Forum / Christa Wolf

• 
  Ann Bogle

  Dec 05, 12:11am

  The German author, Christa Wolf, died on Thursday. The Guardian and the New York Times carried her obituary. She was the friend of Grace Paley and Margaret Atwood, among others. I feel personally sad about it as she is one of my favorite writers, my favorite writer, or the most important [was living] writer to me (however I want to say that). She was very political as a woman, an East German, and writer. I do not want to attempt to describe her politics here (I read her for her writing) except to say that she wrote about the writer's responsibility. She wrote me one letter that I saved in a file in my office. She wrote in German in reply to my letter to her in English about two of her books, especially, The Quest for Christa T. and No Place on Earth. I love the title in German: Kein Ort. Nirgends. No Place on Earth is one of the best novels I have ever read, the best historical fiction I've ever read. It is the story of an imagined meeting between Heinrich von Kleist and Karoline von Gunderrode set in the early 1800s, before both writers took their own lives. The novel contains internal monologue that puts Kleist (man) in proximity to Gunderrode (woman) in a way I've rarely if ever seen written and that would be difficult to film. Wolf's essays-with-novel, Cassandra, instructed me in forms writing can take, placing genres side by side, as she does it, within a book. A film was made of her story with the translated title, "Self-experiment." I'd like to see that. RIP

• 
  Bobbi Lurie

  Dec 05, 04:12pm

  Thank you, Ann, for posting this.

  I would like to share a quote of Christa Wolf's:

  "I could not say how long I had been an unbeliever. If I had had some shock, an experience resembling conversion, I could remember. But faith ebbed away from me gradually, the way illnesses sometimes ebb away, and one day you tell yourself that you are well. The illness no longer finds any foothold in you. This is how it is with my faith. What foothold could it still have found in me? Two occur to me; first hope, then fear. Hope had left me. I still knew fear, but fear alone does not know the gods; they are very vain, they want to be loved too; and hopeless people do not love them."

• 
  Susan Tepper

  Dec 05, 06:06pm

  Ann & Bobbi, thanks very much for your postings about Christa Wolf, which I found fascinating. I don't know of this writer but now will certainly look up her work which sounds intriguing in the best sense.

• 
  Ann Bogle

  Dec 05, 06:23pm

  Wolf and Duras and Lispector. Intimacy in the prose: I read about it first in connection to Lispector's Cronicas, a genre in Brazilian journalism that Lispector innovated in the 60s and 70s, writing Saturdays for Jornal do Brasil. Wolf's writing is intimate, too, while being elegant in style, and her structures (literary, political, historical) blend and reconfigure lines within conventions. Intimacy (beyond that meaning of it as sexual) is a SUBJECT in the fiction and essays as well as a signature of voice and style.

  This passage Bobbi quotes exemplifies those qualities I associate with Wolf's writing. She portrays but does not explain the abstract (faith). Common sense may be that there is a falling away from or straying from or lapsing that occurs with sin. Here, in Wolf, it seems like a clear but never before so-stated coming to be well.

  It is kindness writing -- compassion, knowledge, wisdom -- philosophy without authoritarian commitments.

• 
  Darryl Price

  Dec 05, 10:49pm

  I'm sorry to hear this news, because I have read her works, and been moved. The committment alone was staggering to behold, but I think we can all agree that it takes a certain kind of courage to squeeze through the pain and still manage to look at the world with both eyes open.I'd have to agree that her voice and style were unique, original, and intriguing.

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