This essay investigates the relationship between Sebald's Luftkrieg und Literatur and the prose works on which his reputation primarily depends. Sebald's account of the bombing of German cities, particularly of Hamburg in 1943, reveals two significant intellectual affinities: first with Walter Benjamin, whose conception of history in Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels is linked through the ruins left by the bombing to Sebald's preoccupation with scenes of decay and dereliction in his fictional works, and secondly with Horkheimer and Adorno's critique of ‘progress’ in Dialektik der Aufklärung. Sebald sees the bombing campaign, along with the Holocaust, as part of the one great catastrophe of the Third Reich in which the history of ‘progress’ culminated – a history analysed at length in Sebald's Austerlitz. The ‘firestorm’ in Hamburg, emblematic of this destructive process, illustrates Sebald's recurrent use of the fire motif in his narrative works and is linked to comments on his own childhood in Nach der Natur. His entire oeuvre is at once an attempt to ‘memorialise’ individual victims of this destructive process and a critique of, and a resistance to, the tendency within post‐war German culture to complete the ‘liquidation’ of the past begun during the wartime bombing.
Many writers of the former GDR, not least Christa Wolf, have been made painfully aware of the principle of literary hermeneutics that texts from the past yield up modified meanings when confronted with a changed present and its new 'horizon of consciousness' (to use Gadamer's phrase); their work and their role as writers in the GDR have since November 1989 been submitted to sometimes ruthless re-valuation. In Christa Wolfs casc rrappraisal is also invited by another hermeneutic principlethat each new text written by an author modifies the reader's view of the entire auvre, requiring that we construct a new whole in relation to which we not only view the new work but also see afresh seemingly familiar existing texts.' It was precisely during the uncertain year between the opening of the Wall and the final demise of the GDR that she published her latest prose text Was Bleibt.2 It is the intention of this article to consider what this much discussed (and much criticised) recent work might contribute to our reading of Wolfs perhaps most well known earlier work, Nuchdenken iiber Christa T., particularly in relation to the underlying conceptions of temporality and history.As its title suggests, Was Bleibt is centrally concerned with questions of temporality and in particular with the relation between present and future. It is possible to identify within this text four different conceptions of, and attitudes to, human time and history, the interplay between which forms a central, perhaps the central, theme of the work. These Conceptions are in the first instance related to differing understandings of human identity within the continuum of time, a central theme in Christa Wolfs work, but they are also intimately related, unsurprisingly in a society which placed such emphasis on history and historical consciousness, to perceptions of collective, i.e. historical, time.T h e first of these conceptions is represented by the young Stasi mcn deputed to maintain surveillance of the narrator. T h e latter, a writer with obvious biographical similarities to Christa Wolf, comments on them: ' 'The comprehensive totality into which the part has to be integrated can br conceived o f , . . as the whole life of a person. In a subjective, personal reference to thr lifr of the author rach of his actions ran he understood in relation to thr totality, according to their mutual rffkts and clarification, as one nioment interconnected with all the others in the life ofa wholr person' (E. Brtti, 'Hermcnrutics as the genrral mrthodology o f the Geirte.rruirscn.rrhne~', in J . Bleiehrr (ed.), Contemporary Hermmmlii.s. Hermeneutics QJ Method, Pldosophv and Crifigue, London 1980, p. 60). Christa Wolf, Was Blcibt, Frankfurt a . M . 1990, p. 23 (herealirr ahhrrviatrd as WB). TIME AND HISTORY IN WAS BLEIBT AND N A C H D E " UBER CHRISTA T. 359
Taking as its starting‐point the middle scene of Schnitzler’s Anatol, entitled ‘Denksteine’, this short essay sees in specific expressions used in the same scene evidence for a residual?if subliminal?authority exerted by moral imperatives derived from the Judaeo‐Christian tradition. In a diluted, secularised form these shape Anatol’s notion of ‘love’ and account for the impulse repeatedly to vow ‘ewige Liebe’, not‐withstanding his own inclinations and past practice. The resultant inner division in Anatol between ‘Intellekt’ and ‘Bedu¨rfnis’ is seen in relation to Nietzsche’s reference to ‘religiöse Nachwehen’ (in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches) as one form of the ‘nihilism’ of the period, as diagnosed by Nietzsche.
The present volume brings together papers which were delivered at a Christoph Rein Conference under the title 'Christoph Rein -Ein Chronist seiner Zeit', organised by the Centre for East German Studies at The University of Reading, in conjunction with the Gesamteuropaisches Studienwerk Vlotho, and held at Vlotho in July 1999. The speakers included some, from Britain, Germany and the USA, who had already published extensively on Rein, as well as a number of younger scholars from Britain and Germany. All the contributions to the conference are published here, together with a revised version of the hitherto unpublished translation of Die wahre Geschichte des Ah Q which Sean Allan and Ralph Manheim originally made for the London production of the play in 1990.The conference title took up Rein's• repeated description of himself as 'Chronisi'. The addition to it of the phrase 'seiner Zeit' made explicit one obvious implication of the term: a 'chronicler' is one who produces a written record of his time. Since he began writing in earnest in the early 1970s Christoph Rein's work has indeed formed a kind of commentary on the history of the society in which he found himself -the GDR until 1990 and since then the new, unified Germany. Some critics, writing perhaps in the spirit of the 'Literaturstreit', suggested shortly after the 'Wende' that, as one of them put it, 'Christoph Rein ist mit der DDR auch sein Thema ahhanden gekommen' .1 In fact, he has since 1990, apart from a long period of severe illness, continued to publish at roughly the same rate as beforeand, partly at least, on themes relating specifically to the post-'Wende' period, for example in Das Napoleon-Spiel, Randow, and his recent plays Bruch, In Acht und Bann and Himmel auf Erden. An important feature of the present volume is that no less than five essays -those by Terry Albrecht, David Clarke, Bernd Fischer, Graham Jackman and Bill Nivenfocus principally on these post-'Wende' texts.It is, however, a commentary of a specific kind. It is not one which focuses on the critical moments in that history, though most of these do figure in Rein's work -the uprising of 1953 in Der fremde Freund, the
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.