Pleasures of Fear: Antifascist Myth, Holocaust, and Soft Dissidence in Christa Wolf's "Kindheitsmuster"

Abstract

Since 1989 many East German intellectuals and critical writers have been faulted for their accomodationist attitude towards the GDR state and its punitive politics. While accusations and counter accusations were flying, the question emerged: what was it about German culture or, for that matter about intellectuals, about their particular brand of emancipatory cultural politics that made them such blind and willing instruments of repression?1 In an effort to explain the apparent inconsequence of enlightened doubt among intellectuals in the GDR, scholars have pointed to a variety of psychological, political, and historical mechanisms at play.2 Antifascism and its constituent idea of the unity of all social, cultural, and political forces made for a powerful foundational program that implicated intellectuals in a web of power relations which supported the regime and entrapped critical thought. In a 1990 interview Christa Wolf herself asserted that her generation, a generation that had been socialized under fascism, felt reluctant to organize resistance against people who had been in concentration camps during the Nazi period.3 But if it had yielded to a state with a stained history, ruined economy, and demoralized population, how exactly could the antifascist narrative remain cohesive all the way until 1989 when in her speech Fur unser Land Wolf invoked antifascist ideals as the basis of a new socialist East German nation? In other words, as Dorothea Dornhof put it succinctly, how is it possible that intellectuals who pride themselves on an emancipa-tory understanding would not only enter power relations of their own free will but sustain them despite increasing doubts about their ability to realize any of their emancipatory goals? (63). Christa Wolfs Kindheitsmuster inadvertently points to a profound desire for preservation. Re-writing the state's foundational narrative of antifascism through a discourse of empathy with Jewish victims commonly neglected in the state's symbolic ritualization of communist resistance, Wolfs project engenders a soft dissidence that avoids challenging antifascism as a discourse of power. This is not to say, however, that the text hides its increasing doubts about the legitimacy of the GDR's ideological project. Quite to the contrary, Wolfs novel invests a great deal in a discourse of fear to perpetually regenerate a dilemma of linguistic impotence. This linguistic impasse in Wolfs works has often been read by critics in the context of modernist Sprachkritik, and thus as Wolfs relevant, if limited, contribution to an emancipatory political and aesthetic discourse in the GDR.4 Instead I suggest Kindheitsmuster continuously and quite consciously restages the liminal experience necessary to sustain the peculiar intimacy that lies at the heart of a particularly symbiotic dissidence, a brand of dissidence in which critical writer and state feed on each other.5 Seen in this light, the crucial question is then no longer whether or not the critical GDR writers who decided to stay in their country undermined or legitimized the East German state, but rather how could they do it both at once? How could they both support and corrode the authority of the state? How exactly is a soft dissidence (re)generated and how does it partake in the production of ideology? Kindheitsmuster has entered the canon as the German book exemplary of Vergangenheitsbewaltigung.6 Starting out as an examination of the individual and collective psychology of subjugation under socialist conditions, the book carefully reconstructs the coercive mechanisms surrounding the complicity of Wolfs generation with the Nazi past (Wie sind wir so geworden, wie wir heute sind? Horigkeit. 248). More than any other book of the 1970s, Wolfs novel negotiates, contests, and reworks the different politics of memory that evolved in both East and West Germany since the end of WW II. In contrast to the GDR state's mythologizing of the communist resistance to fascism, Kindheitsmuster suggests that a full and truthful account of Germany's national socialist past would lead to a more conscientious socialist present and serve to guide future-oriented action. …