Abstract
To attend to questions of repair and mending in the context of post-1989 Germany, more than 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, might appear out of step. After all, West and East Germany merged over a generation ago, even before the formal end of the Cold War. Furthermore, the East German origins of both the current chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the current president, Joachim Gauck, seem to affirm symbolically a process of successful integration. Indeed, as the prominent pastor and public intellectual Friedrich Schorlemmer recently noted, the period of militant East-West German confrontations is finally over, with the struggle for global resources taking center stage.1 In many ways, however, the current rapprochement between East and West has failed to give rise to a differentiated postconventional identity in which the mutually respectful recognition of past differences and violations could yield new pathways toward building genuine relations. Instead, as the affectively charged discourse surrounding the recent anniversary of the building of the Wall indicates, a wound arising from the radical changes in 1989 continues to make itself felt in Germany’s public imagination.2 Using this chapter to examine the representational strategies by which post-1989 literature and Christa Wolf’s last novel, Stadt der Engel (2010, City of Angels), in particular, recalls East and West German asymmetries, I aim to shed light on the incomplete, partially failed, and still ongoing postunification process.
Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul.
—Emily Dickinson
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Notes
Daniela Dahn and Friedrich Schorlemmer, “Einmischung! Veränderung! Über Ost, West und die Rolle zwischen den Stühlen,” Neues Deutschland, January 12, 2012.
Susanne Beyer, “Fast vergessenes Glück,” Spiegel 11 (2009): 152–54.
Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, trans. David Macey and Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2010);
Slavoj Ziek, “Shoplifters of the World Unite,” London Review of Books, August 19, 2011;
and Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek (eds), The Idea of Communism (New York: Verso, 2010).
Arno Widman, “Nimm alles nicht so schwer,” Berliner Zeitung, December 13, 2012.
Egon Tuchfeldt, “The Transformation of Economic Systems: The German Example,” in The Economics of German Unification, ed. A. Ghanie Ghaussy and Wolf Schäfer (New York: Routledge, 1993), 18–25;
and Peter Caldwell and Robert Shandley (eds), German Unification: Expectations and Outcomes (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 5–6.
All translations are mine, based on the original German edition: Christa Wolf, Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010).
Anke Pinkert, “Pleasures of Fear: Antifascist Myth, Holocaust, and Soft Dissidence in Christa Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster,” German Quarterly 76, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 25–37.
Theodor W. Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” in Critical Models: Intervention and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 191–204;
and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
Daniela Dahn, “War die deutsche Vereinigung eine Sternstunde der Demokratie?,” in Vertreibung ins Paradies (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1998), 107–13.
Tuchfeldt, “The Transformation of Economic Systems,” 22. For the viability and limits of postcolonial frameworks, see Paul Cooke, Representing East Germany since Unification (Oxford: Berg, 2005).
Julia Hell, Post-fascist Fantasies: Psychoanalysis, History, and the Literature of East Germany (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997);
Charity Scribner, Requiem for Communism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003);
and Anke Pinkert, Film and Memory in East Germany (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).
Mary Fulbrook, Dissonant Lives: Generations and Violence through the German Dictatorships (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Daniela Dahn, “Angstgesellschaft: Das System als Krankheitsursache,” in Wenn und Aber: Anstiftungen zum Widerspruch (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2002), 180–97, here 185.
Linda Haverty Rugg, Picturing Ourselves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 189.
Kathleen Ho, “Structural Violence of Human Rights Violation,” Essex Human Rights Review 4, no. 2 (September 2007): 1–16, here 4.
Alison Lewis, “Reading and Writing the Stasi File: On the Use and Abuses of the File as (Auto)Biography,” German Life and Letters 56, no. 4 (2003): 377–97, here 377.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (eds), Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), especially 133–37.
Andreas Glaeser, Divided in Unity: Identity, Germany, and the Berlin Police (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 238.
Philip Reeves, “Piecing Together ‘The World’s Largest Jigsaw Puzzle,’” NPR, October 8, 2012, http://www.npr.org/2012/10/08/162369606/piecing-together-the-worlds-largest-jigsaw-puzzle (accessed December 16, 2012).
Gilbert Schomaker and Jens Stiller, “Das Dachau des Kommunismus. Der neue Leiter über die Gedenkstätte Hohenschönhausen,” Berliner Zeitung, January 12, 2000.
Matthias Krauss, “Die Unfähigkeit zur Versöhnung,” Neues Deutschland, March 3–4, 2012.
Fulbrook, Dissonant Lives, 459; Detlef Landua, “The Social Aspects of German Unification,” in Ghaussy and Schäfer (eds), The Economics of German Unification, 92–109. For the impact on the next generation, see Jana Hensel, Zonenkinder (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2002), especially chapter 4.
Quoted in Arno Hecht, Der Ostdeutsche—ein Fehlgriff der sozialen Evolution? Oder eine Gegenwart ohne Zukunft (Berlin: edition wortmeldung, 2006), 58.
Christa Wolf, “Illness and Love Deprivation: Questions for Psychosomatic Medicine,” in The Author’s Dimension: Selected Essays, ed. Alexander Stephan and trans. Jan van Heurck (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), 69–84;
and Christa Wolf, “Cancer and Society,” in Parting from Phantoms: Selected Writings, 1990–1994, trans. Jan van Heurck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 89–108.
Gay Wilentz, Healing Narratives: Women Writers Curing Cultural Dis-ease (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 3.
Slavoj Zižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 26.
Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), xxii.
Dahn and Schorlemmer have pointed out that this repression of dissent in Germany’s increasingly synchronized mass media today includes everyone who challenges the status quo, not just East Germans. See Dahn and Schorlemmer, “Einmischung”; and Friedrich Schorlemmer, “Ich brauche kein Amt, nur immer neuen Mut,” in Vom Privileg des Vergleichs: Erfahrungen ostdeutscher Prominenter vor und nach 1989, ed. Heike Schneider and Adelheid Wedel (Leipzig: Militzke, 2009), 284–303.
Václav Havel, “Politics, Morality, and Civility,” in Summer Meditations, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Vintage, 1993), 1–20, here 9.
Heleno Saña, Verlorene Menschlickeit: Auswege aus einem Ausnahmezustand (Cologne: PapyRossa, 2007).
Emmanuel Levinas, “Ethics and Spirits,” in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Sean Hand (London: Athlone Press, 1990), 3–10;
and Rami Tolmacz, “Forms of Concern: A Psychoanalytic Perspective,” in Prosocial Motives, Emotions, and Behavior: The Better Angels of Our Nature, ed. Mario Mikulincer and Phillip R. Shaver (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2010), 93–108, here 102.
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© 2013 Marc Silberman and Florence Vatan
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Pinkert, A. (2013). Toward a Critical Reparative Practice in Post-1989 German Literature: Christa Wolf’s City of Angels or The Overcoat of Dr. Freud (2010). In: Silberman, M., Vatan, F. (eds) Memory and Postwar Memorials. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137343529_10
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