Margit Resch
Understanding Christa Wolf: Returning Home to a Foreign Land
Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. Pp. 182. $29.95
Reviewed by Cheryl Dueck

Resch argues that Wolf's literary achievement is one of East Germany's "most stubborn and enduring treasures" (171). With this first general survey of Christa Wolf's work to be published in English, Resch offers invaluable resource material for those who have long read the author's work in translation, as well as for undergraduate German Studies students. It is pointed out that more reviews and scholarly studies, in many languages, have been published on Wolf than on any other living German writer, and yet, a general introduction to her oeuvre was lacking. As such, this broadly conceived explication of Wolf's literary production and career fills a notable gap.

Resch traces a chronological path through Wolf's career, and identifies thematic and formal phases in her oeuvre. A real strength of this volume lies in the introductory chapter, which offers contextualization for the non-German reader, including a brief postwar history of East and West Germany, an account of unification, and helpful information about the literary climate and the unique role of literature in the GDR. This backdrop facilitates an examination of Wolf's constellation of history, memory, narrative, and the understanding of self. For each of the major works, Resch touches upon the plot, the historical context, the narrative structure conceived by Wolf, the position of the work within the span of Wolf's writings, and its inevitably controversial reception. The most engaging sections cover Wolf's four most important novels, as identified by Resch: Divided Heaven (1962), The Quest for Christa T. (1968), Patterns of Childhood (1976), and Cassandra (1983). The longest chapter, devoted to Patterns of Childhood, features a particularly clear and rich discussion of fear, as it affects memory and the narration of the individual past in fascist and socialist-realist Germany.

"To read Wolf's work is necessarily to meet Wolf in person" (23). This argument is at the heart of much of Resch's analysis, which effectively interweaves the discussion of biography and text. Since Wolf advocates the presence of the author in the text (the fourth dimension), such an approach does yield insight. On occasion, however, the style tends to collapse the boundaries of Wolf's biographical framework with her fictive world, and the reader must sort out, for instance, whether Resch refers to a book's fictive narrator or the author herself (93).

Throughout, the study mounts a well-argued defense of Wolf's place in German and world literature, and confronts the visceral criticism of her politics and literary stance which arose after unification. Resch acknowledges what she terms Wolf's "misguided collaboration with the [GDR] regime" (8), including her role of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party and her heavily criticized brief involvement as an informant for the Stasi (state security police). However, Resch points out that Wolf offered preemptive explanations throughout her work for many questions and accusations that constantly arose in East, West, and Unified Germany, and the author provides a valuable contemporary perspective when she draws our attention to these passages. A serious critical consideration of the much maligned story Was bleibt (What remains, 1993), which narrates a writer's existence under Stasi observation, is a welcome contribution. While many condemned Wolf for publishing a book which portrayed a heavily autobiographical narrator as the victim of the state, despite a privileged lifestyle and position, Resch leads us to consider the narrator's fear, inability to write, speak, or act to resist state practices or ideologies, and the self-approbation for her insufficient courage to do so. This constitutes, Resch argues, a "brutal self-revelation" (164) rather than a claim to status as a victim.

In what is overall an excellent survey, there are a few omissions worth noting. Wolf is known for coining the term "subjective authenticity" to describe her stylistic goal, as formulated in an interview with Hans Kaufmann. Although elements of narration and style are well-explicated generally, Resch leaves this important term unmentioned. Indeed, in light of the fact that, in her conclusion, Resch calls for more attention to Wolf's prose theory and essayistic writing, it is regrettable that not more space is devoted to it here. The bibliography, which does not claim to be complete, excludes some important contributions to scholarship, notably Sabine Wilke's study of history and subjectivity in Wolf's work Ausgraben und Erinnern (1993). In general, more notes and references that point to further reading on specific areas would have been a useful addition to the volume.

Since Christa Wolf continues to publish and create controversy, critical attention continues to flourish in both English and German. For those who read Wolf in translation, Resch's eminently readable study provides an excellent introduction to the issues and themes addressed by the author and her oeuvre, and thus a springboard to the plethora of topic- or work-specific studies.