Companions to

Contemporary German Culture Christa Wolf

---
Edlted by

Michael fskin ·Karen Leeder · Christopher Young ACompanion

Volume 8
Edited by · R Hosek
Son1a
. E. Klocke and Jennifer .

1 J.:j MIX
Papier aue verantwor-
1

tungavollen Quellen
DE GRUYTER !:_~~ FSC" C018439
 Table of Contents

Sonja E. Klacke and Jennifer R. Hosek

lntroduction: Reading Christa Wolf in the Twenty-First Century-1

Curtis Swope
Modernity and the City in Christa Wolrs Oeuvre of the 1960s - 35

Regine Criser
Narrative Topographies in Christa Wolrs Oeuvre - 51

Anna K. Kuhn
The Gendered Reception of Christa Wolf- 65

Deborah Janson
Unearthing a Post-Humanist Ecological Socialism in Christa Wolrs
'Selbstversuch', Kassandra and Störfall - 81

Sabine von Mering

Nature, Power and Literature: Rereading Christa Wolrs Störfall. Nachrichten
eines Tages as 'Ecological Force' in Times of Climate Crisis - 97
ISBN 978-3-11-049199-9
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-049600-0
Roswitha Skare
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-049345-0
ISSN 2193-9659 Literature and Visual Art in Christa Wolrs Sommerstück (1989) and Was bleibt
(1990)-113
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Anna Horakova
Learning from the Underground: Christa Wolf and the Fourth Generation of
Bibliographie information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
GOR Writers -131
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibl' f" .
detailed bibl' h" d rogra re,
1ograp 1c ata are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
John Pizer
© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston From Pan-German Cosmopolitanism to Nostalgie National lnsularity: A
Cover i~age: Christa Wolf. Demonstration on the Alexanderplatz, Berlin on 4November Comparative Study of Christa Wolrs Kassandra and Medea -147
1989
© akg-1mages / ddrbildarchiv.de /Manfred Uhlenhut ·
Printing and binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen
9 Printed on acid-free paper Beverly M. Weber
Printed in Germany Christa Wolrs Trouble with Race -163

www.degruyter.com
 C1th1rlnr Smale
Tow1rd1 a Late Style? Christa Wolf on Old Age, Death and Creativity in Stadt A Note on Translations
d1r Eng~/ oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud - 181
Quotations from Christa Wolrs work are given in German and English. In general, contributors'
Birgit Dahlke quotes in English refer to official English translations provided in the bibliography, unless no
official translation existed, or if they needed to work with their own translation to make a par-
The Protocol of Barrlers to Thlnklng? Wolrs Moskauer Tagebücher. Wer wir ticular linguistic or formal point. Each contributor acknowledges the translations used in their
sind und wer wir waren (2014) - 201 endnotes or highlights their own translations. All translations, whether official or undertaken by
the contributors, follow the relevant German quotation in square brackets. The primary aim is to
Carollne Summers provide an accessible working translation.
To avoid unnecessary repetition, however, the titles of Christa Wolrs main works are given
Translatlng SubJectlve Authentlclty from Christa T. to Stadt der Engel and
in German only. The titles of individual essays and poems are given both in German and in Eng-
August: Re-presentlng Christa Wolrs Subaltern Voice - 219
lish throughout. For ease of reference, a list of translations of these main works is included
here, and a more detailed Select Bibliography is given at the end of the volume.
Yutlan Chen and Fan Zhang
From Polltlcal-Re.alistic Reading to Multiperspectival Understanding: The Moskauer Novelle (1961)
Receptlon of Christa Wolrs Der geteilte Himmel in China - 243 [Moscow Novella]

Der geteilte Himmel (1963)

Huynh Mal Trlnh
[The Divided Heaven (1965)]
R11dlng Christa Wolf In Socialist Vietnam - 263
Juninachmittag (1967)
['June Afternoon' in What Remains and other Stories (1993)]
Collated by SonJa E. Klocke
Chrl1t1 Wolf: A Select Blbllography - 279 Nachdenken über Christa T. (1968)
[The Quest for Christa T. (1970)]

Contrlbutora - 293 Neue Lebensansichten eines Katers (1973)

['The New Life and Opinions of a Tomcat' in What Remains and Other Stories (1993)]
lndex-295 Kindheitsmuster (1976)
[A Model Childhood; Patterns of Childhood (1980)]

Kein Ort. Nirgends (1979)

[No Place On Earth (1982)]

Kassandra. Vier Vorlesungen - Eine Erzählung (1983)

[Cassandra. A Novel and Four Essays (1984)]

Stärfal/. Nachrichten eines Tages (1987)

[Accident. A Day's News (1989)]

Sommerstück (1989)
[Summer Play]

Was bleibt. Erzählung (1990)

['What Remains' in What Remains and other Stories (1993)]

Medea. Stimmen (1996)

[Medea. A Modem Retel/ing (1998)]

https://dol.org/10.1515/9783110496000-001
Beverly M. Weber
Christa Wolrs Trouble with Race
Fragen Sie ihn, ob er die alten Landkarten kennt, mit ihren vielen weißen Flecken, auf die
man kurzerhand schrieb: Hie sunt leones. Fragen Sie ihn, ob er, als er mir ins Fleisch
schnitt, als er meine Wunden öffnete, meine faulen Stellen bloßlegte: ob er da auf jene wei-
ßen Flecken gestoßen ist, die mir selber unbekannt, die unerforscht und unbenannt sind
[„.] an diesen resistenten Flecken [muss] jede Immunabwehr der Welt zuschanden werden.
[Ask him if he knows those old maps with all the white areas where people simply wrote
'hie sunt leones.' Ask him if, when he was cutting into my flesh, when he was opening
my incisions and exposing my rotten places, he came upon any of those white spots, un-
known even to me, that are unexplored and unnamed („.) every immune mechanism in
the world will come to grief against those resistant spots.]1

The narrator of Leibhaftig utters these words in response to doctors' bewilder-

ment at her failing immune system. The terra incognita, the 'white spots' that
she imagines, might be read in many directions: as acknowledgment of the nar-
rator's complicity in violence, as markers of unacknowledged histories, as 'blind'
spots that evidence a lack of knowledge. Those white spots, by being unmappa-
ble, are deemed unknowable, unthinkable and unspeakable. In many Wolf texts,
the danger produced by the limits of the speakable is at its most severe when her
various protagonists are tempted to give themselves up to these limits - in Leib-
haftig, a danger expressed particularly through the inability to desire life itself.
Wolf's last novel, Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud (hereafter
Stadt der Engel), reveals one of those white spots to be whiteness itself, which
as bell hooks argues - often expresses among white anti-racists as 'a deep
emotional investment in the myth of "sameness", even as their actions reflect
the primacy of whiteness as a sign informing who they are and how they
think'. 2 Sara Ahmed suggests that whiteness, as a consequence of racialization,
is an 'ongoing and unfinished history, which orientates bodies in specific direc-
tions, affecting how they "take up" space'.3 Whiteness exists as a structural ad-
vantage in racially structured societies4 and as a set of norms both institutional

1 Christa Wolf, Leibhaftig (Munich: Luchterhand, 2002), p. 98. All translations are taken from
Christa Wolf, In the Flesh, trans. by John Barrett (Boston: David R. Godine, 2005).
2 bell hooks, Black Looks. Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), p. 167.
3 Sara Ahmed, 'A Phenomenology of Whiteness', Feminist Theory, 8.2 (2007), 149-168 (p. 150).
lt Frankenberg, Ruth. 'Mirage of an Unmarked Whiteness', in The Making and Unmaking of
Whiteness, ed. by Birgit Brander Rasmussen and others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2001), pp. 72-96.

https://dol.org/10.1515/9783110496000·011
164 - Beverly M. Weber Christa Wolrs Trouble with Race - 165

and somatic - that reproduce social relations; 5 it allows some bodies to be more visibly than others, to disappear again amidst a humanism that emphasizes
at home and to move more easily in the world than others.6 Approaching Wolf's sameness in the face of violence.
oeuvre from a perspective informed by critical ethnic studies and its multivalent We might see Kindheitsmuster, Wolf's Kassandra lectures, Leibhaftig and
critiques of whiteness enables an approach to Wolf that can resituate her many Stadt der Engel as touchstones that mark Wolf's trouble with whiteness. In par·
contributions to post-1945 German literature within the post-War trouble with 1 ticular, whiteness produces problems for a particular ethics of empathetic feeling
race. Wolf's earlier work engages with anti-Semitism and Eurocentrism in ways that emerges as part of Wolf's attempt to construct a politics of emotion. In seek-
that continually lead Wolf's narrators back to a discussion of shared humanity ing such an ethics, Wolf sets up identifications with the victims of anti-Semitism,
while prohibiting explicit engagement with racism. Wolf's trouble with race in ' racism and imperialism, resulting in equivalencies of victimhood that obscure
Stadt der Engel, alternatively, becomes a more extensive troubling of race: a com- the workings of whiteness. Wolf's narrative worlds have much in common
plex, incomplete revelation of the entanglements of race at the heart of what is with feminist projects that seek to highlight the role of emotions in knowledge,
considered to be 'Western civilization'. recognizing the epistemic authority accorded to white men as a consequence of
In her third Kassandra lecture, Wolf opens by posing the question: 'Die Lit- the exclusion of emotion from epistemology. 8 Yet, given the lack of a language
eratur des Abendlandes, lese ich, sei eine Reflexion des weißen Mannes auf sich with which to articulate white women's participation in whiteness, Wolf's em-
selbst. Soll nun die Reflexion der weißen Frau auf sich selbst dazukommen? Und phasis on emotion results in an ethics of empathy that easily slides into a con-
weiter nichts?' [The literature of the West (I read) is the white man's reflection on ceptual exclusion of white women from whiteness and an identification with the
himself. So should it be supplemented by the white woman's reflection on her· , target of racism that can, in turn, reify racism. As Sara Ahmed suggests, empathy
self? And nothing more?]. 7 With this question, Wolfbriefly acknowledges the vi· can 'sustain the very difference that it may seek to overcome'. 9
olence of whiteness. The imbrication of literature of the 'West' in structures of Stadt der Engel marks a critical turn by which Wolf's trouble with race is ren-
white patriarchy plays a role in two key Wolf projects in particular: the excava· dered visible. The protagonist's repeated attempts to establish a politics of empa·
tion of memory in a Benjaminian redemptive sense that is, as a way of imag~ thetic feeling through her engagement with various 'others' in the text fail re·
ining alternative futures; and critiques of the violence of rationalized/instrumen· ·' peatedly. The novel is troubled by and troubles race, 1° in part because of
talized Western masculinity in the name of progress, often expressed in the ' Wolf's insistence on describing most characters in the text according to racial·
exclusion of women's voices from the public sphere, as well as in the environ· ized categories - as white, Jewish, Black, Puerto Rican, Native American, for ex-
mental impact of advanced technology. Wolf's strategy of response was not to ample - even as she fails to explicitly engage race; and in part due to the mock-
develop a unified aesthetics or poetics, but to represent a fragmented struggle ingly critical voice of her Black angel, Angelina, who challenges the narrator's
towards an adequate politics of emotion as a counter to this violence. Yet al· .• appropriations of victimhood.
though Wolf's interrogation of 'Western civilization' is extensively elaborat~,'.
in her work, the role of racialized bodies in the construction of the full~,
human in Western thought is left largely unarticulated. Thinking through ract;
and its emergence in tandem with modern colonialism have been key to sever
scholarly bodies of work that would seem to align with Wolf's critiques of th
West, yet race haunts Wolf's texts rather ambiguously. lt erupts, at times mo '.
8 See, for example, Alison M. Jaggar, 'Love and Knowledge. Emotion in Feminist Epistemology',

-
5 Sara Ahmed, On Being Included. Radsm and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham, NC:
fnquiry, 32.2 (1989), 151-176.
9 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 30.
10 I am using trouble here partly inspired by Carrie Smith-Prei and Maria Stehle's work on trou-
University Press, 2012), p. 38.
6 Ahmed, 'A Phenomenology', p. 160, 162. ble and the importance of staying with trouble. To trouble, they suggest (after Judith Butler), is to
7 Christa Wolf, Werkausgabe in 12 Bänden, ed. by Sonja Hilzinger (Munich: Luchterhand, 1 destabilize and de-essentialize, but to stay with trouble is to enact a feminist politics that does
2001), vol. 7: Kassandra. Voraussetzungen einer Erzählung (2001), p. 108. All translations not seek to 'work through' trouble, but to use it as an ever-shifting starting point from which
taken from Christa Wolf, Cassandra. A Novel and Four Essays, trans. by Jan Van Heurck (N feminist action can issue. See Carrie Smith Prei and Maria Stehle, 'WiG-Trouble', Women in Ger-
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984). man Yearbook. Feminist Studies in German Literature & Culture, 30 (2014), 209-224.
166 - Beverly M. Weber Christa Wolfs Trouble with Race - 167

from the outside, one that derailed the 'naturally' anti-racist bent of modern de-
Anti-fascism and Anti-Semitism in Christa Wotrs
mocracy. A restoration of right democratic principles, in other words, would lead
Work to the end of racism. 15 In West Germany, the language of race virtually disap-
peared, even as Jews came tobe conceptualized as members of an ethnicity rath-
The trouble with race begins with Wolf's engagement with the history of anti- er than a race. 16 Anti-Semitism became understood as something other to and
Semitism under fascism, particularly starting with Kindheitsmuster. The protago- separate from racism. Racism, in turn, became refigured as xenophobia (in ref-
nist of Kindheitsmuster, named Nelly as a child but an unnamed first person nar- erences to West Germany, racism has been often seen as a US phenomenon).
rator as an adult, examines Nelly's ideological and emotional commitment to These processes have epistemological and scholarly consequences, producing
fascism, but also suggests that patterns of fascism continue in the present. work that replicates the very difference it seeks to explain. 17
The narrative can be clearly located in the tradition of East German anti-fascist The East German silencing of race incorporated elements of both processes.
narrative, even as Wolf explicitly challenges official state narratives of anti-fas- Race and racism were generally seen to exist in another time and place.18 Racism
cism. Nelly's coming of age accompanies a maturity into anti-fascism and into was often constructed as the product of fascism that had thus ended with victory
a new political position as a Communist. Yet her work highlights how a certain . over fascism; and/or as restricted to fascism's perceived inheritor, West Germany;
view of history by GDR rulers refused to engage the past as collaborators, rather or as a phenomenon that existed in the United States. The early purges of Jewish
than as Communist victims of fasdsm.11 Critical as Wolf was of the GDR in so 'cosmopolitans' from East German public life were viewed by the state as polit-
many of her works, her embedding in a GDR context also contributes to some ical developments that had nothing to do with anti-Semitism. Even the promi-
of the 'blind spots', the 'white spots' of Wolf's work. nent trial of Paul Merker a returned emigre who was not Jewish, but was com-
The anti-fascist narrative of East Germany not only refused to engage East „ mitted to establishing an East Germany founded on remembering the Holocaust
Germans as collaborators, but also to recognize that Jewish victims of fascism and fighting anti-Semitism - was a clear sign that Jewish identity and public life
were targeted as radalized others, not only as Communists. Much has been writ• in East Germany would be incompatible. 19 Later, foreign labourers from African
ten about the emphasis in cultural narratives on the Communist victim over the and Asian communist countries as well as Cuba were referred to with a public
Jewish victim12 or at the very least, the repression of the Holocaust in literature,
sometimes even in works by Jewish Communists, such as Anna Seghers. 13 In the
context of early post-War purges of Jewish figures from public life, Jewish Ger···
mans who were also committed Communists thus found themselves called on
by the cultural politics of the GDR to ignore the recent trauma of the Holocaust~14 · ·
15 Alana Lentin, 'Racism, Anti-Racism and the Western State', in Identity, Belonging and Migra-
This is, perhaps, a specifically East German variant of the silence around race,.
tion, ed. by Gerard Delanty and others (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), pp.101-119.
that occurs throughout Western Europe as well in the decades after the Second·' 16 Rita Chin and Heide Fehrenbach, 'Introduction. What's Race Got to Do with lt? Postwar Ger-
World War. Many Western European countries viewed racism as a force comina.· man History in Context', in After the Nazi Racial State. Dif/erence and Democracy in Germany and
Europe, ed. by Rita Chin and others (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), pp. 1-29
(p. 3).
11 Konrad H. Jarausch, 'The Failure of East German Antifascism. Some Ironies of History as P~, 17 Rita Chin and Heide Fehrenbach, 'Gennan Democracy and the Question of Difference, 1945-
itics', German Studies Review, 14.1 (1991), 85-102 (pp. 85-88). 1995', in Chin and others, pp. 102-136 (pp. 129-131).
12 Tue most comprehensive account of the marginalization of anti-Semitism and the Holoc 18 The phenomenon of the East German Indianerfilme in the mid-1960s to the 1980s serves as a
in East Germany remains Jeffrey Herf's Divided Memory. Unfortunately, there is little space further example of temporal and geographic displacement of racism in the GDR. Tue East Ger-
to probe other historical silences about other groups targeted by fascism; these silences are n man iterations of these films imagined racism as a US phenomenon explainable by the Jogics of
ly total in Wolf's work as weil. lmperialism and colonialism. Tue films promoted an identification of East German audience
13 Julia Hell, Post-Fascist Fantasies. Psychoanalysis, History, and the Literature of East Germa · members with Native Americans as anti-fascist resistance fighters. See Gerd Gemuenden, 'Be-
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 89; Anke Pinkert, 'Pleasures of Fear. Antif tween Karl May and Karl Marx. The DEFA Indianerfilme (1965-1983)', New Gennan Critique, 82
Myth, Holocaust, and Soft Dissidence in Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster', German Quart (2001), 399-407. Such displacement renders a discussion of East German racism unimaginable.
76.1 (2003), 13-32. 19 Sander L. Gilman, Jurek Becker. A Life in Five Worlds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
14 Hell, Post-Fascist Fantasies, pp. 89-91. 1003), pp. 36-37.
168 - Beverly M. Weber Christa Wolfs Trouble with Race - 169

rhetoric of 'socialist friends' that enabled an official disavowal of East German camps early on, as well as the supposed 'forgetting' of that knowledge. The sec-
racism.20 ond recounting of this incident within Kindheitsmuster follows directly on the
Kindheitsmuster both replicates and challenges East German anti-fascist nar- heels of an encounter with an American soldier, a German Jew who had emigrat-
ratives. Wolf rejects a rhetoric that assigns responsibility for recognizing complic- ed, who remains 'unheimlich' [uncanny] to Nelly. 23 This encounter is glossed
ity with fascism solely to citizens of the FRG. Yet her characters' encounters with over, as Nelly's leaming becomes instead a learning about the persecution of
Jewish survivors and non-Jewish camp survivors are depicted with a narrative Communists, while her mother's knowledge of Jewish persecution is effectively
structure that allows a certain shared post-War refugee experience to obscure silenced.
the narrator's ongoing imbrication in whiteness. Nelly's own coming of age as a Communist structurally aligns her with sur-
For example, when the adult narrator of Kindheitsmuster reads from a draft vivors, particularly as their journey collapses into that of a shared refugee expe-
of a book chapter to an audience in Switzerland, she imagines a powerful differ- rience. Throughout the text, Nelly, her family and others fleeing with them as the
ence between Holocaust memory in East and West. An audience member sug- Soviet army advances in the east are the primary refugees in the text, while ref-
gests that it is time to 'finally' get past this obsession with the fascist past; a Jew- ugees from the concentration camps remain marginal. In only one case does the
ish German survivor contradicts him. In a later conversation alone with the text represent a concentration camp survivor for a few paragraphs. In this case,
emigre, the narrator emphasizes how important 'people like him' were in the Nelly and her family share the Frahm farmhouse with other refugees, including
years after the War for her, then insists that a demand to end the engagement 'Concentration Camp Ernst', a camp survivor who refuses to explain how, where
with the fascist past could not be verbalized in 'her' country. 21 In this way, the or why he was interned. In this way, he simply becomes one of the refugees, and
narrative of an anti-fascist East Germany is validated even as the narrator con- a potential discussion of anti-Semitism or the differences in refugee experience is
structs a narrative probing everyday complicity with fascism and seeking an em- avoided. 24 As Anke Pinkert has suggested, through Kindheitsmuster, Wolf con-
pathetic connection to the survivor. structed an account of anti-Semitism that challenges official GDR anti-fascist
The narrator's/Nelly's encounters with concentration camp inmates are ela- narratives even as she suspends alterity in a vision of humanity a kind of sur-
borated in undifferentiated ways; indeed, encounters with concentration camp rogate victimhood that Julia Hell, similarly, has viewed as an impossible desire
inmates are narrated as a leaming about the suffering of Communists under fas- for identification with Jewish victims. 25 Pinkert provides a valuable reading of
cism. As Nelly and her family flee west before the advancing Soviet army, they this kind of empathy as rooted in a rejection of anti-Semitism as abjection of
encounter concentration camp inmates from Sachsenhausen who were freed the Jewish body. A reading attentive to questions of race and its silencings in Eu-
when their captors fled. Nelly's first encounter with a concentration camp survi- rope suggests that empathetic identification also occurs because of a Jack of lan-
vor is when one approaches a bonfire the refugees have built. In a conversation guage that can fully engage with anti-Semitism as racism, and therefore that
with this survivor, Nelly's mother expresses disbelief that people were intemed could highlight the narrator's position of structural privilege.
in camps as Communists; 'Wo habt ihr bloß alle gelebt?' [Where on earth have In Stadt der Engel, the encounter with the Communist concentration camp
you been living?] he responds. 22 Tue structure of this incident, explicitly repeat- inmate is repeated but relocated into a different context no langer as a shared
ed later in the book, reveals the blind spots constructed by the East German anti- experience of being a refugee that subsumes the experiences of all concentration
fascist narrative. Each recounting is surrounded by reflections on the appear- camp survivors. 26 The encounter is remembered through the narrator's relation-
ance of concentration camps in local newspapers at the time of their founding ship with Ruth, a 'hidden child' who meets the narrator at a gathering of survi-
and other ways in which everyday Germans were exposed to knowledge of the vors and survivors' children to which the narrator has been invited. Midway

20 Germany in Transit. Nation and Migration, 1955-2005, ed. by Deniz Göktürk, David Gramling 23 Wolf, Kindheitsmuster, p. 480.
and Anton Kaes (Berkeley: University of Califomia Press, 2007), pp. 67-69. 24 Ibid. p. 544.
21 Wolf, Christa Wolf Werke, vol. 5: Kindheitsmuster (2000), p. 450. 25 Pinkert, 'Pleasures of Fear', pp. 28-30; Hell, Post-Fascist Fantasies, p. 216.
22 Wolf, Kindheitsmuster, p. 65. All translations are taken from Christa Wolf, Patterns of Child· 26 Christa Wolf, Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud, 3nl edn (Berlin: Suhrkamp,
hood, trans. by Ursusle Molinary and Hedwig Rappolt (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), p. 314. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are taken from Christa Wolf, City of Angels.
1984). Dr, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud (New York: Macrnillan, 2013).
170 - Beverly M. Weber Christa Wolrs Trouble with Race - 171

through the text, the narrator discovers - quite accidentally - that Ruth herself is an important sentence in which Franza makes her identification with colonized
the person whom the narrator has been seeking throughout her stay. As Ruth re- peoples explicit, 'Ich bin Papua' [I am Papuan]:
lates a story of a German emigre, the narrator recalls the story of the Communist
Man kann nur die wirklich bestehlen, die magisch leben [...] es ist eine tödliche Verzweif-
concentration camp inmate intemally, not out loud. But the retelling contains
lung bei den Papuas, eine Art des Selbstmords, weil sie glauben, die Weißen hätten sich
a major difference. The only point of contact here is that it is the story of the nar- aller ibre Güter auf magische Weise bemächtigt „. Er hat mir [Franza] meine Güter genom-
rator' s 'first encounter with a Communist in the flesh'. 27 The narrator's 'empathy' men. Mein Lachen, meine Zärtlichkeit, mein Freuenkönnen, mein Mitleiden, Helfenkön-
is not in any way expanded here to imagine a shared humanity based on expe- nen, meine Animalität, mein Strahlen.
rience as victims of fascism. Instead, the vast difference between the narrator [You can really steal only from people who live magically (...) There is a deadly despair
and Ruth is allowed to stand. This recontextualisation, together with the unspo- among the Papuans, a kind of suicide, because they believe that the whites seized all
ken form of this memory, prohibits the appropriation of the encounter with the their possessions by magical means „. He has taken my possessions from me. My laughter,
concentration camp inmate in order to establish a shared experience with vic- my tenderness, my ability to feel joy, my compassion, my ability to help, my animality, my
radiance.]2 8
tims of anti-Semitism. Instead, the narrator's experience with survivor commun-
ities confronts her with her participation in racialized difference.
Such confrontation extends to forcing the narrator to engage with the new Wolf's citation of Bachmann illustrates the reliance on structures of empathy.
expressions of racism targeted at refugees and perceived refugees in Germany. Besides the fact that this expression of empathetic understanding has little to
When the Jewish director of the Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles asks her do with realities experienced by the indigenous people of Papua New Guinea, 29
about the racist attacks occurring in the early 1990s in Germany, she must ac- the racialized experience of colonialism is constructed as parallel to the experi-
knowledge a relationship to racialized violence, even as she feels her resistance ence of white women vis-a-vis white men only non-Europeans and women live
to the invitation to speak for unified Germany. Invited to articulate a relationship 'magically', that is, beyond white, masculine (read: non-instrumentalized) ra-
between two forms of racism triangulated by the narrator's own participation in tionality, 'The colonized' slip into 'I' seamlessly. Bachmann highlights colonial-
whiteness, the narrator retreats instead to a reflection on the loss of the GDR. ism even as she recolonizes through the easy identification of Franza with the
Maori. 30 Wolf, in turn, doubles this epistemological recolonization through Kas-
sandra's recognition of self in Franza and, therefore, in colonized peoples. This
From Ingeborg to Kora Bachmann: Gender, Pain critique of violence proves quite different from that expressed in Kindheitsmus-
ter, as Lennox points out: in Kindheitsmuster, race is never named, but the au-
and the Problem with Empathy thor/narrator probes her own complicity in structures of violence; in the fourth
Kassandra lecture, whiteness is explicitly named, even as Wolf seems to excuse
Between Kindheitsmuster and Stadt der Engel, however, Wolf's engagement with women from whiteness, uncritically stating that Franza must leam that women
Ingeborg Bachmann will demonstrate where gender is imagined in the politics of . are colonized and of a 'lower race'. 31 This collapse of gendered and racialized
empathy. Bachmann served as a distant mentor and inspiration for Wolf's initial ·
engagement with questions of gender; via those reflections, Bachmann also in~ '
spired Wolf's first references to whiteness. Wolf's Kassandra lecture on Bach· 28 Wolf, Kassandra, p. 195.
mann, delivered as part of her Frankfurter Poetik-Vorlesungen (Frankfurt Lectures . 29 Monika Albrecht, '"Es muß erst geschrieben werden". Kolonisation und magische Weitsicht
in Ingeborg Bachmanns Romanfragment Das Buch Franzd, in 'Über die Zeit schreiben'. Literatur-
on Poetics), remains the most explicit mention of race and whiteness in her work.
und kulturwissenschaftliche Essays zu Ingeborg Bachmanns Todesarten-Projekt, ed. by Dirk Gött-
This Kassandra lecture, written in the form of a letter addressed to A., relies sche and Monika Albrecht (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 1998), pp. 59-91 (pp. 74-
heavily on Wolf's reading of Bachmann's novel fragment Der Fall Franza {The, 77).
Book of Franza}. Wolf cites from Bachmann's fragment extensively - omittins ·. 30 Gisela Brinker-Gabler, 'Andere Begegnung. Begegnung mit dem Anderen zwischen Aneignung
und Enteignung', Seminar. A Journal of Germanic Studies, 29.2 (1993), 95-105 (pp. 97-99).
31 Sara Lennox, Cemetery of the Murdered Daughters. Feminism, History, and Ingeborg Bach-
mann (Arnherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), p. 61; Wolf, Kassandra,
27 Ibid., p. 313. pp. 194-195.
172 - Beverly M. Weber Christa Wotrs Trouble with Race - 173

others into one in order to achieve a certain sense of shared victimhood exists ognizing themselves as victims of white men: A., Bachmann, Franza, Kassandra
partly as a consequence of the lack of language with which to speak and recog- and Wolf.
nize racism and racialization as part of the legitimation of imperialism. In Leibhaftig, Ingeborg Bachmann is explicitly replaced by another Bach-
And so, Wolf suggests, Kassandra's prophesy today would be the same as mann - the 'dark woman', Kora Bachmann, introduced to the reader as a
that expressed by Franza: name with many assodations. 34 The repeated use of the term 'dark woman' func-
tions as a counterpoint to Ingeborg Bachmann's white ladies, 35 gesturing to the
Die Weißen kommen. [... U]nd wenn sie wieder zurückgeworfen werden, dann werden sie ' unfulfilled promise of Kassandra to move beyond a mere complementing of
noch einmal wiederkommen [...S]ie werden mit ihrem Geist wiederkommen, wenn sie an·
white male dominance with the voice of white women. Yet the portrayal of
ders nicht mehr kommen können. Und auferstehen in einem braunen oder schwarzen Ge- i
hirn, es werden noch immer die Weißen sein, auch dann noch. Sie werden die Welt weiter
Kora Bachmann here largely leaves the workings of whiteness unchallenged.
besitzen, auf diesem Umweg. In Leibhaftig, based on Wolf's experience of repeated surgeries and a life-threat-
ening infection after untreated appendicitis, Kora Bachmann is the narrator's an-
[The whites are coming. („.I)f they are repulsed again, they will return again once more. („.
T)hey will come in spirit if they can no longer come in any other way. And they will be res· ,. aesthetist. With the name Bachmann, she becomes the narrator's mentor as well
urrected in a brown and a black brain, it will still always be the whites, even then. They will as caretaker, staying with the narrator for hours, changing cold compresses as
continue to own the world in this roundabout way.]32 she battles fever. And with the name Kora, she references the Greek Perse-
phone/Cora, the goddess of the underworld who here accompanies the narrator
For Kassandra (and in this case, for the author herself), the ability to speak this into darkness before every operation - and rescues her from the underworld to
terrifying occupation of land, spirit, brain and body opens up the possibility of return her to the realm of the living. 36 Kora Bachmann also, however, prefigures
understanding and knowing the Other as self. Wolf artificially delinks the effects ! Angelina in Stadt der Engel - while not an angel, Kora Bachmann nevertheless
of colonialism from racism, as 'the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and flies with the narrator over Berlin to question the narrator's self-destructive im-
exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death', 33 render· pulses and to further excavate the story of Lisbeth.
ing colonialism an effect of Western masculine rationality. Wolf understands Lisbeth, as a character in both Leibhaftig and Kindheitsmuster, is based on
women to also 'live magically' that is, to rely on a range of affects that extends Wolf's aunt Elfriede. 37 In Kindheitsmuster, in coded language, it is implied that
their knowing beyond that of masculinized rationality. A discussion of colonial• . her son may be the biological son of a Jewish doctor with whom she had an af·
ism and gender without a vocabulary of race has a range of effects: difference is · fair; in Leibhaftig, it is explicit. Between the writing of the two texts, the father of
reduced to a simple effect of either skin colour or gender; whiteness is rendered the child, Dr. Leitner/Lechner, writes and then visits Wolf to confirm the story. 38
masculine, while white women are excluded from whiteness; the complexities of In a remarkable conversation with Kora, the narrator links her inability to fight
racist structures disappear; and women of colour are unthinkable and unrepre- for her life to a Hitler quotation that hung on her wall at school: 'Wer leben will,
sentable. The question 'Soll nun die Reflexion der weißen Frau auf sich selbst der kämpfe also' [Those who want to live, let them fight]. 39 The narrator then tells
dazukommen? Und weiter nichts?' remains unanswered and unreflected. In· Kora the story of her aunt, Dr. Leitner and their child, then bursts into tears,
stead, the fourth lecture, written in the form of a letter, issues an odd call to. while Kora comforts her.
its addressee, A., to save whites from the curse on whites that Franza has de;; The disturbing reference to a Hitler quotation also references a comment
clared with her final words. This odd imperative appropriates the experience: early in the book, when the narrator draws a connection between her body
of the colonized to establish a new imagined collective of action in order to resr,
cue white men a collective comprised of what appear to be white women rec·
34 Wolf, Leibhaftig, 37.
35 Lennox, Cemetery, pp. 269-296.
36 Wolf, Leibhaftig, p. 124.
32 Wolf, Kassandra, p. 196. 37 Jana Simon, Sei dennoch unverzagt. Gespräche mit meinen Großeltern Christa und Gerhard
33 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, 'Race and Globalization', in Geographies of Global Change. Remapping · Wolf(Berlin: Ullstein, 2013), pp. 30-32.
the World, ed. R. J. Johnston, Peter J. Taylor and Michael Watts, ptd edn (Maiden, MA: Wiley· 38 lbid., pp. 31-32.
Blackwell, 2002), p. 261. 39 Wolf Leibhaftig, p. 81.
174 - Beverly M. Weber Christa Wolrs Trouble with Race - 175

and those of the concentration camp survivors she witnessed as her family fled 1 of a personal biography or a location in any social relationship. Her darkness is
west: 'Und sie geben auf, wenn es ihnen an allen Mineralstoffen fehlt. Musel- reiterated throughout Leibhaftig; she is only marginally represented as more
männer. Ohne Kalium [... ] fühlt man sich wie eine Padde, die von einer Astgabel human than the undifferentiated colonized peoples with whom Wolf/Kassan-
im Genick in den Staub gedrückt wird' [And they give up when their minerals are " dra/Ingeborg Bachmann/Franza have allied themselves in the Kassandra project.
depleted. Mussulmen. Without potassium („.) you feel like a frog pressed into the Ahmed's thoughts on the contingency of pain and the ethics of a response
dust by a forked stick against the back of the neck]. 40 The narrator equates her are helpful here:
experience to that of concentration camp survivors using the trope of the Musel-
mann - an antiquated word for Muslim, derived from the Arabic term for Muslim, 1 want to suggest here, cautiously, and tentatively, that an ethics of responding to pain in-
volves being open to being affected by that which one cannot know or feel. [...] The ethical
which eventually became derogatory and which, together with its cognates in .
demand is that 1 must act about that which 1 cannot know, rather than act insofar as 1
several languages, emerged in the language of the concentration camps to know. 1 am moved by what does not belong to me. If 1 acted on her behalf only insofar
name the most abject figures who had lost the ability or will to live, figured as as 1 knew how she feit, then 1 would act only insofar as 1 would appropriate her pain as
between life and death, unable to control many bodily functions. As Alexander 1 my pain. 44
Weheliye explores, the uncritical use of Muselmann was popularized further via ,
the work of Georgio Agamben, who employed the term to figure a biopolitics be- In Leibhaftig, the points of contact between the narrator and her various Others
yond racism. 41 Wolf's use of the figure here conjures this history. The incorpora- remain appropriative empathy.
tion of Jewish suffering into her family history and into her very body triggers the}
1
appropriation of the 'dark lady' Bachmann to construct both good-feeling and ,
'.'il
health for the narrator by enabling mourning and providing comfort. · From Kora to Angelina - The Transformation of
Leibhaftig thus participates in a post-unification trend that is often discussed
in film as 'heritage cinema' - which, in the German context, often seeks to depict1 Wotrs Flying Guides
a German-Jewish reconciliation in order to 'clear historical debts so as to open a
The work of the figure of Angelina in Stadt der Engel, however, does something
path for a normal German future'. 42 In Leibhaftig, a recovered German-Jewish
very different, pointing to the possibility of rejecting the appropriation of the ex-
symbiosis depends on contact with the Bachmanns, from Ingeborg to Kora, ob• :.
perience of racialized others. Angelina serves as a figure around which all the
scuring the contingency of pain by covering up the ways in which whiteness inc .
unspoken issues of race at work in Wolf's oeuvre crystallize. Stadt der Engel,
forms the narrator's position. In the narrator's imagination, her body quite liten ,;
like Kindheitsmuster, relies on a semi-autobiographical narrator who relentlessly
ally becomes that of the survivor because of her ability to 'know' their pain. Thi$
examines her complicity in a structure of violence: in Kindheitsmuster, as a youth
act becomes manageable, liveable, by the incomplete incorporation of Dr. Leit• :.
firmly committed to the ideology of National Socialism; in Stadt der Engel, as a
ner into the family, made possible by Kora Bachmann.43 In this odd triangula•.
collaborator with the Stasi from 1959 to 1963 (indeed, it is difficult not to read
tion, Kora - whose sole role in the text is to heal the narrator - is evacuated ;
Leibhaftig as performing a similar examination, this time probing the urge to
punish herself for both such complicity and its forgetting). And yet there is some-
thing different in Stadt der Engel that more explicitly reveals Wolf's trouble with
40 Ibid, p. 16. My translation. race, embodied in the figure of Angelina.
41 Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus. Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Fern·,
Any angel other than Benjamin's angel of modernity (who also makes an ap-
inist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), pp. 63-65.
42 Lutz Koepnick, '"Amerika gibt's überhaupt nicht". Notes on the German Heritage Film', .
pearance in Stadt der Engel) strikes one as a strange apparition in Wolf's decid-
German Pop Culture. How American' Is lt? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004};, edly nonreligious contemporary worlds; even the gods mentioned in Wolf's
pp. 191-208 (p. 193). Greek worlds are never created as actual characters in the text. Angelina reveals
43 For reasons of brevity, 1 omitted a discussion of the comp!icated ways in which Jews of Euro• the limits of the speakable to be particularly about race, as partially delineated
pean heritage in Germany and the United States have come to occupy whiteness, uneasily, uftioj
cornfortably. Such whiteness, however, does not explain the workings of racialized empathy 1 ·
Wolf's texts. 44 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, pp. 30-31.
176 - Beverly M. Weber Christa Wolrs Trouble with Race - 177

by the lack of language and vocabulary with which to name and think race. One '.: Angelina much earlier on in the text is now imagined to be trained on her. The
might argue that the figure of the black woman serves as the kind of racialized narrator quickly brushes away her sense of inhabiting whiteness, however, fo-
'Other' Anke Pinkert identifies in post-unification discourses, who enables a ne· , cusing instead on difference in faith as the more powerful caesura between
gotiation with the new relationship between East and West and reveals the un· '. the religious group and the deeply atheist narrator. Even this feeling of difference
worked-through histories of race and racism. 45 Yet racialized characters also slips away quickly after the service, when they are greeted by the congregation:
mark a shift in how the limits of the speakable are expressed in or haunt 'Zuerst umarmten uns unsere unmittelbaren Nachbarn, dann kamen entfernter
Wolf's texts, revealing the limits of her ongoing project to both construct a spe- Sitzende, sie standen in einer kleinen Schlange, ich spürte viele schwarze Wan-
cifically East German memory of Germans as perpetrators during the Second · gen an meiner Wange, hörte viele Stimmen welcome sagen, ich begann zu lä-
World War as well as to construct a female voice in response to what she sees 1 cheln, zu lachen, mich wohl zu fühlen' [First the people right next to us hugged
as the inherent violence of Western masculine rationality. Whereas in her earlier · us, then people sitting farther away came up and stood in a short line, I feit lots
texts, narrator figures often sought points of identification with racialized forms of black cheeks on my cheek, heard a lot of voices say Welcome, and I started to
of victimhood through empathetic relationships with racialized others, in Stadt :. smile, to laugh, to feel good.] 49
der Engel, alterity is both allowed to stand and to become visible as a conse· , This experience is notable within the text. There are many meaningful inter-
quence of a set of social relationships. In this transformed politics of emotion, actions with friends, with Holocaust survivor groups and refugee communities,
Wolf's texts begin to reveal the deeply problematic politics of empathy with vic•; and various encounters with scholars. Nevertheless, this moment at the church
tims of imperialisms and German racism. Instead of an identification with such is unique, both due to the actual physical touch and because the narrator begins
figures, a relationship is forged through which Angelina challenges, criticizes \ to feel 'wohl' [good]. For much of the text she is suffering from tremendous phys-
and denies healing to the narrator through the failure of identification. ,
.,, ical pain as weil as psychological distress, both linked throughout the text to her
Angelina first enters the narrative about one-third of the way into the text, il),/ sense of loss as a result of unification, betrayal upon finding out the extent to
a realistic episode as a Ugandan immigrant working for the cleaning service ati which she had been spied upon by friends, self-betrayal upon discovering the
the hotel where the narrator has been placed for the duration ofher fellowship ar:' documentation of her own meetings with the Stasi as an IM in the 1950s and
the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. On a hot day, the narrator offers the cleaningi: of course the relentless wave of criticism that began even before the discovery
staff something to drink; Angelina, however, feels uncomfortable and refuses toi of the Stasi files. 'Wohl' as well-being being-well. Not happy, or healthy, but
join the narrator at her table.46 Unusually for this text, Angelina's body is descrl~~ able - for at least a moment - to be well.
bed in great detail. One recalls Wolf's third Kassandra lecture: 'Das Objektmat; This encounter could potentially stand as a deeply problematic construction
chen: Ist es nicht die Hauptquelle von Gewalt?' [As for turning things into ob!' of positive affect that locates the source of healing and trauma in the encounter
jects, isn't that the principal source of violence?]. 47 ' with a group targeted by a racism that is, for the narrator, distanced. Stuart Tab-
Angelina disappears from the text until the narrator attends a service at theJ erner comes to a similar conclusion when he argues that Wolf has constructed an
First African Methodist Episcopal Church, the oldest African American congrega~" ethics of affective cosmopolitism that relies on assumptions of the knowability of
I•
tion in Los Angeles, where her group of friends are the only white people in a the other.50 A closer look at Angelina complicates such a reading, however. An-
group of 400. The narrator insists that this does not make her uncomfortablcf' gelina re-enters the text as a gently mocking figure who will incompletely serve
·l'
- she merely does not know how to act as the object of scrutiny as a white' as a corrective, highlighting the problem of this healing identification even as
woman. 48 At this moment, the same observing eye that the narrator trained on she shies free of identifying the narrator's embeddedness in a larger structure
of whiteness. In short, Angelina will trouble Wolf's trouble and, in doing so,
will make whiteness more visible even though it is not explicitly named.
45 Pinkert, Anke. "'Postcolonial Legacies". The Rhetoric of Race in the East/West Germ.an N*(
tional Identity Debate of the Late 1990s', The Journal of the Midwest Modem Language Assoda•\
tion, 352 (2002), 13-32.
46 Wolf, Stadt der Engel, p. 164. 49 lbid.
47 Wolf, Kassandra, p. 146. 50 Stuart Tabemer, 'Memory, Cosmopolitanism and Nation. Christa Wolf's Stadt der Engel (2010)
48 Wolf, Stadt der Engel, p. 322. and JM Coetzee's Disgrace (1999)', Comparative Critical Studies, 11.1 (2014), 49-67 (p. 50).
178 - Beverly M. Weber Christa Wolfs Trouble with Race - 179

Lost in memories of her last communion fifty years ago, at her own confir- complicated psyche of modern humankind. The narrator sets up a grand theory
mation, the narrator finds herself being chided by Angelina, as an angel, imme- for herself in her dreams about how 'wenn man tief genug hinabsinken lasse,
diately after the church service. Upon the narrator's demand for security in order verschwänden die Unterschiede zwischen den Menschen und Völkern' [when
to remember the feeling of joy, Angelina merely disappears rather than re- you go deep enough down the differences between people and between peoples
sponds.51 Later, she accompanies the narrator regularly during her last weeks disappear], then looks to Angelina for confirmation. Angelina remains silent.55
in Los Angeles, and the narrator offers sympathy to Angelina as one of the ·. As the Southwest tour continues, the narrator seeks comfort in leaming
cast-off 'dark angels'. Angelina responds with an obscene gesture. The narrator's about and from the Hopi and the Navajo, expressed intemally as hope and Scha-
condescending sympathy for Angelina, which began already with that proffered denfreude that the 'West' has been unable to access 'das innere Geheimnis dieser
drink in the kitchen when they first met, is constantly rejected, undermined and in ihren Augen primitive Kultur' [the inner secret of, in their view, a primitive civ-
thwarted, as are her demands that Angelina provide her with some sort of ongo. ilization].56 The narrator's language here echoes the gendered appropriation of
ing good-feeling. Even when she becomes sick, Angelina the angel denies her colonized peoples and their perceived connection to 'mystery' that was set up
sympathy and watches her mockingly, although Angelina the housekeeper · in the Kassandra lecture on Ingeborg Bachmann. This comparison of the experi-
brings her tea and asks if she should call a doctor. 52 ence of imperialism is no longer allowed to stand as essentially equivalent to
Angelina continues to deny the narrator good-being/good-feeling during the ! women's experience - that lost matriarchy which the tour refuses to provide
narrator's experience in the American Southwest, where the narrator invites An- '· for the narrator - nor as equivalent. This also contradicts the equation of the ex-
gelina's validation of various theories and thoughts that would allow her to ap•. ;t perience of Native peoples with that of East Germans that was set up early in the
propriate Native cultures for her own feeling-good. The narrator's first hope fot:i book, when the narrator refers briefly to the 'colonization' of East Germans. 57
I:'
transformation lies in her tour through the Canyon de Chelly, immediately:'.~ Throughout this sequence of events, the narrator herself never acknowledges
after having been disappointed on her quest for the remains of matriarchy. I, the workings of whiteness; it is primarily the narrative and the figure of Angelina
1
Among the gorgeous views experienced at sunset and moonrise, she feels that that allow whiteness to become visible through Angelina's rejection of empathy.
something fundamental has transformed in her - that she is finally free. Angel• The distinction is particularly relevant when the narrator describes her prohibi-
ina's response is: 'Ja was denn sonst' [Of course! What else would you be?]53 An•: tion from attending Hopi ceremonies as the first time she's experienced exclu-
gelina's laconic response undercuts the narrator's simplistic appropriation of; sion because of her skin colour. lt is not her skin colour that has excluded
Navajo culture as well as of the very landscape in which it is embedded,; her, of course, but her non-membership in a community which has been con-
When the narrator tries again to establish some sort of connection inspired by . '; stantly subjected to an ethnographic gaze that appropriates other cultures in
her new 'knowledge', this time by wondering whether the Anasazi were 'morei;:· the interest of Western subject constitution - a gaze literalized in Stadt der
human' than today's rich whites, Angelina 'hielt auch nichts von Schuldgefüh• ;. Engel by the use of cameras against the wishes of the Hopi.
len, sie war der Meinung, die würden einen nur daran hindern, drauflos zu''
leben und dabei Freude zu haben und, egal, was wir uns aus der Vergangenheit:
vorzuwerfen hätten, frischweg das zu tun, was heute nötig sei' [she considered'' The Possibility of Fellow-Feelings
guilt feelings worthless - in her view, they only kept you from being happ~1~
and living your life and going ahead and doing whatever was necessary today:i lt is the impossibility, then, of 'empathy' between the narrator and Angelina,
irrespective of what we have to reproach ourselves for in the past]. 54 The· Ruth, the Hopi or the Navajo that points to a different possible cultural politics
angel, the narrator concludes, is far too simple to adequately apprehend the, of emotion that remains unfulfilled within the novel. A political coalition would
be rooted in the impossibility of sharing pain across racialized barriers - a pol-

51 Wolf, Stadt der Engel, p. 326.

52 lbid., p. 334.
53 lbid., pp. 383-384. 1 am using my own translation, since the official English translation of, 55 lbid., p. 398.
the text underplays this phrase. 56 Ibid., p. 396. My translation.
54 lbid., p. 388. 57 lbid., p. 16.
180 - Beverly M. Weber

itics of coalition rooted not in a sense of 'I feel as if 1 am you', but 'I shall try to Catherine Smale
hear you, and 1 know that your pain is not mine'. Ahmed suggests that:
Towards a Late Style? Christa Wolf on Old
The call of such pain, as a pain that cannot be shared through empathy, is a call not just for
an attentive hearing, but for a different kind of inhabitance. lt is a call for action, and a ,
Age, Death and Creativity in Stadt der
demand for collective politics, as a politics based not on the possibility that we might be Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud
reconciled, but on leaming to live with the impossibility of reconciliation, or leaming
that we live with and beside each other, and yet we are not as one. 58
'Ich denke viel an den Tod, und es ist mir fast jeden Tag bewusst, dass die Frist,
Stadt der Engel never achieves an imagination of such a collective politics, but it die mir noch bleibt, kurz ist. Während des Schreibens habe ich manchmal ge-
does point to their necessity by marking the necessity of troubling race and a dacht: Na, das werden sie mich vielleicht noch zu Ende schreiben lassen.' [I
politics of empathy in the face of racialization. Unlike in Leibhaftig, the narra- think a lot about death, and almost every day 1 am conscious that the amount
tor's body in pain will not become a source of knowing the racialized other. ' of time 1 have left is short. As l've been writing, l've sometimes thought: Well
Nor will a politics of feeling-good through contact with the other succeed. then, perhaps they'll just about let me finish writing this.]1 These words are
lt requires a particular practice of reading with the insights offered by critical taken from an interview with the 81-year-old Christa Wolf, published in the Ger-
ethnic studies to take the troubling a step further. If we retum to the encounter in man news magazine Der Spiegel in 2010. Wolf discusses the process of writing
the church, for example, the moment of contact is a moment laden with possi- her final novel, Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud, which was pub-
bility. That possibility lies not merely in the contact itself, which always contains lished that same year and hailed by some reviewers as an 'Alterswerk' - a work
the possibility of reinscribing violence. Rather, a practice of reading this encoun- ' of old-age or late style.2 In this passage, Wolf alludes to her experiences of aging
ter to attend to the workings of whiteness would require, in Ahmed's words, that and life-threatening illness as she was writing the novel, which led her to be-
the reader 'respond to injustice in a way that shows rather than erases the com- come acutely aware of her own mortality: she realizes that each day could be
plexity of the relation between violence, power and emotion' .59 her last, yet she is determined to finish writing before her time runs out. Similar
references to her sense of imminent death occur in Wolf's posthumously pub-
lished life-writing project Ein Tag im Jahr im neuen Jahrhundert, particularly in
the diary-like entries dating from around 2004 onwards: she describes how
the thought of death 'unterfüttert fast jede Stunde' [underpins almost every
hour]3 and often wonders how much time she has left in this life: 'Wie lange
noch?' [How much longer?]. 4 These frequent references to death raise questions
about how one might read Stadt der Engel as a 'late work'. Does Wolf develop a
self-consciously 'late' style in anticipation of her death? And if so, how does this
manifest itself in her novel? How does her conceptualization of herself as 'writ-

1 Volker Hage and Susanne Beyer, 'Wir haben dieses Land geliebt. Interview mit Christa Wolf',
Der Spiegel, 14 June 2010, pp.134-138 (http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-70940417.html). My
translation.
2 See, for example, Joachim Güntner, 'Weich abgefederte Selbstbefragung. Stadt der Engel oder
The Overcoat of Dr. Freud - Christa Wolfs kalifornisches Räsonnement', Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 22
June 2010 (http://www.nzz.ch/weich-abgefederte-selbstbefragung-1.6201888).
3 Christa Wolf, Ein Tag im Jahr im neuen Jahrhundert, ed. by Gerhard Wolf (Berlin: Suhrkamp,
58 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics, p. 39; p. 41fn 9. 2013), p. 143. My translation.
59 Ibid„ 196. 4 Ibid„ p. 106.

https://dol.org/10.1515/9783110496000-012