Christa Wolf belonged to the generation in which I also count myself. We were stamped by National Socialism and the late—too late—realization of all the crimes committed by Germans in the span of just twelve years. Ever since, the act of writing has demanded interpreting the traces that remain. One of Christa Wolf’s books, Patterns of Childhood, responds to that imperative, exposing her successive immersions in brown-shirted dictatorship and the doctrines of Stalinism. False paths credulously followed, stirrings of doubt and resistance to authoritarian constraints and beyond that, the recognition of one’s own participation in a system that was crushing the utopian ideals of Socialism—those are hallmarks of the five-decades of writing that established Wolf’s reputation, a journey that leads book by book from The Divided Sky (1963) to her final work, Stadt der Engel (“City of Angels,” 2010); and the books remain. To pick one out: “What Remains” is the title of a story published in June 1990 by Aufbau Verlag in the East and Luchterhand Verlag in the West. Even before it was available to East and West German readers, some West German journalists—the sort who assumed they were history’s victors and the hour of reckoning was at hand—ignored the embargo and struck. Christa Wolf, the celebrated author who had been much-praised for her resistance, the 1980 recipient of the Büchner Prize, Germany’s most prestigeous literary award, who was mobbed by enthusiastic students two years later as she delivered her Frankfurt Lectures on Poetics, Christa Wolf, whose voice had been heard in both Germanies, was now—the Wall hardly having fallen—subjected to an unending barrage of words.
more from Günter Grass at the NYRB here.