Bodily
The flesh is a 2002 published narrative of the Berlin author Christa Wolf .
The story is about the almost fatal infectious disease of an East Berlin writer in the summer of 1988. The external plot takes place in a Schwerin hospital, the time of the plot is the final phase of the GDR , which celebrated its 40th anniversary in 1989, but already shortly afterwards - under the pressure of the Gorbachev reforms and the dissolution tendencies of the Warsaw Pact - its borders opened to the west and in 1990 joined the Federal Republic of Germany.
content
The patient, who is admitted to the hospital in a critical condition, experiences how committed the medical team is fighting with all technical means to record the source of infection and the type of bacteria in her stomach, because this is what enables the rescuing drug to be determined.
However, doctors also find the unusually low defenses of their patient to be completely puzzling. This immune deficiency cannot be dealt with with conventional medicine. The narrator - and with her the reader - can understand her little by little from her memories, thoughts and feelings that unfold associatively in the waking state or in dream journeys:
Due to her initial total identification with the idea of socialist humanism, she experiences the apparent failure of the GDR as a personal collapse. At the low point of her illness, the narrator realizes that her long years of concealment - enforced through surveillance, censorship and self-censorship - distorted her speech about the “sins” of the regime and its destructive effects on personal relationships. But speaking and writing as truthfully as possible is the narrator's life and work maxim.
This critical realization becomes the inner turning point, the liberation from the mental dilemma of political-moral idealism and state repression. The biographical development of the protagonist is contrasted in the story of her college friend Hannes Urban, which is also remembered in spurts, and whom the rise in the GDR's cultural bureaucracy leads to personally and politically insoluble contradictions.
At the same time as the inner change, the medical therapy also succeeds; the necessary medication typically has to be financed through a special budget and procured by an express courier from West Berlin .
Narrative
Christa Wolf links the different levels of time and consciousness through a mesh of motifs and symbols, some of which are drawn out with very strong lines. The Hades motif is particularly striking, which is linked to the anesthesia of the repeated operations, but also to the fantastic hikes in the cellar vaults of Berlin.
Reception and open questions
The story found a broad and mostly friendly reception in the features section.
literature
- Medical histories. Healing stories . In: The time . No. 10/2002.