"Paradise can make itself scarce. That is its nature."
East German author Christa Wolf, 1929-2011
(Source: Wiki)

POST-WAR GERMAN LITERATURE lost one of its most distinctive voices today. Christa Wolf, East Germany’s best-known and still best remembered author, has died at the age of 82.

To be remembered at all as a GDR author is a rare thing, considering that books written in the GDR are about as common in today’s bookshops as the emblematic Trabi cars are on German streets – and a lot less interesting to collectors. I can't remember the last time I saw someone reading, say, Erwin Strittmatter in the U-Bahn. But Wolf retained much of her reputation, probably because her outlook on the communist experience so closely mirrored that of so many of her fellow East Germans.

Wolf was born as Christa Ihlenfeld in Landsberg an der Warthe, a town now located just across the border in Poland and which is today known as Gorzów Wielkopolski. Division became the watchword of her career – divided countries and divided minds. She fled with her family to what soon became the Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany in 1945. An encounter with starving inmates from Sachsenhausen concentration camp left a lasting impression on this fanatical but ultimately clueless member of Hitler's League of German Maidens. Upon graduating from high school in 1949, she immediately joined the communist party. She would remain a member, in good times and bad, for the next forty years.

The young refugee idealist studied German at the universities of Jena and Leipzig and began work as an editor and researcher for East German literary magazines. She married the author Gerhard Wolf in 1951. The young couple were convinced they were building a better society under communism. As she would later say about those heady days: “In proud inexperience we were so certain that we would yet experience that friendly human community to which we wished to dedicate ourselves.”

Wolf published her first novel in 1961, the year the Berlin Wall was erected. Her second book, the mildly controversial Der geteilte Himmel (Divided Heaven, 1963) picked up on Germany’s division, telling the story of a doomed love affair between a man and woman from each side of Berlin. Predictably for Wolf, the East Berlin woman decides to stay on her side of town after a visit to her lover in corrupt and materialistic West Berlin.

 
"State poet" or voice of an idealistic -
and betrayed - generation?
Christa Wolf receiving the Thomas Mann Prize in 2010

Guarded controversy within the parameters of the communist system remained Wolf’s hallmark until the Wall’s collapse in 1989. She was a virtuoso in the art of the literary ellipse, where what is - or isn't? - printed between the lines becomes the entire point of a book. "What a splendid arrangement that our thoughts don't run across our foreheads as visible thought," she wrote in her novel Kein Ort. Nirgends (No Place. Nowhere, 1979). Indeed.

Wolf became the voice of the voiceless without saying very much. In Kindheitsmuster (Patterns of Childhood, 1976) she gingerly discussed the issue of the millions of Germans – like her – who were driven from their ancestral homes by the Soviets and Poles after 1945, an absolute taboo in Soviet-dominated eastern Europe. (This novel opens with her most famous quote, which she actually copied from William Faulkner without attribution: “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”) Her novel Störfall (1987) about the Chernobyl disaster, which was banned in the GDR, focused on the dangers of nuclear energy without assigning blame.

She appeared to be drawn to power. But although Wolf won the GDR's National Prize in 1964 and was elected to the august East German Academy of Arts in 1974, and even though she served as a candidate to the party's Central Committee during the 1960s, her relations with the regime soured early. In 1976 she signed an open letter denouncing the expatriation of the dissident singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann, for which she was given a public dressing down by the party but was allowed to remain a member. As a dissident communist who couldn’t quite bring herself to leave the party, let alone the country, she came to represent an entire generation of reluctant idealists. Describing this period in 1989, she wrote: “The scream that was stuck in our throat was not expelled. We did not come out of our skin.” I suspect most people in East Germany felt that way one time or another.

This public image as a reluctant dissident brought her few practical problems at home – after all, her books earned the East German regime needed foreign currency and also made it look vaguely liberal by allowing her to keep writing – while attracting considerable attention abroad, where she won numerous literary honors, including the coveted West German Georg Büchner Prize in 1980 and even an honorary doctorate from Ohio State University in 1983. By 1989, she was practically the last intellectual feather in the party's cap.

The night before the Berlin Wall fell, as thousands of her fellow citizens were fleeing to the West by any means available, Wolf used her considerable literary and political cachet to appeal to East Germans on state-run TV: “We beg you, remain in your homeland, remain with us.” Like other GDR intellectuals, she hoped to keep the East German state separate, and socialist, by whatever means possible. Finally, on November 27, 1989, she put her name to the document “For Our Country,” calling upon East Germans not to “sell out our material and moral values to the West.”

It was all too little, too late. The East German state quickly collapsed and was absorbed into the Federal Republic on October 3, 1990. Wolf’s reputation also collapsed. In 1993 it was revealed that she was not only heavily monitored by the Stasi secret police, which collected a total of forty-two volumes of spy reports on her and her husband, but she had herself worked as a Stasi informer during her idealistic phase between 1959 and 1962 under the code name “Margarete.” The public turned against her upon the publication of her book Was bleibt (What Remains) in 1990, in which she denounced communist tyranny and appeared to depict herself as a victim of Stasi oppression - publishing it at least a decade too late to do anyone any good. Literary critics particularly had their way with her, calling her a “collaborator” of the communist regime. Star critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Germany’s “literature pope,” famously denounced her as the GDR’s “state poet.”

But Wolf soldiered on. She fled this “witch hunt” by accepting a fellowship at the Getty Institute in Los Angeles between 1992 and 1993, thus following in the footsteps of other German “émigrés” such as Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and Theodor Adorno. She continued writing and openly engaged her critics. Her last book, City of Angels or Doctor Freud’s Overcoat, in which she discussed her experiences in Los Angeles and her horror at the extent of the Stasi’s interference into her life, appeared last year.

It is easy to denounce Wolf, who eventually admitted that her ideals were misguided. In City of Angels, she posed the saddest of all questions: "Was our life all for nothing?" I suspect her earlier works would mean very little indeed to readers today, and I have to admit that I have never made it to the end of any of her books. But she wrote as an East German for East Germans, and perhaps we should give the last word to one of those grateful readers. In an article from last year, Wolfgang Thierse, a former East German dissident and today president of the German Bundestag, had this to say about Christa Wolf:

For the past five decades, Christa Wolf’s works have become a part of my life. She represented distance and life-expansion against the narrowness of the GDR. Christa Wolf’s melancholy, her occasional elegiac self-pity had a highly liberating effect when compared to the compulsive optimism that weighed so heavily upon us. Her gentle, diligent, humble truthfulness represented an objection and contradiction to the system of lies and ideological corruption.