„Aber die Frage begleitete mich: Wie lebt man in einer Diktatur?” Christa Wolf – Hoffnungen und Enttäuschungen einer DDR-Autorin

Abstract

“But I Still Had This Question: How Does One Live Under a Dictatorship?” Christa Wolf – Hopes and Disappointments of an East German Writer. The article focuses on the tensions between writing and dictatorship and especially between real socialism and socialist utopia. Based on Christa Wolf’s essays and novels she shows how the tension between her utopian pretension and real disappointments increased in the face of totalitarianism being established in the GDR. The article tries to explain what kind of attitude the writer, who had been strongly attacked by literary critics, especially from the West, after 1989, had towards the term “dictatorship”. How can we understand why she kept a gleam of hope for a socialist utopia in spite of her early disillusionment about the social and political developments in the ostensibly antifascist-democratically aligned part of Germany? Both a poetic and political continuity can be observed in Wolf’s texts: her credibility consists in a subjective authenticity expressed in her novels and essays; this may explain why the author continued to believe in a socialist utopia after the GDR had developed historically into a totalitarian state and even after the end of the socialist project.