-
tionship to Lessing has always been an intimate one.
The word "intimacy" is completely applicable here.
The philosophical structures of Aristotle, Kantor Marx
have influenced my thought profoundly, but I would
not have been able to deal on a personal level with the
people who created these structures: I never would
have chosen them for my friends. Lessing, however,
was and still is my friend. He extends his hand to us, he
imparts no uneasiness in us with his greatness: he is on
our level.37

The friendship between reader and writer that Heller shares with
Lessing is the relational form between Christa WolPs narratorand the
many names, voices and masks that emerge in her work. The narrative
voice is simultaneously a reader who listens, reflects, cites and thereby
invites others to participate in the creative process. Wolfs recent essay
on the question of peace, for example, supports her theoretical specu-
lations.38Written in the form of a letter, it presents a narrativevoice that
is at once a reader and writer of letters, a hesitant promulgator of ideas
and answers, a critical observer of world politics, a vulnerable histori-
cal witness to the nuclear threat, an individual in crisis, and finally as
essayist, a peacemaker. Significantly, she invokes the 16olderlinelegy
"Komm! ins Offene, Freund!" Her language invites intimacy, the
generosity of friendship, and the relinquishment of the authorial ego
in favor of reciprocal involvement. It is an alternative to the open-
endedness of epic theater which, in Brecht's view, assumes the attitude
of friendliness (a one-sided process), but which nevertheless teaches
with craft and cunning while others learn.39It is a theater of actors, not
directors. The dramatic dialogue of Wolfs prose does not offer the
instructive challenge of change but the possibility of interdependent
Otherness and friendship. As a structural category, friendship is syn-
onymous with the politics of peace.

37. Agnes Heller, "Enlightenment Against Fundamentalism:The Example of Less-

ing," New GermanCritique,23 (Spring/Summer 1981), 13.
38. Wolf, " 'Komm! ins Offene, Freund!" K6nnen wir den Frieden retten?" Siid-
deutscheZeitung,42 (February 20/21, 1982), p. 100.
39. Cf. Wolfs critique of Brecht, "Brecht und andere" (1966), in C.W., Lesenund
Schrieben,pp. 161-163.
 HelenFehervary 81

The relationship between the reader and the writer is more complex
in Wolfs fiction. The first and paradigmatic example is her short story
"An Afternoon inJune," written in 1965, part of her authorial transfor-
mation from the writing of TheDividedHeavento TheQuestforChristaT.
The story begins with a question: "A story? Something solid and
tangible, like a vessel with two handles, to hold and drink from? And it
continues with a rejoinder: "A vision perhaps, if you know what I
mean."40In this, her first short story, ChristaWolf uses the second per-
son pronoun for the first time in the narrativestructure of her prose. In
German it is the formal "Sie," and it reoccurs throughout the story:
"You can imagine how disquieting it is" (AJ, 43-44); "How can I
explain to you in plain terms" (AJ, 51); "If you ask me" (AJ, 52);
"Forgive me. But it's difficult not be be swept away. Maybe there are
better words" (AJ, 53); "Do you know what he said? You won't be able
to guess" (AJ,53); "Do you know the feeling when a question strikes at
your inner core?" (AJ,55). Clearly, the narratoris addressing someone
with whom she is on familiar, though not intimate terms, and with
whom she talks about language and communication. The "Sie" she
addresses is distinct from the familiar "Du" with which the narrative
"I" within the story addresses her husband and children, as well as
from the formal "Sie" she uses with the other characters of the story.
The "Sie"with whom the narratoris in dialogue is absent from the plot
line of the story but present on the level of narration. Conversation
with this "Sie" takes place in the present tense of the narrator's time
frame, while the conversations with the characters of the story take
place in the past.
The narratoris a reader as well as a writer. In fact, the act of reading is
the pivotal point around which the events, conversations and reflec-
tions of the story unfold. The storyline is simple: A woman, the narra-
tive "I," is reclining in a chair in her garden, reading a book.
Meanwhile, her husband prunes the hedges, her two daughters chatter
and play, and neighbors drop in to exchange news. The topos of the
woman reading in the drawing room or the garden has been a familiar
device since the Enlightenment. The sentimental heroine reads frivo-
lous, even dangerous novels. In the works ofJane Austen her efforts
are misunderstood, chastised or perceived as trivial; in Flaubert's
MadameBovaryshe pays for this preoccupation with her life. The image
of the woman reading is shrouded in mystery. It is not the content of
the book but the very act of reading that provides the framework of
significance. As typically portrayed in 19th-century paintings, she is

40. Wolf, "Juninachmittag," in C.W., Gesammelte

Erzihlungen,p. 41. Hereafter cited
asAJ.
82 ChristaWolfs Prose

not directly involved with the spectator but engrossed in a third pre-
sence. Her involvement in the life of the book takes her out of the con-
trol of the spectator or her partner in dialogue, and hence makes her
enticing, aesthetically intriguing and mysterious. By contrast, a 19th-
century merchant reading a book is aesthetically uninteresting. If
involved with a book at all, he holds it in his hand as a sign of his person
and wealth. For the hero of the 18th-century novel, the book also has
symbolic value. The title of the book is worthy of mention, not the act
of reading itself. Werther cites Ossianand EmiliaGalottias found on his
night-table after his suicide. In the tradition of the 19th-century novel,
Thomas Mann's hero Thomas Buddenbrook reads (Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche) for philosophical contemplation. As a cynical contem-
porary comment on the hero's accumulated wealth of literary associ-
ations, Max Frisch lists the chaotic array of titles on his main
character's bookshelf in HomoFaber.With its ready body of meanings,
the book usually serves the literary hero as an affirmation or aggran-
dizement of his identity. It is a container of ideas that belongs to him
and feeds his development. It is a mirror, not a mystery.
Nor is it a vision. The traditional function of the literary work in
literature is akin to Christa Wolfs first tentative definition of a story in
"An Afternoon in June": "Something solid and tangible, like a vessel
with two handles to hold and drink from?" Her second attempt at
definition - "a vision perhaps" - comes closer to the topos of the
woman reading that is shrouded in mystery. However, from the per-
spective of the woman reading the book, as opposed to the perspective
of the spectator, this relationship is not only a mysterious one, but one
that also provides another way of seeing: a vision. Wolfs initial reflec-
tions on the nature of a story do not only comment on the writing of her
story; they also pertain to the stories in the book she reads as a character
in her own story. It is not the title or the author of the book that con-
tributes to her sense of authorship - indeed, the book and its author
are never named. Rather, the process of perceiving and experiencing
the metaphoric landscape of the book allows her to write her own story
and to exist as its author. The book does not legitimate, but rather
demands that she extend herself beyond her previous narrativeidenti-
ty. It is not a symbol but a part of an interdependent narrativeprocess,
a literary partnership. The "vision" of the stories being read and the
story being written is a way of seeing and a possibility for growth
through communicative interaction.
It is significant that the narrator has not directly inherited the book
she reads from its author, but that it was recommended to her by her
husband. She is in fact reluctant to merge her own experience as reader
and writer with the literary tradition to which her husband has greater
historical access and sharper critical tools:
 Helen Fehervary 83

Dear, I said to my husband a little later - I couldn't see

him but I could hear his pruning shears [ ... ] Dear, I
said, you were right after all.
Of course, he said. I don't know why you never wanted
to read it before!
She can write, I said.
Although it's not all good, he said, so that I wouldn't
run the danger of overshooting the mark once again.
Clever! But the way she comes to terms with that
country ...
Yes! he said in a superior tone. Italy!
And the sea? I challenged.
Ah yes! he cried, as though that were irrefutable
proof.
The Mediterranean!
But that's not it at all. One very precise word next to
another. That's what it is.
Although the Mediterranean is not to be dismissed
entirely either, he said.
You with your foreign words all the time, the child said
reproachfully (AJ, 42).
Because she has indirect access to the products of the literary heri-
tage, when she does read she reads differently. Or, she discovers a dif-
ferent landscape within this heritage. While her husband is interested
in the description of a historical place (Italy and the Mediterranean are
familiar topoi within German literature), she is concerned with the
landscape that emerges from an unfamiliar arrangement of words.
Increasingly absorbed in her book, the narrator is interrupted repeat-
edly by her children's questions, her husband's rejoinders, the sound
of jets breaking the sound barrier overhead, and the gossip of neigh-
bors. Nevertheless, her relationship to the book and its author creates a
dialogue that emerges from beneath the scattered comments and
fragmented conversations surrounding her. The book acts as the cen-
tering device for the story and thus provides a third presence, an alter-
native Other to the "I"/"you" relationship between the narrator and
the other characters: "The book, for example, that I still held in my
hands and that had the advantage of not interfering with the contem-
plation of apricot trees [... ] in all modesty it contributed its own, as
the third person should" (AJ, 49).
The third peson or presence is as threatening as it seems familiar, for
it articulates many of the fears and premonitions that slip by unnoticed
in the fragmented conversations of the lazy afternoon. The book
reveals the strangeness of foreign territories and "too many hermits,
84 ChristaWolfs Prose

prophets and hexes" (AJ,49). At one point the narratoris engrossed in

a "somewhat sad dialogue" (AJ, 47); at another she allows herself to
skip a story that describes "a horrible mob revenge against a traitor"
(AJ, 49). She admits that she is incapable of enduring "all those muti-
lations and murders of men before the eyes of their wives held in bon-
dage" (AJ, 50). At the end of the story the garden idyll appropriately
fades with the setting sun, and the narratorrises from her chair to stand
upright. But the Marxist paradigm of base-superstructure has been
turned on its head. The earth that should provide a firm foundation is
fluid, and the narratoris not grounded but at sea: "One is afraid if there
is still no ground in sight; one throws ballast overboard, this or that,
only to float up again" (AJ, 64). The closing line of the story, ironically
phrased as a question, brings the reading experience of a faded after-
noon into sharp focus: "When was that with the Mediterranean, asked
the child. Today?" (AJ, 64). The child's vague question leaves us with
the final indirect reference to the book and encourages us to reflect as
readers on the masked presence of the "third person."
The "third person" appears to be the Austrian writer Ingeborg
Bachmann, and the book the narrator reads would appear to be The
Thirtieth Year(1961)41This volume was Bachmann's first publication of
short stories, and it marked the initial step of her transition in the 1960s
from writing verse to writing prose. The stories in TheThirtiethYearcan
be seen as forming the fictional autobiography of a woman poet, from
a lyrical impression in "Childhood in an Austrian Town" to the even-
tual dissolution of traditional poetic existence in "Undine Goes." The
progression of the stories shows the attempt to write in a new way about
another self; in retrospect we see that it would become a prose-sell.
Wolfs story "An Afternoon in June" centers around the narrator's
reading of TheThirtiethYear,parallels in many respects the thematic
sequences of the stories, and creates metaphoric associations that both
cite and respond to some of Bachmann's reflections about writing in
TheThirtieth Year.The most obvious are Wolfs references to water - the
fluidity and at the same time the precision of prose - which recall
Bachmann's suggestion of the sea at the end of "Childhood in an Aus-
trian Town," major portions of the title story, "The Thirtieth Year,"
and the central image in "Undine Goes." An examination of the
parallels between Bachmann's prose and this story by Wolf, as well as
her later work, deserves an extensive analysis of its own. In our context
it is significant to note that the literary relationship between Wolf and
Bachmann begins in "An Afternoon inJune," where the narrator is a

41. English edition: Ingeborg Bachmann, TheThirtiethYear,trans. Michael Bullock

(London: Andre Deutsch, 1964).
 Helen Fehervary 85

reader as well as a writer. Wolfs story is not merely influenced by

Bachmann, nor does it cite her explicitly. Rather, it incorporates her
aesthetic sensibility in the form of a narrative friendship and partner-
ship.
One year after "An Afternoon in June," Wolf wrote her well-known
essay on Bachmann: "The Acceptable Truth: Ingeborg Bachmann's
Prose" (1966). Once again Christa Wolf is a reader as well as a writer.
She begins the essay:

When preparing to read this prose one should not

count on stories or the description of actions. One
should not expect information about events, charac-
ters in the usual sense, nor harsh assertions. One will
hear a voice that is audacious and lamenting. A voice
that speaks truthfully about its own experience,
expresses itself about certainties and uncertainties.
And is honestly silent when the voice fails.42

At the end of the essay Wolf speaks in the "we"-form about the inter-
relationship between reader and writer demanded by Bachmann's
prose:

We read Ingeborg Bachmann's prose through the filter

of these experiences. They are sincere and authentic,
and perhaps her prose thus gains another dimension
that the author herself could not foresee, for every
reader participates in the book that one reads. And
Ingeborg Bachmann is one of the writers who express-
ly makes herself dependent on the cooperation of her
readers. She demands and provides contemporaneity
(AT, 185).
Wolf writes her essay in a language that cites Bachmann, is meta-
phorically prefigured in "An Afternoon inJune" and forms the basis of
her later prose fiction. The most explicit parallel to her earlier story is
her reference to the notion of "vision":

Vision! people are heard to say casually:What is vision?

One suddently sees what cannot be seen but must be
there because it creates an impact. The past in the pre-
sent, for example. Or the immoderate desires that are

42. Wolf, "Die zumutbareWahrheit: Prosa der Ingeborg Bachmann," in C.W.,Lesen

und Schreiben,p. 172. Hereafter cited as AT.
86 ChristaWolfsProse

always suppressed, that can arise - who knows from

where - in anyone at any time [... ] But above all else
the relationship and the meaning behind seemingly
unrelated and meaningless figures. The discovery of
what makes them live and - no matter how they try to
pretend - what leads to their downfall (AT, 177).
Wolfs description ofBachmann's authorial vulnerability suggests her
own vulnerability as author between the writing of TheDividedHeaven
and TheQuestforChristaT.:

Ingeborg Bachmann, fully aware of the tradition on

which she draws and to which she is bound, is affected
by her experience so convincingly, so fundamentally
and uniquely that we would never think of her as an
epigone. She does not play with despair, danger and
bewilderment: She is in despair, is in danger and there-
fore truly wishes to be rescued. The signs she gives -
the tapping, the attempts to break out - are genuine.
The intensity of her efforts is also directed relentlessly
against herself (AT, 180).
Wolfs phrasing in this passage directly anticipates the language of
her narrator'sreflections in TheQuestforChristaT.Indeed, her story "An
Afternoon inJune" and her essay on Bachmann are the prolegomena
to her subsequent novel. Written during this period but not published
until 1968, TheQuestforChristaT.ends, like her story, by invoking "the
past in the present": "When, if not now?" And it pursues in greater
depth the literary project inspired by Bachmann and first evident in
WolPs story and essay: the articulated presence of the authorial self as
both reader and writer - the author Christa Wolf as both self and
Other, as both narrator and Christa T. Whereas in the story the author
is the anonymous third person, and in her essay she is the historical
persona of Bachmann, in her novel Wolf finds the mask of authorship
in terms of her own first name: Christa T.
The transition fromTheDividedHeavento TheQuestforChristaT.reveals
a critical period in Wolfs literary development as she formulated her
subsequent relationship to prose. During this period the literary mask
of Ingeborg Bachmann mediated between Wolf the author and the
emergence of her prose persona, Christa T. If TheQuestfor Ch/istaT.
marks a departure from inherited traditions and the beginning of
Wolfs autonomy as an author, it also continues a literary project
inspired by Bachmann. But this project, which "makes [itself] depen-
dent on the cooperation of[its] readers," is a unique and vulnerable as
 Helen Fehervary 87

the authorial experience it cites and the public sphere of literature it

envisions. As "sincere and authentic" readers of Wolf and Bachmann,
we are challenged to pursue the language that informs their works so
that voices such as theirs will no longer continue to "pass out of
time."

No. 5
The New Nomads
Immigrationand Changes in the InternationalDivisionof Labor
Editedby MarleneDixonand SusanneJonas
Thisnew collectionof writingsis crucialfor understandingone of the
mostcontroversialissuesof the 1980s.It breaksnewgroundin analyzing
the recentwavesof immigration to the UnitedStates.The effects on
workersfrom PuertoRico, Mexico,Latin and CentralAmerica;the
of the world-economy;
restructuring andthe formationof a transnational
working classarecentralthemes exploredby the contributorsto thisissue.
Contemporary MarxismNo. 5 also includesa specialsection called
"Perspectives:Two Views of the State."ImmanuelWallersteinand
MarleneDixonpresenttwo provocative viewson the changingroleof the
stateunderthe conditionsof the world-economy today.
No. 6, Firstof two issues
on Africa
Proletarianization and
Class Struggle in Africa
Guest Editors:BeinaidMagubaneand Nzongola-Ntalaja
Withemphasison the revolutionary hope andupheavalof southernAfrica,
theseauthorsandactiviststakeon the mostchallenging issuesposedby
Africatoday:nationalismandclassstruggle,socialistconstructionandthe
legacy of neocolonialism,U.S. interventionismand the role of
transnationalcapital,class formationin the capitalistperiphery,
vs. petty bourgeoissocialism,andmore.
proletarian
Journalof the Institutefor the Study of Laborand EconomicCrisis.Publishedtwice
yearly. Subscriptions:1 year $8, 2 years $15 (individuals).Add $2 per year for
mailingoutside U.S. Singlecopies $5. Makechecks payableto:
SYNTHESISPUBLICATIONS, P.O. Box 40099, Dept. 21, San Francisco,CA 94140.
LI I-- I