'Was bleibt' ('What Remains') by Christa Wolf (Review)

German Literature Month is in full swing, and as it's still Ladies' Week, I have another review of a book by a female writer for you.  It's actually quite a short work, one you can zip through in an hour or so - its importance though goes far beyond its pages...

*****
Christa Wolf's Was bleibt (What Remains)*** is a novella set in the late 1970s in East Berlin.  A female writer has recently become aware of a disturbing development, where several men are constantly parked outside her house.  Every morning when she opens her curtains, they are there, patiently sitting the day away, not really doing anything, just reminding the writer that Big Brother is watching.

The novella records one day in this period of her life, from waking up to going to bed, an attempt to imprint the events in her mind for the time, far in the future, when she will be able to find the words to document the events clearly.  It's very tempting for the reader to read things into this idea - unsurprising when you consider that the book was written in 1979 but didn't appear until 1990...

It's a story of a society in stasis, a country where life is slowly ebbing away.  Both the writer and the city seem cold and grey.  A fire has died out inside, and as far as the eye can see, it's cold, drab and pitiless.  As the writer goes about her day, we see her looking for warmth and signs of life: she gets involved in a conversation with a woman at the bottle shop; she receives a visit from a young writer who has just been released from prison; and she gets several letters, some more welcome than others.

The observation, while a fairly unobtrusive one for the most part, is intended to wear the writer down mentally:

"Einschüchterung nenne man das, sagte ein Bekannter, der genau Bescheid zu wissen vorgab, aber waren wir eingeschüchtert?"
p.25 (Suhrkamp, 2012)

"Intimidation is what that's called, said an acquaintance of mine, who claimed to know about these things, but were we intimidated?"
(my translation)

The answer, of course, is yes.  The effects of the observation are clear as the writer is obviously stressed and suffering from nightmares.  She's even finding it difficult to write, too busy worrying about what might happen.  A pointless break-in which leaves a bathroom mirror shattered shows that she is right to be concerned...

The writer spends much of her day involved in dialogues in her head - monologues, as she says are pointless.  She finds herself talking and arguing with those who are oppressing her, even if she realises that it's pointless to talk to an unknown entity:

"Und wie anders als kindlich, kindisch, sollte man die unaufhörlichen Gedankenmonologen nennen, auf denen ich mich ertappte und die allzuoft in der absurden Frage endeten: Was wollt ihr eigentlich?  Wieviel ich noch zu lernen hatte!  Eine Institution anreden als sei sie ein Mensch!" (p.18)

"And how, other than childlike, childish, can you describe the constant internal monologues in which I caught myself and which all too often ended in the absurd question: What do you want?  I still had so much to learn!  Talking to an institution as if it were a person!"

Still, you can understand her frustration.  With no real face to her enemy (her observers are very much faceless), she is destined to continually torment herself with thoughts of how to change the unchangeable, to escape the inescapable.

The end of the novella though gives her hope for a brighter future, and it comes, naturally, in the form of the young, the students who talk to her after her reading.  She goes to bed confident that while today is grey and depressing, tomorrow (or the day after that) might just be a little sunnier, a little brighter...

*****
Was bleibt is an interesting little piece, but it's not really one of Wolf's major works.  However, it has a cultural significance which goes far beyond its ninety pages.  Its real importance is to do with the (to use a beloved neo-Germanism) 'shitstorm' which erupted on its publication - this was a book which really shook up the German literary establishment.

Why?  Well, Wolf waited until after reunification to bring it to public attention, despite having written it back in 1979, and many writers and critics saw this as opportunism, even cowardice.  If the book had been released back in the 1970s, some claimed, it may have had a major impact on the way the Stasi carried out their observations.  Instead, they argued, Wolf sat on it to protect her own comfort...

I won't go into all that here, but the German Wikipedia page for Was bleibt goes into the debate in detail.  As a book, Was bleibt is fairly average and of only minor interest.  However, as a document of writing under Communism - and of the culture wars that followed its demise - it's well worth reading :)

*****
***An English-language version (What Remains and Other Stories, translated by Heike Schwarzbauer and Rick Takvorian) was available from Virago Press - you may have to look for a second-hand copy though.

The Tortured Artist

We've had writers from Austria, Switzerland and Germany so far this month, but now it's time for one from a country which no longer exists - East Germany (AKA the GDR/DDR).  Christa Wolf is one writer who stayed on her side of the wall despite the constraints this put on her art - and one way writers throughout the ages have dealt with this problem is by projecting their thoughts a long way away...

*****
Kein Ort. Nirgends (translated as No Place on Earth) takes us back to a part of Germany we visited not so long ago.  It's 1804, and we find ourselves in a large house in the village of Winkel am Rhein, privileged (and hidden) spectators at a tea party.  A group of upper-class Germans are laughing, joking, talking and sipping tea; generally having a wonderful time.  Yet two of them, a man and a woman, appear to be a little distanced from the others, both pretending to enjoy the company while actually lost in their own worlds - now, who could they be?

We quickly learn the identities of the two outsiders.  The woman is Karoline von Günderrode, a German romantic poet; the man is Heinrich von Kleist, one of the most famous playwrights and prose writers of the early nineteenth century.  In Kein Ort. Nirgends, Wolf has created an imaginary (if plausible) meeting between two spirits who have a lot in common.  Both are creative talents; both suffer for their art; both are to later take their lives...

Kein Ort. Nirgends is a short work, barely reaching a hundred pages, and the story is divided into two parts.  The first is set in the house, where the two main characters gradually become aware of each other's presence and start to want to get involved in a conversation.  They both sense that the other is an outsider: in her mind, Günderrode sees the small party as interconnected lines on a page, with a space around the point denoting Kleist; Kleist, likewise, sees an imaginary space around Günderrode, a protective buffer against the real world.

The second part, when the group goes out for a post-dinner walk, gives Kleist and Günderrode the opportunity to find out more about each other, allowing them to explore their thoughts on art and life.  As the two walk along the river, lost in a world they share, things get a little more abstract and philosophical.  Perhaps it is apt that they often managed to shake off this reader...

It's certainly not a book for someone wanting a quick, fun read.  The style is dense and deliberately confusing, switching rapidly between the two main characters, intermingling thoughts and words with little but context to tell you which are which.  In addition, there is little action, just discussion, and the topics are, on the whole, not the easiest to follow.  The two artists are mainly concerned with the nature of art and the toll it takes on the artist, as well as the dilemma of how to be yourself, yet live in the society you have been born into.  It's not a dilemma the others at the party share, and Kleist recognises this, asking his friend:

"Wie soll der Gesunde den Kranken verstehen?"
p.39 (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2007)

"How can a healthy person understand a sick one?"

That very fine line between genius and mental illness was obviously of concern a long time before we started tweeting about it...

Of course, other factors contributed to this feeling of uncertainty.  The story is set at a time of great upheaval in Europe, with fear of Napoleon and his ambitions dominating politics (and life in general) all over the continent.  Chronologically, this piece actually falls nicely between Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea, an early paean to a united Germany, and Heine's Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen, where the poet takes a satirical look at what the Prussians have done with the idea of a German state.  Kleist himself was Prussian, fighting in the army and working within its bureaucracy, and this conformity is one of the factors slowly driving him mad.  Another of the (real-life) characters, Savigny, is described as forcing a decision between following science and art, his entweder..., oder... ('either..., or...').  In the end, our two friends take the third option...

When we start discussing the story in terms of artists struggling to reconcile their art with everyday life though, especially under a bureaucratic regime centred on Berlin, it becomes very tempting to shift our attention from the early nineteenth century to the second half of the following one.  In many ways, it appears that Wolf is alluding to her own situation, cunningly highlighting the pressures on writers in East Germany.  In which case, should we be visualising Wolf when Kleist and Günderrode bemoan their plight?

"Können Sie sich einen Menschen vorstellen, Doktor, der hautlos unter die Leute muß; den jeder Laut quält, jeder Schimmer blendet, dem die leiseste Berührung der Luft weh tut.  So ist mir, Doktor.  Ich übertreibe nicht.  Das müssen Sie mir glauben." p.40

"Can you imagine a person, doctor, who must go forth with no skin amongst people; whom each noise tortures, each gleam of light blinds, whom the merest breath of air causes pain.  That is how it is for me, doctor.  I'm not exaggerating.  You must believe me."

Poor Heinrich.  Poor Karoline.  Poor Christa...

A Short Life in Detail

The famous (East) German writer Christa Wolf passed away in December last year, and sadly that was the event which pushed me into trying one of her books for the first time.  I was supposed to have read Kein Ort, Nirgends (Nowhere on Earth) at university at one point, but as I recall I didn't even get around to buying it (which says less about Wolf than about my efforts at university...).  This time, however, I managed to both buy and read one of her works - and, more importantly, enjoyed it as well.

Nachdenken über Christa T. (usually translated as The Quest for Christa T.) is an intriguing, at times confusing, story of the short life of a young woman living in the former German Democratic Republic.  Our narrator meets Christa T. at school during the Second World War, and bumps into her again when studying at university a number of years later.  The narrator uses the book to relate selected details from Christa's life, from the moment of that first meeting until her untimely death from leukaemia at the age of thirty-six.

So far, so normal, you may think; however, this book is anything but.  It consists of a series of anecdotes from the narrator, who has been given a box of documents by Christa's widower and is determined to lay bare her friend's life in an attempt to explain to the reader what kind of woman she was and how she lived her life.  But why should we care?

This is a question which is (deliberately) never satisfactorily answered, and it's not the only ambiguous part of the story.  As the narrator relates events from Christa's life, the point of view slips back and forth between the first- and third-person, at times making it difficult to tell who is meant by 'ich' ('I').  In any case, the reader suspects that this issue of identification is complicated further by the temptation to throw a third speaker into the mix - Wolf herself.  Towards the end of the novel, the narrator sympathises with Christa's tendency to slip into the third-person, citing "...die Schwierigkeit ich zu sagen." ("...the difficulty of saying I.", p.201)***.  So just who is speaking here?

Knowing that the book is set in East Germany, it's difficult to avoid reading certain things into Nachdenken über Christa T., even though Wolf was one of the writers who stayed and defended her mother country.  Christa is shown to be a free spirit who refuses to be tied down by the expectations of society, waltzing in and out of lectures, not caring if her marks drag down the average of her study group, running off with any man who takes her fancy.  At one point, the narrator says:

"Kein Verfahren findet statt, kein Urteil wird gesprochen..." p.68

"No trial is taking place, no judgement is being made..."***

However, it is difficult to take this at face value; there is a pervading sense that the free-spirited Christa is somehow letting the system down by doing exactly (and only) what she wants to do.  Mind you, the state censors let it slip through, so I won't labour the point ;)

This book, with its emphasis on examining a person's life in detail, enabling a portrait to be painstakingly built up, reminds me in many ways of another classic German novel, Heinrich Böll's Gruppenbild mit Dame (Group Portrait with Lady).  Böll also used third-party sources to slowly develop his main character, avoiding having her appear in person until late in the piece to heighten the effect of the puzzle.

However, a major difference is that where Böll's Verf., the man engaged in building up a picture of Leni Pfeiffer, roamed far and wide interviewing people to get his information, Wolf's narrator refuses to ask others for help, preferring to rely on her own memory and the scraps of paper she has been given.  At times, she even imagines conversations and scenes which may have taken place, filling in certain gaps for herself.  When events start to become blurred later in the piece, this gives us even more reason to be suspicious of the facts - and of her motives...

Of course, we are given clues of this 'blurriness' early in the novel, when the narrator discusses the difficulties of ever getting a clear view of events, using clever word play related to poetry.

"Dichten, dicht machen, die sprache hilft.  Was denn dicht machen und wogegen?" p.24

"To write poetry, to seal off, language helps us.  Seal off what and from what?"***

Here Wolf is playing on the sounds of 'dichten' (to write poetry) and 'dicht machen' (to seal off) to explain that the role of poetry and literary writing is to obscure, just as much as it is to reveal.

This idea of 'defamiliarisation' would be a familiar(!) one to anyone who has studied literary theory, and while it may sound perverse, there is actually a kind of twisted logic in it.  By defamiliarising an object and rendering it difficult to make out, the writer forces us to concentrate our attention much harder on it.  In this way, we find something new in mundane objects which we don't really see properly any more.

And this is what Wolf does in Nachdenken über Christa T. - she takes an ordinary life and, through her smoke and mirrors, produces the story of a life less ordinary, a life spent trying to avoid being pigeon-holed, trying to find out what she actually wants from her time on earth.  The narrator has used this opportunity in an attempt to show us, just one time, how Christa T. really was, not how people saw her.  Why?

"Wann, wenn nicht jetzt?" p.219

"When, if not now?"***

 *****

Page numbers are from the German Suhrkamp Taschenbuch edition (2007).
All quotes marked *** are my attempts at translation :)