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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2020
Everything about Germany has been said. I make this claim after wearily pushing aside the stacks of recently published books, the piles of fresh newspaper articles that I have read, skimmed, or left unread. What a giant gruel Germans have been cocking up, talking and writing and analyzing and arguing and polemicizing and pontificating and lamenting, even satirizing themselves and Germany, in the past four years. We have stirred this gruel ourselves, put the pot on the fire, watched it simmer, bubble, sizzle, boil over; we have tasted it, eaten it up like good little children. But the gruel cannot be consumed, nor can it be held in check any longer. It is spilling over the stove and kitchen, out from the messy house onto the road, onto all the streets of our German cities, apparently bringing no nourishment to the homeless Germans who huddle there. And if we well-housed Germans want to be honest—and what do Germans today want more urgently than to be honest!—we must admit that we no longer like the taste of this German millet gruel. We are sick of it. We are fed up with it.
The editor of PMLA is grateful to Marilyn Fries, who recommended this text for publication and who, despite a devastating illness, began to translate it before her death in 1995. The editor dedicates this publication of the text to the memory of Marilyn Fries.
“Parting from Phantoms: The Business of Germany” is a translation of a lecture given on 27 February 1994 at the Dresden Staatsoper. The German text is taken from “Abschied von Phantomen—Zur Sache: Deutschland,” in Auf dem Weg nach Tabou: Texte 1990–94 (Köln: Kiepenheuer, 1994), a collection of prose by Christa Wolf. The University of Chicago Press will publish Jan van Heurck's translation of the collection. © 1996 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. World rights © 1994 Luchterhand Literaturverlag, München.
1 Heinrich Hoffmann (1809-94), a physician and an author, wrote a series of cautionary tales about naughty children and gave them to his four-year-old son as a Christmas gift in 1844. The original Frankfurt edition of Der Struwwelpeter: Lustige Geschichten und drollige Bilder… (“Slovenly Peter: Merry Tales and Funny Pictures …”) was published in 1845 and appeared in English translation a few years later. The series of characters mentioned by Christa Wolf—the Suppenkaspar, Little Konrad, the blackamoor, the wild huntsman, Little Pauline, Johnny Head-in-Air, Flying Robert—are from the Struwwelpeter tales. The metaphor of eating one's soup, which Wolf uses throughout, also plays on a German idiom: “eating soup you have made” is equivalent to “making your bed and having to lie in it.”
2 A summary of some of the events in the East German revolution will provide background to Wolf's comments throughout her talk. A series of demonstrations against the government of the German Democratic Republic began in Leipzig in September 1989 and spread to other major cities. The largest was a gathering on 4 November 1989 in East Berlin, which drew one million participants. Addressed both by opposition leaders and by members of the governing Socialist Unity Party, this demonstration led directly to the resignation of the Honecker government on 7 November, to the legalization of the opposition group New Forum on 8 November, and, on 9 November, to the opening of the Berlin Wall and the approval of reforms to end the monopoly of the Socialist Unity Party. In the subsequent effort to define a new relation between East and West Germany, Wolf supported the “For Our Country” petition, signed by East German intellectuals on 18 November 1989, which declared that there was still a chance for the East to develop a socialist alternative to the Federal Republic. An open forum known as the Round Table, in which Wolf joined, began on 7 December 1989 and included representatives of the new GDR government formed by the Party of Democratic Socialism and of the opposition groups that had brought down the old government. Opposed to the anschluss that would occur if the eastern lands were immediately absorbed into the Federal Republic under article 23 of the West German constitution, or Basic Law, the participants generally wanted the Germanys to unite gradually through close cooperation or favored a federation of the two states. The Round Table members sought to halt what they considered a destabilizing offensive from the Federal Republic, to build an alternative to capitalism, and to ensure that any new German state was nonaligned and demilitarized rather than a part of NATO. In the elections of 18 March 1990, the Christian protesters of the Bischofferode plant, in the GDR, would have voted for the Alliance for Germany, a coalition dominated by the East German Christian Democrats. Put together by the chancellor of West Germany, Helmut Kohl, the Alliance for Germany separated the Christian Democrats from left-wing groups with which they had been associated, allying the party with conservatives. This coalition favored rapid monetary union and unification under article 23 of the Basic Law. Wolf's view is that the West German government, seeking to facilitate the takeover of the GDR on terms favorable to the West German right, deliberately destabilized the new political parties and reform groups in the GDR. See Harold James and Marla Stone, eds., When the Wall Came Down: Reactions to German Unification (New York: Routledge, 1992).
3 Karl Friedrich Schinkel was the architect of Die Neue Wache, an 1818 neoclassical building. After the division of Germany it stood in East Berlin, where it was made into a monument to the victims of militarism and fascism.
4 Karl Liebknecht (1871-1919) was a German antimilitarist Social Democratic politician and a participant in the 1918 revolution that forced the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm and the conclusion of an armistice in World War I. With Rosa Luxemburg, Liebknecht led the Spartacus League and joined in the Spartacists' uprising in 1919, after which both were murdered by soldiers in Berlin while being taken to prison.
5 The name Michel was used by Heinrich Heine and other German authors of his period to designate the French revolutionary slumbering inside every German.
6 August Hoffmann von Fallersleben (1798-1877), a patriotic poet who influenced the student movement and paved the way for the revolutionary events of 1848, wrote “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles” in 1841 to express the desire of German liberals for unity. The poem provided the words for Germany's national anthem after World War I, and its meaning was reversed under Nazi rule. After World War II, the third verse was used for the national anthem of West Germany.
7 The first line of the second stanza of “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles.”
8 Theodor Storm (1817-88) was a German realist prose author.
9 Anna Seghers was the pen name of Netty Radvanyi, known as Netty Reiling (1900-83), a social-documentary prose writer. A Jew and a Communist, she fled the Nazis, returning to East Germany in 1947 and becoming prominent in the GDR Writers' Union. Her best-known novel, Das siebte Kreuz (The Seventh Cross), was made into an anti-Nazi film in the United States.
10 The racist violence that increased in both parts of Germany after unification was typified by a 1992 attack in Mölln in which three Turks were burned to death, by several incidents in Solingen, and by the burning of a refugee center inhabited by Gypsies and Vietnamese in Rostock in 1992. Formerly, Mölln and Solingen were in West Germany, and Rostock was in East Germany.
11 The translation of these lines is quoted from Patterns of Childhood, trans. Ursule Molinaro and Hedwig Rappolt (New York: Farrar, 1980) 129.
12 Karoline von Günderrode (1780-1806), a Romantic writer, is the subject of Wolf's novel Kein Ort. Nirgends (No Place on Earth) and of her long essay “Der Schatten eines Traumes” (“The Shadow of a Dream”), translated in The Author's Dimension: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, 1990). Bettine (Bettina) Brentano (later von Arnim; 1785-1859) was an author, a member of the Romantic circle, the sister of Clemens Brentano, the wife of Achim von Arnim, and a friend and correspondent of Karoline von Günderrode.
13 “Mein ist die Rache” [Vengeance Is Mine], Golems Wiederkehr und andere Erzählungen (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1968), vol. 6 of Gesammelte Werke.