? Saved! Christa Wolf recalls in her autobiography of a deep crisis in their life, but discovered on the outskirts of the western world surprisingly a hope for salvation. By Richard Kämmerlings reminds few pages earlier, Christa Wolf at the 4th November 1989, close to the event on the Alexanderplatz, in her speech for a moment, take in the flash for them, the utopia of a true socialism. The historic moment when the story starts a fairy tale, happy ". Witnessed him to have, you thought it had all been worth it," Well, just three years later, Christa Wolf was a double insult. The population of the GDR had mostly very different aspirations than that to realize the true socialism can last. And Christa Wolf himself, was a writer and an intellectual, the subject of the so-called German-German literary dispute. With the end of the state, had to which they held at all the internal distance to the end, she lost even the always self-evident accepted role as a representative figure - it was certainly for many of their East German readers today, precisely because of this only too easily demonstrable experience of a loss of status in united Germany.
the hotel "Ms. Victoria
Christa Wolf 1992 now sits in a quirky hotel with the random matching or well thought out name Ms. Victoria does "fairly eating and drinking happily with the consumer culture of the triumphant capitalism familiar, make friends with her co-scholars and a number of German-Jewish emigrants and deals at the invitation of the Getty Foundation, a new narrative project: your late friend Emma her a bundle of letters of a certain L. had left, one in the thirties, who emigrated to California psychoanalyst. Christa Wolf embarks on a biographical clues, which recalls the proverbial needle in a haystack: not even the full names of L. knows it.
As in their canonical works such as "thinking about Christa T. "or" childhood pattern cut "in this book also unique categorizations. The fact that the publisher is on the back cover (and only there) "novel" is called, is probably a breakdown. Christa Wolf mixes travelogue, diary, memory passages, dream narratives and clearly fictional passages. The history of puzzles L. rounds is not really the shape remains uncontoured strange (although there are a surprising solution).
critique of capitalism
is for the reader, the first of a hassle, especially as it is located next to some very mundane everyday observations (the exaggerated friendliness of Americans, their remarkable breakfast habits etc.) and of the expected (but not so wrong) criticism of social ills and the excessive consumption fetishism of the West has to bite through this really annoying: when explaining about the young Americans at the Getty Center, they would have to leave the country if Clinton does not election win, the atmosphere was "denunciatory" and you know even in the universities no longer who you could still speak openly: "This is probably little heard abroad? -. In fact, I said "It's a bit rich, so a parallel to totalitarian circumstances suggest. So there are some points where we no longer give much credit wants. And yet, you should do it.
For so after about a hundred, a hundred and fifty pages does this prose slowly quickening, the motivic links are tight, the sound more urgent and more direct. The narrator is informed by and by fax about the violent and most destructive reactions to the announcement of its "acts of perpetrators," she had already seen before. As "the Margaret" she was taken from 1959 1962 in the state security. Although she sees herself in the face of (compared to the size of their "victims Act") with little exposure to the weight of covered facts of a continuing media campaign, it rushes away from Germany, "at Edge of the World "in a deep crisis, which revolves about a deeper question:" How could I forget? I knew that I was not able to believe it gave me even as my real offense before - offense, which for a German fine word "
length monologue in my head
is this for the narrator himself puzzling lapse of memory of the name. , magma-like core of the book. Again and again, is the host institution, among other so a large archive, superimposed as the "CENTER" (in capitals) the speech, and incessantly, the doings of the presence of the work of the past, a movie in your head a monologue in an endless loop. Christa Wolf called the formative years, her youth as convinced, even fanatical companion to mind an illegal activity as agitator in West Berlin, an encounter with great role models such as Louis Fürnberg, but later breaks, especially the days after the Biermann expatriation, as she stated, despite the enormous pressure of signing the protest letter.
The eponymous jacket Sigmund Freud is a paradoxical picture of this piercing self-examination: Its protection is to be had only at the cost of complete alienation. The crisis culminated in an ecstatic night of Christa Wolf, after a few whiskey ignored the telephone ringing ("Berlin" is always here for family ties), Freud hears mantle talk to him and then - singing: "All the songs I knew and I know many songs with many verses. The ensuing list of all people, children, combat and hymns is the climax of the book, a crisis as a turning point and also the sum deposited in the subconscious of a lifetime.
Psychoanalytic aesthetics
"City of Angels" follows, and so it can easily be underestimated, a psychoanalytic aesthetics: Just put the incidental, the wit, the slip of the tongue, the dream releases the buried truth. The book also contains a love story never pronounced. The botched colleague Peter Gutman, who claims to be himself hopelessly in love with a third one is for the narrator to a soul mate, his own failure - he despairs about the biography of a philosopher - reflected the self-doubt, Christa Wolf and also removes the existential. Besides this Umeinanderkreisen and intellectual Honeymooners is a light-footed offset the gloom and the threat of resignation.
Gutman is also supplying the key word, a reference to Walter Benjamin's angel of history, is driven forward relentlessly must look back on the disasters of mankind and can heal anything. (A different Benjamin Quote the book is preceded by a motto.)
intrusion of the fantastic
But apart from these historic pessimism does a Christian hope of redemption. For a tourist visiting the "First African Methodist Episcopal Church", the narrator receives entrained and even communion. In the sermon is about the miracle of forgiveness. After this event, she accompanied a black named Angelina, a "guardian angel" at every turn, there is even a common flight hour, as if the Starship Enterprise on a sudden start in Malibu.
This envelope into fantasy is a surprising one, but so would just as suddenly, even after the entry of the Benjamin his Savior in the story. A strange, a remarkable book, a rescue.
Christa Wolf: "City of Angels or The Overcoat of Dr. Freud." Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2010. 416 pages, hardback kr. 219, - inkl moms
Book Title: City of Angels or The Overcoat of Dr. Freud
author Christa Wolf
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