German Studies Association

Review
Author(s): Sigrid Mayer
Review by: Sigrid Mayer
Source: German Studies Review, Vol. 14, No. 2 (May, 1991), pp. 446-447
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of the German Studies
Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1430629
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 446 GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW

and her critique of the war mentality, hierarchy, and objectification of women
in patriarchal society in her 1983 novel and essays on Cassandra. Anna Kuhn
views Wolfs development of a feminist perspective as a gradual evolution,
beginning with her focus in the mid-1960 on women's experience and self-
actualization, and culminating in a radical feminist revision of myth and
Occidental civilization in Cassandra.
Christa Wolf's Utopian Vision: From Marxism to Feminism is
particularly welcome as a major comprehensive analysis in English of Wolf s
work. Kuhn's sensitive use of translation adds considerably to the value of her
study. It is unfortunate that she did not include the German citations from Wolf s
works in the footnotes. Nonetheless, Kuhn's excellent study is a valuable
contribution to the growing body of scholarship on this prominent East German
author.

SALLY A. WINKLE, Eastern Washington University

Marilyn SibleyFries, ed. Responses to Christa Wolf: CriticalEssays. Detroit,Mich.:

Wayne State University Press, 1989. Pp. 419. Cloth $45.00.

Following the publication of her latest book Was bleibt? Christa Wolf
recently became the focus of a heated debate in West German newspapers, a
debate, inevitable and difficult, about the role of intellectuals in times of
tyranny. As we pursue this "Literatenstreit" (Die Zeit, 3 August 1990, overseas
ed.) we may subsume it, albeit somewhat ironically, under the title of the first
critical anthology on Christa Wolf in English, "Responses to Christa Wolf." The
editor, Marilyn Sibley Fries, was inspired by a 1982 MLA special session on
Christa Wolf to collect twenty essays by Wolf scholars in the United States,
Great Britain, and the (former) two Germany. Fries contributes a comprehensive
introduction to the collection, in which she treats the evolution of Wolf s work,
including Wolf s historical and personal background, her social and cultural
contexts, and, most importantly, changing perspectives in her major works. This
introduction represents the most sensitive and differentiated reading of Wolf s
work to be found in the volume, possibly with the addition of Helen Fehervary's
comprehensive essay on Christa Wolf s prose "A Landscape of Masks." The
introduction is followed by a translation of a 1973 conversation between Wolf
and the GDR Germanist Hans Kaufmann. Here Wolf endeavors to define her
concept of "subjective authenticity." Kaufmann's essay on "Christa Wolf s
Principle of Poetics," then examines Wolf s "poetics" from the point of view of
socialist realism, concluding that "Christa Wolf s creative production to date
[1974] is richer than her concept of 'modern prose"' (87).
The remaining seventeen essays may be divided roughly into two

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 BOOK REVIEWS 447

groups: those dealing with Wolfs work in general, and those focusing on
individual texts. An unlikely coupling - at first blush - of Virginia Woolf and
Christa Wolf in terms of "Selective Affinities" is achieved productively,
elegantly, and with a remarkable flair for historical comparatism by Joyce
Crick. Though separated by more than a generation, both authors exhibit
important traits "characteristic of the modern novel" (95). Comparative studies
are also contributed by Sara Lennox and by Andreas Huyssen. The former
points out "Difficulties of Writing the Truth" in Christa Wolf and Ingeborg
Bachmann, and the latter looks for "Traces of Ernst Bloch" in Christa Wolf.
Although the editor explains in the introduction why Wolf cannot "be
simply aligned with the authors of postwar West German literature, modernism,
or feminism" (33), it is not surprising to find that almost one third of the
contributions emphasize feminist or postpatriarchal aspects of Wolf s works.
As indicated by their titles - "On Establishing a Female Tradition" (Christiane
Zehl Romero), "Female Subjectivity as an Impulse for Renewal in Literature"
(Karin McPherson), "Prose Beyond the Citadel of Reason" (Myra N. Love), "I/
She: The Female Dialogic in The Quest for Christa T." (Anne Herrmann),
"Cassandra: Creating a Female Voice" (Heidi Gilpin), and "Christa Wolf and
Cassandra" (Laurie Melissa Vogelsang) - each of these essays takes a different
approach in identifying nontraditional elements in Wolf s prose.
Some of Wolfs writings have elicited more critical responses than
others. The Quest for Christa T., for example, is analyzed from three different
perspectives by Heinrich Mohr, Rainer Nagele, and Anne Herrmann. The
"Cassandra Motif," both in its narrative and essayistic versions, has provoked
numerous commentaries, including explorations of its use by Christa Wolf and
Aeschylus (James I. Porter) and of "Myth, Fairy Tale, and Utopia in No Place
on Earth and Cassandra" (Judith Ryan). Essays by Hans-Georg Werner and
Brigitte Peucker trace Wolf s relationship to Romanticism as manifested or
"controlled" in Unter den Linden. Wolf s use of "identified" and "unidentified"
quotations in No Place on Earth is analyzed productively by Ute Brandes.
Patterns of Childhood is the focus of Sandra Frieden's exploration on "The Self
as Deconstructing Couterpoint to Documentation." The fact that a study of
Wolf s 1987 narrative Strfiall (published in the wake of the Chernobyl
accident) is missing from the volume is doubtlessly due to the unavailability of
an English translation prior to 1989.
While some of these studies overlap each other, and although recent
works by Christa Wolf are not included, the anthology represents a timely and
valuable collection of research based on her texts in English translation. No
scholar of Wolf s oeuvre can afford to ignore this rich secondary source.

SIGRID MAYER, University of Wyoming

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