Gail Finney
Christa Wolf
New York: Twayne, 1999. Twayne World Authors Series. Pp. 142. $33.00

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

Margit Resch argues that Wolf's literary achievement is one of East Germany's "most stubborn and enduring treasures" (171). With these first general surveys of Christa Wolf's work to be published in English, Resch and Finney offer invaluable resource material for those who have long read the author's work in translation, as well as for undergraduate German Studies students. Resch points 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 English-language introduction to her oeuvre was lacking. As such, these broadly conceived explications of Wolf's literary production and career fill a notable gap.

Both studies trace a chronological path through Wolf's career, and identify thematic and formal phases in her oeuvre. Following a biographical introduction, Finney's volume offers a concise explication of each of the author's major prose works, as well as several short stories and essays, structured according to the standard format of the Twayne's World Authors Series. The chapter titles name the phases of the work as 'isms', including socialist realism, feminism, pacifism, and environmentalism. Finney's review of the oeuvre is spare, but it covers the essentials, with the exception of the last chapter, in which the most recent works (1994-98) receive short shrift. The essays in Parting from Phantoms (1994) are mentioned only cursorily, just a few brief paragraphs are dedicated to the major work of fiction, Medea. A Modern Retelling (1996), and Christa Wolf's Medea: Conditions of a Text (1998) apparently could not be included at all. Highlights of Finney's text include the insightful passages in which she examines Wolf's narrative techniques, for instance, the use of pronouns to establish the sliding gender identity of Self-Experiment. Since the titles of Wolf's works are left in the original German here, with the translations given in parentheses at the beginning of the discussion, this book seems primarily devoted to students of German who will read the works in the original.

A real strength of Resch's more colorful 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 in the Wolf's oeuvre, and its inevitably controversial reception. The most engaging sections cover Wolf's four major 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.

In what is overall an excellent survey, there are a few omissions worth noting in Resch's book. 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 Ausgraben und Erinnern (1993). For more notes and references that point to further reading on specific areas, and a more complete bibliography, the reader is better served by Finney's volume in the Twayne series.

"To read Wolf's work is necessarily to meet Wolf the person" (23). This argument is at the heart of much of the analysis in these two books, which effectively interweave 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, Resch's 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). The occasional tendency to overemphasize the biography also occurs in Finney's text, for instance, when she biographically reinterprets a fantastic dream sequence in a story, based on speculation about Wolf's own guilty feelings over her collaboration with the state security police (Stasi) (70).

Finney and Resch can be counted among the North American critics who have been Wolf's most vocal defenders in a controversial period of reception since German unification. Resch's study in particular 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 that arose after unification. Resch acknowledges what she terms Wolf's "misguided collaboration with the [GDR] regime" (8), including her role on the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party and her brief involvement as an informant for the Stasi, for which she was heavily criticized. 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 What Remains, which narrates a writer's existence under Stasi observation, is a welcome contribution. While many condemned Wolf for publishing a book that 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, Resch argues, constitutes a "brutal self-revelation" (164) rather than a claim to status as a victim. Finney, on the other hand, takes a less partisan approach to this subject, noting the resounding silence of the author after the revelation of Stasi involvement.

Since Christa Wolf continues to publish and to create controversy, critical attention continues to flourish in both English and German. For those who read Wolf in translation or in the original, Resch's eminently readable commentary and Finney's solidly referenced survey both provide 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.