Writing from the Margins, Writing in the Margins

Abstract

Born 1929 in Landsburg an der Warthe, Germany, today Polish Gor- zow Wielkopolski, Christa Wolf has been one of the most influential figures in German literature since 1961. The reunification of the two Germanies in 1990 entailed a marginalization of Wolf and her fellow East German writers in that many of them felt they had been “exiledV201D; or “colonized” by the West. During the Literaturstreit (literature battle), West German critics and intellectuals, in turn, debated the question whether or not East German writers could still be considered artists at a time when their point of reference, the East German state, no longer existed. In an attempt to deal with the many allegations and accusations against her work and her person, Wolf embarked on a voluntary and temporary “exile” in the United States, where much work was done on her first major “post-reunification” novel, Medea (1996; English translation 1998). The text features the author’s usual writerly concerns involving relationships between past and present, men and women, individual and society, and so on in a retelling of Euripides’s tragedy. Wolf presents a modernized) Medea who becomes comprehensible as woman, as victim, and as outsider. Wolf’s Medea attains new meaning in the context of political oppression in general and the former East German regime in particular.