Patterns of Childhood: Analysis of Major Characters
"Patterns of Childhood: Analysis of Major Characters" explores the intricate dynamics of childhood and morality through the experiences of key characters during the Nazi regime. The central figure, Nelly Jordan, is depicted as an impressionable girl whose ideals are shaped by the pervasive propaganda of her time, yet she grapples with her individual moral compass amidst the indoctrination she faces at school and within her family. This tension between conformity and personal ethics leads Nelly through a profound transformation as she witnesses the harsh realities of her family's plight as refugees and the broader atrocities of war.
The narrative is further enriched by the perspective of the adult Nelly, who reflects on her childhood with a sense of alienation, highlighting the disjunction between her past experiences and her present self. Charlotte Jordan, Nelly's mother, embodies resilience and resistance against Nazi ideology, yet struggles with her own ambitions and the desire to shield her children from the grim realities of their world. In contrast, Nelly's father, Bruno, represents the complexities of survival and moral compromise, revealing the human struggle between ambition and ethical integrity.
The introduction of Lenka, the narrator's teenage daughter, adds a contemporary lens through which the historical events and their repercussions are analyzed. Lenka’s individualism and critical perspective challenge her mother’s reflections and contribute to a broader discourse on identity, memory, and the impacts of historical trauma. Overall, the analysis encompasses themes of innocence, ethical consciousness, and the quest for an integrated self against a backdrop of societal turmoil.
Patterns of Childhood: Analysis of Major Characters
Author: Christa Wolf
First published: Kindheitsmuster, 1976 (A Model Childhood, 1980; reissued as Patterns of Childhood)
Genre: Novel
Locale: Landsberg, Mecklenburg, and the German Democratic Republic
Plot: Social realism
Time: 1932–1975
Nelly Jordan, a girl growing up under the Nazi regime. An impressionable, idealistic girl, she falls prey to the propaganda surrounding her in school, Hitler Youth, and the media. In spite of intense indoctrination and the silence maintained in her family, Nelly manages to preserve bits of her individual morality through feelings of secrecy, embarrassment, guilt, shame, pity, fear, and a pervasive sense of sadness. Still, she enthusiastically participates in the Hitler Youth and tries to please her Nazi teachers. With the misery of her family becoming refugees, the atrocities that she witnesses and hears about, and the occupation of Germany, her system of beliefs breaks down, and she has to undergo a total transformation to become a new human being.
The narrator, who is identical with the adult Nelly but feels that the child Nelly is a stranger. An ethically sensitive, complex, and philosophical writer, the narrator is haunted by the split in her and her generation's consciousness that has occurred through the suppression of negative memories. The occasion of a brief family trip in 1971 to her prewar home-town, Landsberg, which since the war lies in Poland, precipitates her writing an autobiographical novel. The questioning of the memories that are provoked through associations with certain places during their trip makes her write about Nelly's development. She also feels compelled to reflect on the act of writing as a way of fixing and potentially distorting memories, however, and—through her observer status—of alienating herself from living in the present. Thus, she experiences not only the splits between past and present and between self and society, but also a split between life and fiction writing. She is in search of an integrated self that can overcome these various splits.
Charlotte Jordan, Nelly's mother, an intelligent, ambitious, proud, and unyielding lower-middle-class woman who, because of her background, was not able to develop her talents in medicine or writing. Instead, she became conventional in many ways, as the wife of a grocer. During the war years and the immediate postwar period, she rises to be the mainstay of her family. Most important, she is the only member of the Jordan family offering some open resistance to Nazi ideology. She has a Cassandra-like ability for premonitions of catastrophes, which she voices loudly. She is, however, subdued by her family and the appearance of the Gestapo; her desire to provide her children with a “happy childhood” wins out. She thus becomes an accomplice in the conspiracy of silence that disables the children from developing an ethical consciousness. A number of instances of her courage and compassion for the oppressed are described.
Bruno Jordan, Nelly's father, a grocery store owner. After his disastrous experiences as a World War I veteran and as a prisoner of war, his sole ambition is to provide for a “happy family” through economic success. Toward this goal, he is willing to collaborate with the authorities; thus, he joins the stormtroopers in 1933 and feels like a “hypnotized rabbit” when another stormtrooper blackmails him for goods. He takes an office in a Nazi merchant organization, befriends Nazis, and reads their literature. Still, even for him there are limits to his collaboration: He expresses genuine abhorrence when he learns that through a furlough, he narrowly missed participating in the execution of Polish hostages. Similarly, when chosen to supervise French prisoners of war, he is not able to be cruel to them, because he recognizes their common humanity. After the end of the war, he spends more than a year in a Russian prison camp and comes home a broken man.
Lenka, the narrator's teenage daughter. A skeptical young woman who has grown up in East Germany, she is not prone to high-flying ideals of nation or socialism. She is a true individualist. Her unhampered curiosity, moral judgments, or, at times, incomprehension serve to prod her mother's reflections about the time when she was a girl of the same age. Lenka accompanies her parents and uncle on the trip to Landsberg and lives at home while her mother writes the novel. One of her teachers, a reform-minded nonconformist, commits suicide. During a vacation job in a factory, Lenka experiences alienating work at the conveyor belt. She rebels against all that is made to destroy the individual, whether it is working conditions in industrialized societies, the Nazi past, the brutal suppression of the Chilean revolution, or the Vietnam War.