Eulogy for the Living: Taking Flight

by Christa Wolf, Gerhard Wolf (Afterword), Katy Derbyshire (Translator)

Christa Wolf tried for years to find a way to write about her childhood in Nazi Germany. In her 1976 book Patterns of Childhood, she explained why it was so difficult: “Gradually, over a period of months, the dilemma has emerged: to remain speechless or to live in the third person, these seem to be the options. One is impossible, the other sinister.” During 1971 and 1972 she made thirty-three attempts to start the novel, abandoning each manuscript only pages in.
 
Eulogy for the Living, written over the course of four weeks, is the longest of those fragments. In its pages, Wolf recalls with crystalline precision the everyday details of her life as a middle-class grocer’s daughter, and the struggles within the family—struggles common to most families, but exacerbated by the rise of Nazism. And as Nazism fell, the Wolfs fled west, trying to stay ahead of the rampaging Red Army. Though Wolf abandoned this account, it stands, in fragmentary form, as a testament to her skill as a thinker, storyteller, and memorializer of humanity’s greatest struggles.
 

136 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Novelist, short-story writer, essayist, critic, journalist, and film dramatist Christa Wolf was a citizen of East Germany and a committed socialist, and managed to keep a critical distance from the communist regime. Her best-known novels included “Der geteilte Himmel” (“Divided Heaven,” 1963), addressing the divisions of Germany, and “Kassandra” (“Cassandra,” 1983), which depicted the Trojan War.

She won awards in East Germany and West Germany for her work, including the Thomas Mann Prize in 2010. The jury praised her life’s work for “critically questioning the hopes and errors of her time, and portraying them with deep moral seriousness and narrative power.”

Christa Ihlenfeld was born March 18, 1929, in Landsberg an der Warthe, a part of Germany that is now in Poland. She moved to East Germany in 1945 and joined the Socialist Unity Party in 1949. She studied German literature in Jena and Leipzig and became a publisher and editor.

In 1951, she married Gerhard Wolf, an essayist. They had two children. Christa Wolf died in December 2011.

(Bloomberg News)

Reviews

[Chequers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quasi un prologo al piu' famoso "Trama d'infanzia", la Wolf mette su carta i suoi ricordi, a mano libera, in uno stile piu' colloquiale che "pensato", e parla del suo rapporto con la madre e del suo piccolo mondo in Prussia (ora Polonia) e della sua fuga nel 1945 quando l'armata Rossa si avvicinava a Berlino. Un argomento molto poco raccontato, IMHO, ma che ho trovato sempre estremamente interessante.

[Viktoria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sehr gut erzählt und trotz des Themas nicht sentimental. Vom Aufbau her ist "Nachruf auf Lebende. Die Flucht" eigentlich genauso erzählt wie Wolfs Erzählung "Kassandra". Bei beiden erinnert sich eine junge Frau an wichtige, interessante, charakterbildende Momente ihres Lebens, die nicht chronologisch erzählt werden. Auch ähnlich: beide sind gezwungen ihre Heimat zu verlassen und die Erinnerungen werden durch das Verlassen des Heimatortes ausgelöst.
Liest sich sehr gut!

[Areeb Ahmad (Bankrupt_Bookworm) · Rating 3 out of 5]

"My mother grieved for all her lost possibilities, but because it wasn't her way to suffer in silence she found a hundred pretexts to convert her great disappointment into myriads of minor complaints, in a constant gruelling battle against going to rack and ruin—the spectre that haunted her the most—and in her permanent concern for us, leaving us only our retreat to myriads of minor misdemeanours."

This novel was hard to come to terms with at first. Instead of the well-known narrative about Jewish people fleeing Germany during Nazism, it follows an ethnic German family who leave at the tail-end of the war as the Russians advance. A work of autofiction, it's distinctly informed by Wolf's own life who was a teenager at this time. The narrative voice is strong and even though it is just a 130-page book, it is a complex read as there are frequent shifts in time and place as a free association of memory recall is established.

There's a lot of focus on the mother, who has been quite dissatisfied with her life as a grocer's wife and work in the factory. Gerhard Wolf, the author's husband, says that Wolf wrote "about the first stages of the family's flight so as to bid an irrevocable farewell to her childhood and thereby to her unconscious existence... with an unclouded view of the past, a eulogy for the living." Katy Derbyshire's translation shines, propping the lyricism of the prose as she charts familiar themes of home and belonging.

[Aubrey Li · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eine tolle Erzählung von der Erinnerung der zweiten Welt Krieg, der beherrschenden Mutter, und der Flucht.

[Tora]

A perfect little book for the "to move forward you must look back" adage. Kinda crazy for the "looking back" to be about childhood in Nazi Germany--but if anything being immersed in it via the naivete of a child, couched in the knowing curation of an adult is quite interesting. The weirdness of signs and symbols is rendered more obvious, for example--what does it mean for a child to be told to love a photograph of an ever-present stranger? I want to be Rayne Fisher-Quann when I grow up, which is funny because she's younger than me, but yesterday she tweeted about how everything about "living" has already been told to you, but the words themselves have little meaning without experience, and even then the words must be relearned, again and again and again. This is what the narrator did and does. Lots of others adages to pile on top of that adage - we see through a glass darkly; we stumble in the dark, etc. Know thyself! they say. Easier said than done.

[beesp · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Epitaffio per i vivi" è un addio all'infanzia, al tempo della scoperta dell'inconscio, per lo più governato da moti segreti. È un racconto autobiografico. Christa Wolf riguarda alla sua infanzia in maniera critica, cercando di spiegarsi e di comprendere certi sentimenti e certe scelte della sé bambina, fino a quella mattina di febbraio del '45, quando effettivamente la sua famiglia per intero abbandonò dietro di sé un'epoca di certezza e sicurezza in una cittadina governata dal timore-amore per il Fuhrer.
Christa Wolf, tre anni dopo la sua morte, la troviamo in un libro scritto di getto - cosa inusuale per lei - che racconta di sé e della sua esperienza di fuga, ma soprattutto di cosa nascondesse e svelasse di sé a sé quand'era quasi una giovane. Secondo me il senso fondamentale di questo testo è proprio l'idea di un addio a un mondo conosciuto, all'idealizzazione della sua famiglia, per passare a tempi bui, che richiedessero una piena attenzione ed auto-analisi, cui Christa non poté sottrarsi e che ha poi riassunto. Christa Wolf ha vissuto una fuga ed ha scoperto quello che credeva essere il suo ambiente familiare. È cresciuta tutto in un battito di ciglia ed ha riepilogato, qui, cos'avesse significato fino a quella mattina capire e comprendere e come poi, in poche ore, questo senso fosse cambiato radicalmente. Accade attraverso lo svelamento dei familiari e della madre, probabilmente, attraverso l'acuta capacità - assente negli altri familiari, che pure stanno lasciando la loro città natale - di ricevere la novità di momenti storici e fondamentali nella vita di una persona. Christa Wolf racconta della percezione chiarissima del terremoto provocato dall'abbandono dei luoghi conosciuti e familiari. Probabilmente, riflettendoci, Christa Wolf ci ha raccontato del momento in cui è sorta in lei quella sensibilità che in lei sarebbe sfociata nella scrittura: raccogliere i più sottili movimenti della sensibilità, riconoscerli, identificarli, persino ricordarli.

[L'angolino di Ale · Rating 5 out of 5]

Questo mio primo approccio con questa scrittrice è risultato più che positivo. Ho amato la sua schiettezza. La sua narrazione è veritiera e lucidissima. Questo racconto rappresenta quasi una missione attraverso la quale l’autrice sente la responsabilità di raccontarci, con assoluta sincerità,ciò che è realmente accaduto; quella cruda verità che nessun libro di storia potrà mai illustrare con la stessa autenticità di una testimone di quindici anni e della sua esperienza diretta.

Recensione completa su "L'angolino di Ale":
http://langolinodiale.com/2015/05/23/...