Summer piece

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The story Sommerstück by Christa Wolf (1989) describes how several families gradually move to a village in Mecklenburg , leave behind disappointment about stagnation and nudging in the GDR and try a life close to nature and community.

Emergence

Christa Wolf began working on Sommerstück in the late 1970s, parallel to Kein Ort. Nowhere . She wrote on it until 1983, but after a revision in 1987 she did not release the text until 1989 for publication by Aufbau-Verlag ( Berlin ) and Luchterhand-Verlag ( Darmstadt ).

shape

The text uses diary material. As early as 1964, Christa Wolf emphasized the importance of the diary for her literary work, in order to establish a relationship with everyday experience. She is convinced that this includes “real life” and works against violence: “The banality of the good; the good as banal - or shall we now say: as ordinary, average, self-evident, that alone is an effective and permanent guarantee against Treblinka . "

The narrative is not directly autobiographical. Nonetheless, it is possible to assign the persons described, even if this is done in encrypted form for their protection, possibly by including motifs from their literature. So behind the narrator “Ellen” and her family are the author, her husband Gerhard Wolf and, with individual features, her daughters Annette and Katrin and her granddaughter. The allusions to Sarah Kirsch (“Bella”), her son (“Jonas”) and Helga Schubert (“Irene”) are clear ; thus "Clemens" refers to their husband Johannes Helm , "Michael" their son Robert. "Steffi" and "Josef" are similar to Maxi and Fred Wander , their son Daniel is called "David".

content

Christa Wolf had placed Kassandra during the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy . In the “exclusion of women from socio-political participation” she saw the origins of the destructive tendencies of modern technology, such as the danger of nuclear war. Sommerstück takes up a concept of everyday culture and the respectful treatment of nature as a resistance to it.

The narrative includes "criticism of female addiction that leads to self-imposed and co-culpable oppression." She asks questions about radical sincerity:

“Not only this evening's game, a bigger game had failed. Maybe they had kept the stake a tad too low. Each of them had quietly left an ambush open, as if they could follow their newfound inclinations for a while and wait for them to be needed elsewhere and for other things - whatever they might call "important things." Quite clearly, even oppressively, because despite all the abundance of life they felt within them a reserve that was never requested, an excess of abilities and qualities that they considered useful and useful, the one past and, they still hoped, a future had but no present. What was a temporal phenomenon they still related to themselves. It was they who were not needed. "

Here, as in other places, Christa Wolf also reflects the lack of prospects for many after Wolf Biermann's expatriation and in the late GDR - the “idyll of family and friends” describes a social island.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Christa Wolf: Summer piece : Luchterhand, Frankfurt a. M. 1989, p. 11
  2. ↑ Christa Wolf: Diary - work equipment and memory . In: Dimension I, p. 18. Quoted from Katharina von Ankum: The reception of Christa Wolf in East and West. From “Moscow Novella” to “Self-Experiment” . Amsterdam 1992, p. 13f.
  3. ^ Annette Firsching: Continuity and change in the work of Christa Wolf ; Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1996, p. 174, 288 online excerpt
  4. ^ Annette Firsching: Continuity and change in the work of Christa Wolf ; Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1996, p. 288f. Online excerpt
  5. ^ Hannelore Mundt: Adaptation and Resistance with Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood and Christa Wolf. In: ORBIS Litterarum 53 (5), 2007, p. 191
  6. ↑ Christa Wolf: Sommerstück , pp. 190f.
  7. ↑ llko-Sascha Kowalczuk: final. The 1989 revolution in the GDR ; Beck, Munich 2009, p. 148