The czech writer Eva Kl?-mov?, describing the aftermath of 1989 in her homeland, said: "Before, nothing was allowed and everything seemed important. Now everything is allowed and nothing seems important." It is the sort of melancholy aphorism you can hear emerging from book-lined rooms throughout eastern Europe-the sense that the writer is no longer needed. Solzhenitsyn once described authors under totalitarian conditions as "a second government." The past eight years have shown us that when the "first" government and its system of beliefs is toppled, the second, literary, government is in for a tough time too.
For a start, writers lose out in status to the new rising classes of business and media-the "second governments" of democracy. Then their works are reassessed to determine whether they were sufficiently critical of the old regime. Their friends, bank accounts and contacts with the state security organs are rolled out for all to pass judgement.
On top of this, they are likely to find that the very act of writing is more difficult than it seemed before. Totalitarianism-like the unity of time, place and action in Greek drama, or the constraints of form in the 19th century novel-was a kind of frame, an external constraint within which narrative, tone and content were fixed. Without the daily rubbing up against unwelcome political conditions, the writer is left, for the first time in his or her life, wholly free-and very much alone.
The East German writer Christa Wolf has been in this situation since German reunification. She thus extends her knack for embodying post-1945 German plights: from her childhood spent under Nazism in Landsberg-an-der-Warthe, the flight to East Germany from the Russian army, to membership of the rising generation of socialist intellectuals, toiling away in the provincial offices of the flagship literary magazine Neue Deutsche Literatur in search of new writing for the "new people."
After publishing her first successful novel The Divided Heavens in 1963, about a couple torn apart by the erection of the Wall, and her remarkable study of lost idealism, Thinking About Christa T. (1968), she became part of the East German literary establishment. Not a dissident, certainly, but a consistent supporter of writers against the restrictions of state and censor, a defender of the individual voice in collective times. She meticulously carved out her own space in a state so obsessed by uniformity that it built a flagpole into every balcony of its apartment blocks so that its citizens should never be stuck for a place to fly the German tricolour on May Days.
After the regime's collapse, she published What Remains and Other Stories in 1990. She wrote this documentation of discovering that she had become a target of Stasi surveillance in 1979 but consigned it to the drawer. Presumably she did so because publication in the west at that time would have meant that she would have had to leave, which she said she would never do. In the great divide in East German letters, she was a "stayer"-even if that meant compromises with a system which no longer inspired her confidence.
In her exchange of letters with the late Franz F?hmann, the subject of going and staying looms large, with Wolf defending writers who choose to go west while F?hmann remains implacable: "Priests, writers and doctors should not go." I mention this because the bitterness of the "Christa Wolf debate" rode roughshod over the impossibly difficult choices which face intellectuals under a dictatorship. The claim that Wolf fails as a writer because she did not realise the full awfulness of the socialist system is shallow. It ignores the advantage that literature has over politics-namely that being proved right is not its governing standard.
The point about her writing is that she evokes so acutely the state of mind of the stubborn believer, and what it feels like to have your hopes betrayed. The experiences of Christa T. as a child, student, teacher, mother and a vet's wife in Mecklenburg are small and specific and yet so universal-reminiscent of Theodor Storm's evocation of 18th century north German villages. Through Wolf's world we come closer to knowing what it is like to be on the losing side of history. Like Cato, she lets the gods praise the victors and is interested in the vanquished and fallible. We do not need to share her characters' beliefs to empathise with them-we just have to accept that beliefs and ideas make and break lives.
She is often said to write tangentially-Frank Schirrmacher wrote witheringly of her "hovering language... which never quite gets round to saying anything." But the poignancy of her earlier works lay in that ability to achieve clarity through an intimate, tentative tone which more decisive people never accomplish. Like all important writers, she transcends her immediate subject matter, so that we can continue to read her books not simply in order to rediscover the runes of a lost society, but because we want to enter the world of people who are inspired, sustained, led astray and sometimes destroyed by the power of belief.
Among her secret police records, Wolf found herself registered as an IM-an inoffizieller Mitarbeiter, Stasi-speak for informant-from her days at the literary magazine. The substance of the allegations: that she passed her views of the "class standpoints" of various authors to the men in leather jackets, is not so terrible. She could reasonably cite the (now routine) defence of the accused, "I never did anyone any harm with my reports." But that prompts the real question: "What did you think you were doing when you wrote them?"
Fritz Raddatz, a writer of the liberal left, was outraged by the revelation and told her so in Die Zeit: "How was it, our admired Christa Wolf, after Georg Luk?cs was hauled away, Imre Nagy murdered and Walter Janka imprisoned... did you write little notes to the 'firm'? Why did you do it?" Readers looking for an answer to this and the broader questions of what Wolf defends and regrets about her life have to search hard in her latest book, Parting from Phantoms: Selected Writings 1990-94.
It is a slow, evasive work, as if the writer had chosen not to put herself through the exacting mill of self-examination which she produced in A Model Childhood, her 1984 consideration of the relationship between the individual's past and present sensibilities. But before one can treat the past with such authority, one has to have accepted that it is past. In A Model Childhood, Wolf uses the device of renaming her past narrator "Nelly" to distinguish her from the present adult self. In Thinking About Christa T. she took this several steps further, juggling countless narrative levels (I say countless because I spent the best part of a year in the Humboldt University library trying to take them apart, I found 11 and was then discouraged to find that a researcher at Cornell had identified more than 20).
The "phantoms" of East Germany revisited in this book are still too close to life for Wolf to treat with such sovereignty. To be blunt, I can't see the point of this book at all. It is a scrapbook of speeches, interviews and exchanges of letters; a badly considered follow-up to her excellent collection of essays The Writer's Dimension. The theme of Stasi collaboration is buried deep in resentments over the failure of the 1989 revolution to deliver an alternative kind of government, and in sour observations that a year after unification, no one on the 46 tram smiles any more. (I often took that tram from Pankow before 1989, and it was not noted then for the carefree expressions of its passengers.)
Wolf is now the representative figure of East German letters. I should not imagine that she is very amused by it, but I enjoyed the attack on her in Thomas Brussig's novel Heroes Like Us, which parodies her high-minded speech about the power of language (included in this collection) delivered at the reformist demonstration "For Our Country." Brussig is the Damien Hirst of East German letters, whose hob-nailed boots dance over old icons: his secret policeman manages, at the height of the revolutionary moment, to mistake Wolf for another matriarchal East German icon, the ice-skating trainer Jutta M?ller.
It is not her attackers Wolf needs to worry about, but her defenders. Reading the self-serving, melo- dramatic interventions in this collection-notably of G?nter Grass and G?nter Gaus-reminded me of Pope's complaint to John Arbuthnot: "One from all Grub Street will my fame defend/ And more abusive, calls himself 'my friend.'"
When the author does get round to speak of the opening of her Stasi files, she pinpoints a real danger: "that the Stasi is dictating my biography." But the most effective way of redressing this would have been to write more openly of how she felt as the "Nelly" in a communist country, expiating Nazism only to find that the trumpeted anti-fascism of the GDR masked its own grave failings.
There are honest and painful notes here-it's just that they are so annoyingly submerged. To attack Wolf as fleeing the debate about the East German past (she accepted a Getty scholarship in Santa Monica) seems absurd and cruel when you read passages like this one: "I stopped identifying with the people who did this [compiled the Stasi files] a long time ago. But I did identify with them once and an echo of that still reaches me from those files. I have to wonder how many moral systems I've taken on board in my life... and why I felt such conflicts in separating from them each time... my already deep distrust of my memory is now intensifying and turning into a strong distrust of myself."
Her latest novel Medea seeks to reinterpret collapse and guilt by feminising the Greek legend, but it does not really connect with the modern Germany. It is as if she has not yet recovered her earlier power to divine the human currents which run deep below the coursing flow of politics and to restore a voice to them.
Like Grass, who is always being told to write another Tin Drum, one longs for a book like A Model Childhood about the East German expe-rience. But at 68 (strange how Wolf's age now intrudes-she seemed ageless while preserved in the GDR's cultural formaldehyde) it may not happen. We would still be left with an author who provides an elegant and moving answer to the most difficult of questions about a lost order -Ranke's "How it really was."
Parting from phantoms: selected writings 1990-1994
Christa Wolf
University of Chicago Press, $24.95
