2023-11-09 12:03:32
Literature 9. November
Mother of the East-West debate
As of: 11:03 a.m. | Reading time: 3 minutes
Christa Wolf (1929–2011), two years before her death
Quelle: picture-alliance/ dpa
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The wall had divided the country for 28 years and has been history for 34 years. Nevertheless, East and West Germany do not stop arguing about the GDR, unity and their differences. It began with the destruction of a “state poet” and her most famous work.
East Germany, summer 1961. Rita Seidel, a young woman, has moved from the village to live with a man she loves. Above all, she lives with him in the city to become a teacher. However, Manfred Herrfurth, a chemist in Halle an der Saale, lets her sit. Weeks later, a letter arrives from West Berlin: “I’ll let you know when you should come.”
Rita is undecided: “He’s gone. Like some random acquaintance, he left the house and closed the door behind him.” During the day she works in wagon construction, in the evening she sits dead tired in her teachers’ seminars and dreams of finding a better person.
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August begins and she travels to West Berlin, where Manfred explains to her: “Here I know where I stand. I’m prepared for anything here. Over there it will be who knows how long before the facts appear behind the beautiful words. The fact is: man is not designed to be a socialist.”
Rita discovers a phenomenon: the simultaneous day and night sky over Berlin. She thinks of a comrade’s report from the West: “You like a lot of things, but you don’t enjoy them. You constantly feel like you are harming yourself. You are a stranger in a terrible way.” She goes back to Halle, she returns home. When she woke up on Sunday, the GDR was building the wall.
Five days before the fall of the Berlin Wall, on November 4, 1989, Christa Wolf spoke at the largest demonstration for reform and freedom in the GDR
Quelle: picture-alliance / dpa
Christa Wolf mentions the Berlin Wall in her story “The separated sky” never by name. Your wall is the elephant in the room. Nevertheless (or because of this), her slim book from 1963 is considered the only classic of world literature on the Wall, which fell again 34 years ago after dividing the country for 28 years. Younger, still-living writers have told the story of the fall of the Wall – without turning into prose the classic conflict that led both to the Wall and to its fall: to leave or to stay there.
Wolf’s “heaven” also haunts the East-West debates, which in 2023 will be as heated again as they were in 1990 “Time” the booklet in particular and Christa Wolf as a representative of GDR literature in general were disposed of as “emotional kitsch”. “The Poetry of the State,” as it was called in 1990, “The Divided Sky” was never, even when the state still existed. Otherwise the book would not have been a bestseller.
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GDR author Brigitte Reimann
Manfred awakens repressed longings in Rita, for the Rhine, the Black Forest and Lake Constance: “Isn’t that Germany too?” Rita turns away from Manfred, Christa Wolf writes: “Oh, the longing for all the places where he came from would be now, after all the unattainable landscapes and faces that would impress themselves on him, the longing for the whole, full, shared life broke into her and almost destroyed her. Who in the world had the right to kill a human being – even just one! – to be faced with such a choice?”
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