Theater of Cruelty (13 page)

Like Grass and Syberberg, Christa Wolf grew up in a part of the old Reich that is now Poland. Like them, she lost her
Heimat
and has been haunted by that loss ever since. She was born in Landsberg, now Gorzow, in 1929, in time to be a member of the BDM, the girls’ equivalent of the Hitler Youth. In her most interesting book,
Patterns of Childhood
,
⁹
she tries to deal with her sense of guilt about having been a participant, albeit a rather passive and innocent one, in the Nazi state:

The “I,” as in many of her novels, has a slippery identity.
Patterns of Childhood
is written in the form of an interior monologue inspired
by a short visit to her native town. The adult narrator is referred to as “you”: “Don’t ask your contemporaries.” The narrator’s childhood self, the one that took part in rallies cheering on the Nazis, is called Nelly. It is not entirely clear when Nelly becomes “I,” but it is presumably around the time that she rejects her Nazi childhood and embraces its ostensible opposite, the Communist state.

A major component of Wolf’s ambivalent sense of guilt is the idea of being a passive observer, a reporter, a writer, while others suffer. The only way to overcome this problem is to take an active part in building a better world, to help create, however flawed in its execution, an ideal community, a political utopia. As she put it in an interview given in 1979: “For me, only writing can still offer us a chance of bringing in the utopian dimension.”
¹⁰
And her idea of utopia is linked to the two most traumatic experiences of her life: her complicity in and subsequent repudiation of Nazism, and her expulsion from her
Heimat
:

To have admitted complicity in the Nazi movement (Wolf never passes herself, or more accurately her literary persona, off as a resister; on the contrary, she was a true, if very youthful, believer) was in fact an unorthodox thing to have done as a writer in the GDR. The correct party line was that Communists had been Hitler’s main victims,
and resisters to the last man, woman, and child. And since the GDR was a socialist state, run by the former victims and resisters, it was the better half of Germany, the antifascist Germany, where collective guilt could not be an issue. The Nazis lived in the West. The East German, as Peter Schneider put it in a recent essay, was “the German with the good conscience.” So for the country’s most prominent novelist to say quite openly that she had believed in Nazism, or worse, that nobody in her hometown had resisted it, was not what her comrades, who ran the show, wished to hear.

As could be expected, she was attacked by Marxist critics in her own country for being “subjective,” for breaking away from class analysis. But for the same reason she was hailed by many in the Western world as a brave dissident. She had her share of problems with the GDR censors, and her work was widely published in the West. But she was not a dissident, for however subjective and ambivalent her writing may be, she never doubted the moral superiority of the Communist state. This is made quite clear in
Patterns of Childhood
, where the echoes of the Nazi state are never to be heard in the GDR, or the Soviet Union, but in Chile and the US. To quote just one aside:

This kind of remark was appreciated in New York and Berkeley, as well as in the
Volkskammer
of Berlin, capital of the GDR. Which
partly explains Wolf’s huge success in East and West. She played to many galleries at once. I am not suggesting she did this cynically, as a smart career move. There is no evidence that she was disingenuous about this. She honestly believed that America was rotten, and that the Nazi legacy was a Western, capitalist problem. As she said in an interview in 1975 (these dates are important): “The ‘better history’ is on our side, the others are unlucky, they have the old Nazis.” Or: “I do think it would be impossible for it to happen again here. As we can see, the world as a whole is incredibly threatened by fascist and fascistic tendencies. The reasons why it cannot happen here, though, are, I think, first and foremost historical. I don’t want to set myself up as some kind of prophet, but the necessary conditions do not exist here.”

The dates of these quotations are important, because Wolf now says that she realized as early as 1968 that, as she put it in an interview given this year on British television, the government of the GDR was creating something fundamentally different from what she had hoped for. The word “fundamentally” is a surprise. She was a candidate for the Communist Party’s Central Committee from 1963 until 1967, and she only resigned from the Party in 1989. It is true, however, that she was always critical of the stupidity and stuffiness of bureaucrats and pedagogues in the GDR, and their absurd penchant for parades, flags, community singing, in short, of the general conformity demanded in the name of the socialist ideal:

Christa T., Wolf’s most famous literary character, is an individualist who cannot cope with the pressures to conform. And Wolf’s account, in
No Place on Earth
,
¹¹
of an imaginary meeting between Heinrich von Kleist and the Romantic poet Karoline von Günderrode is about the difficulty of reconciling the desire for spiritual freedom with the demands of a highly structured society. Christa T. dies young, of a fatal illness. Kleist and von Günderrode both commit suicide. Naturally, this sense of things never sat well with the gray and frightened men who ruled the GDR, for they wanted upbeat heroes who could serve as models to the People. And just as naturally, it provided great comfort to many readers in the GDR, who struggled with precisely such predicaments.

But this did not make Wolf a dissident. One of her main subjects was how to compromise for the sake of a higher ideal. As a young woman put it to me recently in East Berlin: “Living here was like being a Catholic; it wasn’t a matter of staying Catholic or not, but how you managed your relations with the Church—a question, really, of personal morality.”

Wolf’s struggles with her personal morality struck a tremendous chord with a people force-fed with propagandistic pap. Yet she never wavered in her political commitment. This made her the ideal writer for a Communist regime, for she made it easier for people to live in a quasi-totalitarian state. Indeed, she made the personal sacrifices, the spiritual hardship seem virtuous. And this made those who chose to move to the capitalist West appear weak, even cowardly. Her first novel,
A Divided Heaven
, is about a man who decides to go west, leaving behind his fiancée, who wants to stick to the task of building a better Germany. There is no doubt which character we are supposed
to admire. Wolf made the point again in many speeches, some delivered as late as November 1989.

Even state censorship, in her view, was not something to get overly upset about, for it, too, was spiritually bracing. After all, she said in 1975, “Goethe couldn’t have his
Tasso
performed for decades. But did he sulk?” Of course not. It is easy to give up, but “much more difficult to remain productive and just.” Not revolt, but a stiff upper lip; that was Wolf’s prescription for the long-suffering citizens of the GDR. Nietzsche is supposed to have said that “dancing in chains is the highest art.” And now that the chains have been severed? Hans Joachim Schädlich, a novelist who was forced to leave the GDR in 1977, put it this way: “They never liked the great authoritarian father, but now that he’s gone, they don’t know how to live without him.”

Wolf, like all her colleagues in the GDR, had developed a fine antenna for censorial sensitivities and knew pretty much how far she could push her luck. But the East Germans had an advantage over writers in other Communist countries in that they could have their work published in West Germany. Some of Wolf’s novels,
Cassandra
for example, actually appeared in two versions: a censored one in the East and an unexpurgated one in the West.
¹²

The not uncommon belief that censorship fosters creativity is nonsense. But masterpieces have been produced in very difficult circumstances. Dancing in chains is not an absolute impossibility. Wolf is an interesting, if humorless, writer, whose books may not merit the Nobel Prize, which she was close to getting, but then nor do those of many authors so honored. She has expressed the inner life of an idealist, who was neither a conformist nor a dissident. The quest for her
own identity is her main subject. In
The Quest for Christa T
.
¹³
and
Patterns of Childhood
she turned autobiography into a fictional art. And in
No Place on Earth
and
Cassandra
she deftly removes the borders between the essay and fiction.
Cassandra
is a feminist reinterpretation of the Greek tragedy. Wolf identifies so closely with her heroine that Cassandra often sounds more like the author than the prophet of Troy. Although all these books are stylistically inventive, her best, in my view, is
Patterns of Childhood
.

This has much to do with the period in which the novel is set. For it is a story of disillusion with a faith once firmly held. She catches the duplicity of the Nazi state in all its ghastly nuances, because she can recognize it exactly for what it was. And she can do this without losing a certain human sympathy for the people who shared her beliefs.

Her novels set in the GDR are different. Instead of disenchantment, there is an almost perverse will to believe, to hold on to the faith, to catch that glimmer of utopia. This matters less in an allegorical story, such as
No Place on Earth
. And even in her contemporary novels she never describes the GDR as a workers’ paradise. What animates all her novels is not her belief that the contemporary Communist state is wonderful but her tenacious wish to believe that one day it will be. So whereas
Patterns of Childhood
is a novel of disenchantment, her subsequent books are those of a believer, who realizes at the same time that reality falls far short of her ideal.

It might be argued that just as the Roman Church gives Graham Greene’s work a piquancy it might not otherwise have had, Wolf’s art derives its strength from her faith in communism. In fact, however, I think neither writer has benefited from getting religion. There is something perverse, even willfully blind about both of them. Wolf’s oblique criticism of the Communist state is superficial and whatever
piquancy it may contain, this hardly compensates for her tiresome preaching about the evils of bourgeois politics, America, capitalism, and so forth. But whereas Greene is also a cynical Englishman, aware of his own perversity, Wolf has allowed faith to cloud her vision of reality.

This may explain her latest novel,
Was bleibt
, written in 1979, “reworked” in 1989, and published this year.
¹⁴
It is a slight work, little more than a novella, really, about a writer’s horror at finding out one morning that she is being watched by two young men posted outside her door. They are clearly Stasi agents, even though that notorious institution is never mentioned in the text. Considering what else the Stasi was up to—torturing people, for example—watching a famous, well-connected writer’s window may seem a minor affair. But not to Wolf (for the narrator is obviously she); it brings her usual soul-searching ambivalence to a crisis point: “I was possessed by a raging pain, which had settled itself inside me and made me a different person.” She is panic-stricken by the ghastly Kafkaesque atmosphere of her city, where everybody speaks conspiratorially or with a forked tongue, where old friends suddenly shun you in the street—why? Is it me? Is it them? Is it just in the imagination?

The crisis comes to a head:

Then the climactic scene: the writer is invited to give a lecture. She notes a distinct nervousness in the cultural worthies who have organized the evening, but she doesn’t grasp what it is until much later, when she discovers that she has been talking, honestly, she believes, or at any rate as honestly as she could, under the circumstances, to a select audience of officially trusted people. Her other audience, the young people who found solace in her books, were not allowed in; they were beaten up by the police. Order had to be maintained in the better Germany.

As Wolf describes the incident, in her anxious inner voice, we suddenly see Nelly emerge again, the innocent girl who joined the Hitler Youth organization. She knew, yet she didn’t know. She was an accomplice, yet she was innocent. She was innocent, but … well, perhaps, “I would have. I might have. I could have. Done it. Obeyed orders.”