March 18

Read the 2011 New Yorker article Remembering Christa Wolf

“Throughout her life, Wolf suffered physically when she felt that society was failing. She endured a heart attack and depressions. Still, she didn’t leave East Germany. In the West, she said, there would be no reason to write.”

[Thirty years after she was accused of reporting to the Stasi in the early 1960s on fellow authors, Christa Wolf] struggles to understand how she could have possibly forgotten her early, albeit harmless, collaboration with the secret police. She remembers the meetings, yes. But working with them? That has been wiped from her recollection. “Why I talked to them at all. Why I didn’t send them away, which is what I would have done, if they had appeared just a little bit later.” The answer she comes up with is: “Because I didn’t see them as ‘them,’ yet.”

Read Jonathan Shaw's review of City of Angels

Perhaps because I read City of Angels just after leaving the morally clear-cut world of All the Light We Cannot See, I loved it for its complexity, its ruthless self-questioning, it’s commitment to the life of the mind. The book was published in Germany in 2010. Christa Wolf died in 2011, aged 82. The narrator writes at one point of feeling the end approaching, and says explicitly that she means the end of life as well as the end of the book. If Christa Wolf intended the book as a farewell statement, it’s a powerful goodbye, hardly optimistic but not without hope for humanity.