NACHDENKEN UEBER CHRISTA W
The GUARDIAN has published an obituary of Christa Wolf. It is scooped in great chunks out of Wikipedia, and fails to address an important aspect of her work.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/01/christa-wolf
My response will not be published there, so I paste it here.
“When in 1992, it was revealed she had been used by the Stasi from 1959-1962 as an inoffizieller Mitarbeiter (informal collaborator)…” - “inoffizielle Mitarbeiterin”.
“Christa was a member of the Bund Deutscher Mädchen…” - “Bund Deutscher Mädel”.
“Gorzow Wielkpolski” and “Henrich Mann Prize” - “Gorzów Wielkopolski” and “Heinrich Mann Prize”.
Typos, or unfamiliarity with German / eastern European culture. Something to tidy if you make the time.
Let me wish that you had addressed in your obituary the ambiguity and failure of Christa Wolf’s professed search for authenticity. You write: “Her success meant that she was allowed to travel and teach abroad…”; her success! Her canonisation was bought by selling out, by accommodation, by preaching water whilst drinking wine.
Christa Wolf demanded of her parents and their generation morality, confrontation, sacrifice, and declared that they had failed. They had enabled Fascism. What did she demand of herself? She made her arrangements with the GDR regime and lived very, very well. Royalties in hard currency. A villa in the countryside. Foreign travel. The rigour that Wolf preached on paper was not matched by rigour in her own choices. Did she speak truth to power? Perhaps. But not enough truth to imperil herself.
After the Biermann affair, Sarah Kirsch, another East German author, said: Enough of this; and left. Christa Wolf was too comfortable, too cosy in her eminence, to practise morality, confrontation, or sacrifice. She stayed.
Christa Wolf was an artist whose art, and whom, the State knew how to use, as her burial in the Dorotheenstadt cemetery demonstrates. The regimes under which she lived shifted, to be sure - National Socialism, the German Democratic Republic, the German Federal Republic - but Wolf was the same to her end, an inoffizielle Mitarbeiterin all along.