Finished 29/08/24
I got the urge to read this book after the disaster of the last one. I read some excerpts of this while in college and always liked the way Christa Wolf wrote. I thought I better read the English translation since my German is beyond rusty right now. This book is a collection of short stories by Christa Wolf, the most famous one being What Remains. Christa Wolf is a German woman who lived through WWII and the soviet occupation of East Germany. These short stories are categorized as "realistic fiction." However, most of these stories follow a girl or woman who went through things eerily similar to what Christa Wolf went through; because of that, I choose to believe that most of these are her own memoirs and will be writing as if she is canonically the main character.
How I'll order this report is by going through each short story individually and give the years each one was published and the German translation of the title if I can find them. Because Christa Wolf was constantly spied on by the Stasi for many years, some of what she wrote needed to stay hidden for her own safety until the German reunification in 1990.
Starting from the first short story: Exchanging Glances or Blickwechsel (1974). This short story I found very harrowing and sad. In it Christa Wolf talks about when she was a little girl, still living in eastern Germany, having to flee from the Russian military and dodge airstrikes from the Americans during WWII. She had to leave her home and was exposed to death and war at such a formative age. The story takes a turn halfway through, because suddenly her and her family are safe: "the Führer has died." It took Christa Wolf quite a while to accept that she no longer needed to be on guard, that she was able to relax and her world really did change for the better.
One of the moments that really struck me during this story is her being punished and looked at strangely because she laughs at inappropriate times. I feel like that really encapsulates her mental state and her youth. She is nothing if not confused and unaware about how to regulate her emotions.
Next is Tuesday, September 27 or Dienstag, der 27. September (???). For almost 60 years of her life, Christa Wolf recorded everything that happened on the 27th of September every year, this story is just one of those times. I couldn't find online when this was published or written, but since most of it is spent talking about her young daughters, I image it was some time in the 50s or 60s. This story is relatively pleasant; it's very ordinary. She talks about taking her daughter to to doctor's, experiencing slight misogyny at work, she comes home and plans one of her daughter's birthday parties, she talks to her husband about her writing. -But with all of her stories, there's a tinge of overwhelming sadness to it. (It seems weird to have "tinge" and "overwhelming" describe the same thing in the same sentence, but I don't know how else to put it.)
I don't know if Christa Wolf was ever diagnosed with anything, and I'm sure she didn't talk about it openly, but through reading her writing, you can tell that she struggled with mental health for a lot of her life. She never seems fully happy. Her writing is like she's just numbly going through the motions. I'm sure living through WWII and being spied on by the Stasi really screwed with her head, but her mental illness seems to transcend those experiences. -As if she was naturally prone to sadness and paranoia.
Thirdly June Afternoon or Sommerstück (1989). This short story was very lovely and was one of my favorites. This one had the same vibes as Tuesday, September 27 in that this seems to just be a day in the life of Christa Wolf when, again, her daughters were young. If this story is an accurate reflection of how she treated her daughters, Christa Wolf was a great mom. She seemed to really cultivate and encourage their creativity and treat their questions and observations with respect.
In this story she also has a run-in with the neighbor, an old woman, who she seems to find annoying and tries to make go away as soon as possible. This neighbor, I think, was a human representation of der Mauer (the wall) that seperates East and West Germany. From Christa Wolf's backyard, she can see the top edge of the wall, it's always in sight and near, like her neighbor. It seems to be this oppressive, omnipresent force that's best to ignore but you have to confront it every once in a while.
The 4th one, half way through, is Unter den Linden (1974), the English translation is pretty self explanatory, it would be something like "Under the Linden (Trees)." Unter den Linden was also a Middle High German poem written in medieval times by Walther von der Vogelweide (I actually read and studied this in college in the original Middle High German.) Christa Wolf gave a more modern and feminist retelling of it. In von der Vogelweide's, it's a love story bridging on softcore pornography about a young woman and man meeting each other away from prying eyes under a linden tree and having sex in a bed of flowers. Vogelweide's poem is interesting because despite being written a long time ago and by a man, the poem is from the young woman's perspective.
In Christa Wolf's short story, she talks about walking to college as a young woman and passing below the linden trees to get to a certain lecture. I found this story to be a little unclear, but that was definitely an artistic choice. Here's what I can determine from the rest of the story: the young woman ended up falling for her lecturer and, despite him being much older and in a position of power, he pursued a relationship with her. They were never equal partners in the relationship and she felt like she was coerced into sex when looking back on it later in life. She again walks under the linden trees to go to the court house many years later to join the many women testifying against this same lecturer. This story sounds like it could've been real, this very well may have happened to Christa Wolf unfortunately. This entire story is confusing and skips around in time. You also can't tell when someone is thinking or speaking because of the lack of quotation marks. This is another one I found really sad, but feminist retellings of old stories (or poems in this case) can sometimes turn out really moving, like this one.
The next one is The New Life and Opinions of a Tomcat or Neue Lebensansicht eines Katers (1974). This is one of the stories that is absolutely not realistic fiction. This short story follows the life and thoughts of a cat whose owner is an Applied Psychology professor. I found out by googling the name of this story that this is another feminist retelling of an old German tale called The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr or Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr (1819-1821). This was written by E. T. A. Hoffmann who is best known for The Nutcracker and the Mouse King or Nussknacker und Mausekönig (1816) and The Sandman or Der Sandmann (1816). Even though it took me a second to catch on to what this story was implying, once I got it it was very funny.
This tomcat, who's a "descendent of Murr," spends a lot of time with his owner and thinks he knows all about applied psychology but, just like his owner, he's very misogynistic and, from a woman's point of view, knows nothing. The tomcat, like his owner, reads and knows a lot about psychology, but they never put their knowledge into practice. -Very ironic! They also don't make an effort to understand women's feelings and reasoning, instead they brush them off as "too emotional." A funny example of this is when the professor's wife wants to be intimate with him, but he refuses and opts to read a psych paper about sexuality instead. In the end, the professor falls in love with a machine that he's trying to make "human-like" by making emotions into equations, but it never works. I think this is a direct reference to The Sandman, the main character in that story also falls in love with a robot.
Then we have A Little Outing to H. (???). This one was my least favorite. I think it just took me a long time to pick up on what was happening here, and for a while I thought it was a satirical but critical look at Germany post-WWII or the vast division between East and West Germany. -It very well might be, but I'm still unsure. Like in most of these stories, the main character was a woman surrounded by men. This woman was asking a lot of questions but she was just being laughed off by the men around her; something all women can relate to honestly.
The story was of this woman who went with her male friend to this town called H. which we later learns stands for "Hero Town." Some people are wearing badges on their shirts with a "P" on it. Those people look really put together and held some status, while other people have no badge and they all look sad and disheveled. What I could pick up on was this: the "P" people were from the outside of the town. This town consisted of literary "heroes," as in book characters come to life. In this town they were forced to relive their stories but some lived on past their story's end and were mostly unhappy. The "heroes" seemed to be treated like zoo animals despite being praised and loved by the "P" people. Like I said before, I don't really know what this is referencing or alluding to. Maybe you have to be really into German literature and know a lot about German culture to understand this?
Second to last is Self-experiment (1973). In this story, I think Christa Wolf's main focus was to discuss gender differences and how they are, in reality, so minor and unimportant but socially made into this big thing. This story also shocked me for how ahead of its time it was because the main character is (for a time?) transgender. The story is about a woman who volunteers herself as a test subject for a new drug, made in the medical laboratory she works in, that will turn her into a man. As a man she becomes much more free, she's able to walk alone at night, she can appear in public without having to be aware of her surroundings all the time, both men and women respect her more as a man. In the end she figures out her boss, who she thought was a woman, is happily living life as a man with a wife and children. It concludes with the main character taking the "antidote" early which turns her back into a woman. I don't know if the reasoning was ever really clear why she did this, but it didn't seem to be because she loved being a woman. It was more of a sad acceptance.
I also want to point out an interesting choice the translators made that I believe they shouldn't have. In all these short stories Christa Wolf writes, if the main character is a woman, she always remains nameless. The main character of this story only had a name when she was a man, and that name in the English translation was "Other." I was confused about it for a second until I realized that "other" in German is "Anders," which is, in fact, a name. If I was translating this, I would've kept the name "Anders" and just made a note about it. I think there is something to be said about how you won't get the full effect of the literature if you're reading a translation of it, but I also think it's the translators job to convey as much of the original meaning as possible. If a non-German speaker was reading this, they wouldn't pick up on a very clever decision Christa Wolf made in her character's name.
Lasty is What Remains or Was Bleibt (1979-1990). This story is much like Tuesday, September 27 and June Afternoon. Just detailing a day in the life of Christa Wolf. A bit of history: back in the late 50s and early 60s, Christa Wolf was an informant for the Stasi, or the East German secret police. She must've realized how messed up it was to be an informant because she quit doing that after a few years. But in stepping away, she would become a critical target for the Stasi for the next nearly 30 years. Throughout this story, she's very aware of the people spying on her, the men in the car outside of her apartment at all hours of the day just watching her. Being constantly watched, of course, leads her into this state of paranoia. Every action she takes, she does as if she has an audience.
In this story she starts her day grocery shopping and runs into a man she used to know; her paranoia makes her believe that he's also spying on her even though he's almost surely not. Her husband is in the hospital and her daughters are grown up and have moved out, so she's in a very vulnerable mental state being "all alone" while having a hyper aware audience. Later there's a woman who comes to her door talking about how she spent time as a political prisoner and looks up to Christa Wolf's writing. She shows Christa Wolf her manuscript but Christa Wolf advises her to not publish it because it'll only do more damage. At night, Christa Wolf goes to a cultural center in East Berlin and reads an excerpt of one of her books for an audience. Her paranoia makes her believe that there are spies in the audience and gets afraid when people start speaking so freely. In the end, after some of the audience members walk her to her car, one of them says something about "the future and what remains" which makes Christa Wolf laugh.
I think the point of What Remains is this inability to find hope for what's to come. Even though 10 years after writing this the wall would fall down, Germany would reunite, and Christa Wolf would be able to publish this work. It's hard sometimes to believe that there could be an end to a struggle, to uncomfort. But, like the wall falling down, the end can come so quickly and surprisingly.
All of my reports/reviews seem to be super long, so I think I should just accept it at this point. That's all, thank you for reading!
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