In Thomas Brussig's funny 1995 novel Helden wie wir (English version: Heroes Like Us) about the collapse of East Germany the narrator pokes fun at Christa Wolf and calls her the "Super Mother" of East German literature („Übermutter“ der DDR Literatur). And that is precisely the persona she assumes in her last novel Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud (City of Angels or The Overcoat of Dr. Freud).
I'm sorry to say that Stadt der Engel doesn't really succeed as a novel. It might have worked better as a notebook or personal memoir of an emotional crisis in the vein of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, but even that is questionable since the nameless narrator of Stadt der Engel - who is clearly the author herself - is too guarded to connect with the reader: we learn nothing about her as a woman, a mother, a wife. Instead, we get the Übermutter of East Germany and are left with 400 pages of socialist navel-gazing.
Stadt der Engel covers the nine months that Christa Wolf' spent at the Getty Center in Los Angeles in the early 1990s. The invitation from the Center came at an opportune time, since things were getting hot for Christa Wolf in Germany following the collapse of the GDR. She arrives with the passport of the GDR - a country that no longer exists. She is in mourning for the loss of her beloved country: throughout the book she refers to the collapse of East Germany as an Untergang (downfall) instead of Wende (turning point) which is the usual word. Furthermore, the writer is still in shock that her fellow citizens in East Germany had rejected her call for a socialist renewal; they wanted to nothing more to do with utopian experiments.
But the sojourn in Los Angeles coincides with the revelation back home that Christa Wolf had briefly collaborated with the Stasi as IM Margarete ("informant Margaret") and spied on fellow writers. Soon after her arrival in the US, the fax machine is humming with articles and essays from former colleagues, friends, and admirers who now treat her as an object of scorn. This leads, midway through the book, to a nervous breakdown. What is devastating to the writer is not so much the act of collaboration, but the fact that she has no memory of it. How ironic this selective amnesia is for Christa Wolf, whose novels explore how the past is always intruding on the present. Her motto, which opens her 1976 novel Kindheitsmuster -
"Das Vergangene ist nicht tot; es ist nicht einmal vergangen." (The past is not dead. It's not even past")
- was lifted without attribution from William Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun (perhaps she forgot these are not her words?). In Stadt der Engel Christa Wolf employs the same narrative strategy as in KIndheitsmuster, using the first person for the present, and the addressing herself in the second person "Du" in recounting the past.
The problem in Stadt der Engel is that not much happens. The narrator has little interest in learning about America and spends much of her time holed up in her hotel room watching Star Trek episodes or having tiresome phone conversations with a German scholar staying in a room next door who also suffers from a deep depression. A subplot involving the letters of a woman psychoanalyst, known only as L., who was forced to flee Nazi Germany, goes nowhere. From time to time the narrator ventures forth to meet with other Germans staying in LA, or with aging Jewish refugees. On these trips she sees homeless people and unemployed African Americans which gives her insight into awful injustice of (capitalist) American society and allows her to feel superior in her commitment the socialist utopia.
Only in the last 20 pages does Stadt der Engel arouse some interest when the narrator leaves Los Angeles and travels through the desert in Arizona and Colorado to discover "the soul of America". The impressions of the Hopi reservation are interesting, but then she ends up in the casinos of Las Vegas where she can smell the Untergang of the American empire. Finally this sense of impending doom sparks a momentary flash of insight - or at least questioning:
Das kleine Land aus dem ich kam, wa es zu unbedeutend, um Anteilenahme zu verdienen? Stand über ihm con Anfang an nicht das Menetekel des Untergangs: Ins Nichts mit ihm? Wäre es möglich, dass ich um einen banalen Irrtum so sollte gelitten haben?
(The small country I come from - was it too insignificant to deserve my sympathy? Didn't it exist from the beginning under the sign of downfall? Is it possible that I suffered so because of a banal mistake?)
Christa Wolf joins that long list of émigré German writers, artists and composers who have nothing but disdain for America - the country that gave them sanctuary. In this connection I highly recommend Michael Lentz's 2007 novel Pazifik Exil about the German exile community in Los Angeles. Of course there are exceptions: the great playwright Carl Zuckmayer fled the hothouse of the Los Angeles to raise sheep on a farm in Vermont, where he did discover "the soul of America" and wrote the charming Vermonter Roman. Finally, for a very funny novel about a German writer lost in the vast expanse of America, I recommend Walter Kempowski's Letzte Grüße.
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