Preservation and Change in Christa Wolf's Was bleibt

Abstract

Seldom does a book catch and shape the tenor of its times like Christa Wolfs Was bleibt. Originally written in the summer of 1979, three years after the Biermann affair had plunged Wolf and other East German writers into controversy and intensified police observation, and then revised ten years later in the wake of the revolution inside the erstwhile GDR, Was bleibt implicitly spans the ten years which ended with the demise of Christa Wolf s state. It outlives that state.2 The self-reflexive gesture of the book's narrative voice dialogically invokes both past and future, making the story a reflection on the conditions and possibilities of its own writing. As the female narrator states on the first page of the book, she wants to know wie ich in zehn, zwanzig Jahren an diesen noch frischen, noch nicht abgelebten Tag zurtickdenken wiirde (5). With this gesture, she invokes both an Ich and a reader who will, like her story itself, remain long after the state whose moral and spiritual decay the story relates is gone. The story, then, becomes not just an effort both to save and to live more fully a particular day, but to invoke another, future day: