What remains

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What remains is a story by Christa Wolf .

Prehistory and origin

For the writer, the collection of signatures against Wolf Biermann's expatriation from the GDR , which Christa Wolf helped initiate in 1976, resulted in the transformation of covert surveillance by the Stasi that had existed since 1969 into open one. The story is about this time. According to the author, it was written at the end of 1979 and revised ten years later after the fall of the Berlin Wall. But "What remains" was only released in the summer of 1990, which became the occasion for a media-effective debate about the political credibility and literary rank of Christa Wolf.

content

The story tells of a day in the life of an East Berlin writer, whose apartment and professional activities are openly observed by the Stasi. The narrative addresses the consequences of the observation, in particular the feelings, self-questioning and changes in the everyday life of women. As a first-person narrator, she is in a constant inner monologue, in a permanent self-examination, in which she partially splits into you, me and a third , a behavior that is caused by the gloomy external pressure. One of the egos represents the originally loyal attitude towards the state of GDR, another is desperately fighting for a new language that could express the experiences authentically and vividly. Everyday life is told that is no longer any longer when the own apartment has been entered in the absence of strangers and clearly visible traces of it have been left as a clue. Calls can only be made within the apartment if the telephone plug is unplugged. Telephone calls become a farce that only takes place in codes and trivialities. Symptoms of anxiety and nervousness such as restlessness, insomnia, weight loss, and hair loss pervade the narrative.

The narrative follows the pattern of a novella. The daily routine of the writer, which has meanwhile become accustomed to, is interrupted by an unheard of event : a reading that the Stasi has bought up halfway still raises provocative, courageous questions about a viable future. The writer encounters the next generation of writers with astonishment, but also with fearful tactics, whose will and courage to change something in the silent immaturity and rigidity is unbroken.

Consequences and literary controversy 1990

Initiation of the dispute

On November 12, 1987, an article by Marcel Reich-Ranicki with the title "Makes persecution creative?" Was published in the FAZ . The reason for this was a speech that Christa Wolf had given Thomas Brasch . In order to award the Kleist Prize to the writer, who emigrated from the GDR in 1976, Christa Wolf asserted that the GDR, with its contradictions, made Brasch creative in the first place. M. Reich-Ranicki disagreed and attacked the author with unprecedented vehemence. He called her artistic and intellectual capabilities "modest", denied her courage and firmness of character and coined the title of GDR state poet for Christa Wolf .

1st phase of the literary dispute

Before Christa Wolf's story "What remains" available in bookstores was published reviews in the period from 1 June 1990 by Ulrich Greiner and in the FAZ of 2 June 1990 by Frank Schirrmacher . In their articles, both critics subjected the author's political stance to a fundamental critique.

Ulrich Greiner questioned the credibility of Christa Wolf's story in his article. Frank Schirrmacher emphasized that Christa Wolf is not of interest as an artistic case in the current context. Rather, he reproached the author for having published the story too late, namely at a time when it had lost its explosiveness. Schirrmacher even suspected that ten years earlier - due to the prominence and invulnerability of Wolf - the text had damaged the surveillance system of the GDR and thus suggested that Christa Wolf had remained silent out of fear for her privileges.

The attacks of Greiner and Schirrmacher were followed by columnist literary criticism in overwhelming numbers. But they also triggered a wave of solidarity with the author. Writers like Walter Jens , Günter Grass and Lew Kopelew stood behind the author as well as politicians, whose most prominent Rita Süssmuth emerged . Marcel Reich-Ranicki had prepared this dispute in his program The Literary Quartet . On November 30, 1989, he introduced the discussion evening with the words:

“A revolution has taken place in Germany. And whenever a revolution takes place on this earth, writers like to say that they, the writers, have made a major contribution to it. What is it like, did the writers win or fail in the GDR? "

Reich-Ranicki's question affected all writers who had written and stayed in the GDR. In the course of the program, the thesis was formulated that the “bonus of writing under difficult conditions” would no longer apply and that new benchmarks would now have to be set for GDR literature.

2nd phase of the literary dispute

In the second phase of the literary dispute, there was a heated argument about a certain type of politically committed writer. Numerous intellectuals started attacking each other. Greiner described the change in the dispute in an article in ZEIT on July 27, 1990 with the words: "The growing bitterness in the dispute over Christa Wolf stems from the fact that no one likes to admit errors, [...]" He later worked on the core of the dispute more precisely: “Whoever determines what has been, also determines what will be. The dispute about the past is a dispute about the future. "

In the controversy over the cultural power of interpretation in the newly forming German state, the writers fought exemplarily on their own level.

At the end of this phase of the dispute, the most violent critics of Christa Wolf, such as Chaim Noll , were repeatedly singing in a purely personal way : "I confess that reading her books always bored me where it wasn't involuntarily amused."

3rd phase - inspection of files

Christa Wolf gave information in an article in the Berliner Zeitung on January 21, 1993 (including the title of the article) that from 1959 to 1962 she had been listed as " IM Margarete" at the GDR Ministry for State Security . In addition to 42 files on their surveillance, there was also a 130-page facsimile on their own stasis, which documented seven meetings with Stasi employees. She had written three reports, which, however, painted an exclusively positive picture of the people concerned. Correspondingly, in internal records from 1962, the Stasi complained about Wolf's “reluctance” to work together and began to extensively monitor the author herself - a situation that lasted until the end of the GDR.

Frank Schirrmacher now intervened in the following debates as the defender of the writers who lived and worked under extraordinary political and cultural conditions. He demanded: "The hasty condemnation of writers in any case, it would be the most fatal thing that can happen now." The mass media took up the subject in the meanwhile characteristic way. A quite significant literary controversy took the form of a race between great papers and magazines for the next revelatory story. A particularly spectacular reaction to Christa Wolf's IM process was the demand by the Munich CSU that the city council should revoke the Sibling Scholl Prize awarded to the author in 1987 for her book Störfall . This was averted - not least thanks to the committed work of Inge Aicher-Scholl , Hans and Sophie Scholl's older sister .

Wolf felt the criticism because of her Stasi obligation, which she was reproached regardless of the context, as a witch hunt and as an unjustified reckoning with her desire for a democratic socialism and her GDR biography. She compared her situation with her oppression in the GDR. In 1992/93 Christa Wolf went to the USA for a long time and withdrew from the political arena. In order to refute the allegations of the media, she published her complete IM file in 1993 under the title File Inspection Christa Wolf .

literature

  • It's not about Christa Wolf. The literary dispute in a united Germany. Spangenberg, Munich 1991.
  • The German-German literary controversy or “Friends, it speaks badly with a tied tongue”. Analysis and materials. Luchterhand, Hamburg, Zurich 1991.
  • Lothar Bluhm: Identity and Break in Time. Problems of heterogeneous language games in the “new German literary dispute” 1990/91. In: Traces of the search for identity in contemporary literatures. Edited by Jürgen Kamm et al., WVT, Trier 1994, pp. 17-38.
  • Bernd Wittek: The literary dispute in the unifying Germany. Tectum, Marburg 1997.
  • Lennart Koch: Aesthetics of Morals in Christa Wolf and Monika Maron. The literary controversy from the turn of the century to the end of the nineties. Lang, Frankfurt a / M 2001.
  • Lothar Bluhm: Location regulations. Notes on the literary controversy of the 1990s in Germany. A cultural studies sketch. In: German-language contemporary literature since 1989. Interim balance sheets - analyzes - mediation perspectives. Edited by Clemens Kammler and Torsten Pflugmacher, Synchron, Heidelberg 2004, pp. 61–73.
  • Roswitha Skare: Christa Wolf's “What remains”. Context - Paratext - Text. Lit, Münster 2008.

Web links

Article from 1990 from the Zeit-Archiv:

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The anxious Margaret ; in: Der Spiegel 4/1993 of January 25, 1993.
  2. ^ History of the Geschwister-Scholl-Preis , on geschwister-scholl-preis.de.
  3. ↑ Wolfgang Thierse: I am moving out again , June 23, 2010.
  4. ^ Hermann Vinke (Ed.): File inspection Christa Wolf. Distorting mirrors and dialogue. A documentation. Luchterhand Literaturverlag, Hamburg 1993, ISBN 3-630-86814-2 .