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Christa Wolf
Leibhaftig
(In Person)
Luchterhand Literaturverlag, February 2002. 185 pp. Any new book by Christa Wolf - whose status was reconfirmed by the recent award to her of the newly-founded Deutscher Bücherpreis - deserves to find a place in the English-speaking book market, and this, her first major work of fiction since Medea in 1996 and her first novel since the collapse of the GDR, is no exception. Intellectual, complex, but with an often lyrical lightness, it operates on many levels. The main narrative takes the form of a Krankenbericht, the story of a life-threatening illness (a ruptured appendix) suffered by the anonymous female narrator and follows her hospitalisation and treatment, the procuring of the appropriate and expensive drug from the West, and her ultimate recovery. The action takes place in East Germany in the late 1980s, allowing for quite deliberately suggested parallels between the protagonist's physical and mental state and that of the GDR shortly before the collapse of Socialism and the fall of the Wall. Flashbacks and dream sequences allow for free association, and memories from the past crowd in. This past is largely the history of the GDR but also reaches back to the narrator's childhood and thus to the Third Reich.
The whole book is a marvellous linking of the mythological and the modern. The sinister pathologist who significantly fails to give his name seems, with his sepulchral appearance, almost a personification of the Grim Reaper, or of Pluto from the Underworld. Similarly the anaesthetist Kora Bachmann (reference, Ingeborg Bachmann, the Austrian novelist, and her unfinished novel Todesarten, or 'Ways of Death) guides the protagonist, Persephone-like, into the underworld of anaesthesia. But parallelling all this is another sort of underworld: the basement of the narrator's apartment in Berlin (formerly its air-raid shelter) and likewise the city's Friedrichstrasse underground station, the transit point between the two worlds of East and West. With its echoes of Dante, Goethe and even Kafka, this novel offers us the richly challenging thoughts of an accomplished mistress of her art.
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