Patterns of Childhood by Christa Wolf

First published:Kindheitsmuster, 1976 (A Model Childhood, 1980; reissued as Patterns of Childhood)

Type of work: Social realism

Time of work: 1932-1947 and 1971-1975

Locale: L. (Landsberg, Germany; later, Gorzow Wielkopolski, Poland); Mecklenburg, in the Soviet Occupation Zone; and the German Democratic Republic

Principal Characters:

• Nelly Jordan, the narrator, a woman who grew up in Germany during the Fascist period
• Charlotte Jordan, her mother
• Bruno Jordan, her father
• Lenka, her fifteen-year-old daughter

The Novel

Patterns of Childhood is an intricate interweaving of three narratives: Nelly Jordan’s childhood under National Socialism; her trip with her husband, daughter, and brother to her former hometown (now in Poland); and the difficult process of recollecting and recording her unsettling memories. In July, 1971, a two-day trip to L., which the narrator has not seen since fleeing with her family in late January, 1945, sets off a string of associations, dreams, and memories about her childhood. She is unsuccessful in organizing these recollections until November, 1972, when she begins to write about her childhood self in the third person, namely as Nelly Jordan, and about her remembering and writing selves in the second person. Only in the last pages of the novel do these selves coalesce.

Nelly’s earliest memory is of herself as a three-year-old in 1932 sitting on the steps in front of her father’s grocery story and repeating the word “I” over and over. The momentous political events of the following year hardly affected her happy childhood. Despite the economic crisis, her father successfully opened a second store, and her parents were probably too busy with business to take notice in the newspaper of the curtailment of personal freedoms or the opening of the Dachau concentration camp in March, 1933. In the summer, the Nazi Standard Bearer Rudi Arndt accused Nelly’s father, Bruno Jordan, of having connections with the outlawed Communists, but Bruno was able to appease him with the promise of a sack of flour and sugar for the next Party meeting. One day in the fall of 1933, Bruno appeared in Nelly’s room proudly wearing his new peaked, blue naval storm trooper cap. “See! Now your father is one of them, too,” exclaimed her mother in a “happy voice.” Although they had previously voted for the Social Democrats, Nelly’s parents voted for the Nazis in the November elections, along with most of the other citizens of L.

In 1937, Elvira, the family’s maid, revealed to Nelly that four years earlier Elvira and her family had stayed home and wept when the Communist flags were burned in the town, for her family were Communists. Only thirty-five years later, in the State Library, which had old copies of the newspaper from L. on file, did the narrator learn the background information on what had really happened in the town. Now, the narrator can only speculate on Nelly’s family’s reactions to the day of the flag burning, March 17, 1933. Neither can she be sure of why Nelly realized that she had to keep Elvira’s secret to herself. She does know that Nelly started asking fewer questions, that somewhere around this time Nelly dreamed or thought for the first time that “it’s all wrong,” that Nelly’s sense of guilt increased as the realm of her secrets grew, and that the family did not talk openly about certain “glitter words” (“alien blood,” “sterilization,” “hereditary diseases,” “a eugenic way of life”). The narrator now wonders whether one solution to the problem of living under a dictatorship is to restrict one’s curiosity to areas that are not dangerous.

During Nelly’s first year in the girls’ school on Adolf-Hitlerstrasse, she tried assiduously to live up to the expectation of Herr Warsinski, her religion and German teacher. Remembering it now, the narrator finds it difficult to explain to her daughter, Lenka, how Nelly could so eagerly submit to her teacher’s demands for unflinching obedience and faithfulness to the Fuhrer. During this period, Nelly’s family was building a new house and store on the outskirts of town near two barracks, one of which was just being constructed. With the growing number of soldiers in the area, it proved to be a very favorable location. These “peacetime” years were good years for Bruno Jordan and his family. Bruno became active in the buyers’ cooperative, his account book grew thin, as people could now pay with cash and not on credit, and he purchased a picture of the Fuhrer from his Party friend Leo Siegmann.

When the purity of an aunt’s ancestry was questioned, Nelly’s response was that she did not want to be Jewish. She did not need to be concerned, for her family had no Jewish, foreign, or Communist relatives, friends, or connections, no mental diseases, and no subversive tendencies. An uncle took over the candy factory abandoned by an escaping Jew. Nelly went to see the remains of the Jewish synagogue in town the day after it had been destroyed during the Crystal Night of November 8, 1938. Soon after, she made little prisons for ladybugs, her favorite creatures, and covered them sadistically with sand when they tried to escape.

When a mailman brought Bruno’s draft notice in late August, 1939, a week before the German invasion of Poland, Charlotte called out on the stairs: “The hell with your Fuhrer.” Nelly’s father, however, was soon home again after the successful completion of the Polish Campaign in October. A few weeks later, when Leo Siegmann called Bruno to tell him that their unit had executed five Polish hostages, Leo remarked that it was too bad that Bruno was not there. Bruno’s face became ashen. “That kind of thing is not for me,” he said later. Nevertheless, he remained in the reserves for the rest of the war, and his wife, Charlotte, took over the daily running of the business.

Nelly excelled at sporting events sponsored by the Hitler Youth in the local stadium. She even pushed her way into serving with the Jungmadel League; it was far more interesting than sitting around home or the store, and it made one tough. It also protected her from fear and self-doubt. Yet, for all the time she spent in her Jungmadel unit, the narrator has no memory of a single face or name from its mass of activities. What the narrator does remember precisely is Nelly’s history and German teacher, Julia Strauch. Julia was single and the sole female intellectual Nelly knew. Nelly fell in love with Julia, but her love was a kind of captivity and was never returned. Nelly was thirteen at the time and had begun to steal candy from the store. She had also started to read surreptitiously her parents’ copy of the SS magazine and to tear up her fingernails.

In 1943, the adolescent antics of her friends behind the altar at their confirmation and Herr Andrack’s hypnosis demonstration at the party afterward left a stronger impression on Nelly than reports of the German defeat at Stalingrad or Joseph Goebbels’ voice on the radio proclaiming total war. In 1944, refugees began to arrive in town, and Charlotte had to wake her children every night as bombers flew overhead on the way to Berlin. On January 29, 1945, when Russian troops were approaching the town, Nelly fled with her aunts, uncles, and grandparents in a truck belonging to her Uncle Alfons’ employer. Her father had already left with the French prisoners of whom he had been put in charge and would soon be captured. Charlotte decided to stay behind at the last minute to settle their affairs, leaving Nelly and her younger brother, Lutz, in the care of the other family members.

It took two weeks for the twelve family members to reach the town of Wittenberge on the Elbe River, several hundred kilometers due west of L. There, in the school where they were housed, Charlotte miraculously caught up with them. The family soon moved to a hotel in a village west of Berlin, then in late April, was forced to flee again, this time to the northwest by foot. They heard of Hitler’s death and met survivors from the concentration camps, one of whom, a Communist, said to them, “Where on earth have you all been living,” a sentence which years later was to become a kind of motto for Nelly.

Eventually they settled in a small village in Mecklenburg, which was then occupied by Russian troops. From her teacher, Nelly “discovered that she’d been living under a dictatorship for twelve years, apparently without noticing it.” In 1946, she contracted a mild case of tuberculosis a few months before her father, hardly recognizable, returned from a Russian prisoner-of-war camp. She spent the following winter in a sanatorium and was released in April, 1947, weighing 165 pounds.

During the two-day stay in L. years later, the narrator and her family avoided contact with the Polish inhabitants of what is now G. Her family’s houses and stores, the school, the bathing area on the river, the church, the stadium, the barracks, the factories, the train station, an overgrown cemetery, and the sandy hills outside the town all provided access to forgotten images, conversations, people, and events. Lutz is far less troubled by the past than his sister, but Lenka repeatedly asks disturbing questions as the very ordinary narrative of her mother’s life under Hitler begins to be told.

The Characters

In a brief foreword, Christa Wolf warns the reader that the characters and events in the novel are the inventions of the narrator and that anyone who “detects a similarity between a character in the narrative and either himself or anyone else should consider the strange lack of individuality in the behavior of many contemporaries.” Almost all the characters in the novel sacrificed their individuality during the Nazi era out of fear, duty, opportunism, idealism, or indifference. In contrast, the narrator and Lenka, by questioning authoritarian behavior patterns in themselves and others, are able to break out of such patterns and develop as unique individuals. Readers are thus challenged to examine critically their own lives in order to see to what extent they, too, are susceptible to the “universal loss of memory” and “terrifying lack of individuality” that are characteristic of the modern age.

Halfway through the novel, the narrator has grave second thoughts about her character young Nelly. The girl she describes seems helpless, manipulated, strange; she calls her “nothing but the product of your hypocrisy.” The narrator now blames herself for not directly confronting that of which she is ashamed and defensive. The year is 1942, Nelly is thirteen and has begun eating candy while reading the SS newspaper. She has been swept along by events and fully indoctrinated into the Nazi educational and youth organizations. She is only marginally aware of the war of Nazi racial policies and has long since stopped asking painful questions. Her acquiescence in the daily routine of a small town under Fascism is virtually complete. Unlike the main characters of most other East German novels about the Nazi era, whose heroes are resistance fighters or rapid converts to socialism, Nelly begins to gain a new social identity slowly, during the flight from L. and the resettlement in the Soviet Occupation Zone.

Late in the novel, the narrator quotes Johann Wolfgang von Goethe without comment: “I have done much writing, in order to lay the foundation for memory.” She feels compelled to write about her childhood not only because of the trip to L. and her daughter’s probing questions but also because no other book on World War II or Fascism can adequately explain her own experience. “Woe to our time, which forces the writer to exhibit the wound of his own crime before he is allowed to describe other people’s wounds,” she notes in a chapter that opens with a quote by the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (“With my burned hand I write about the nature of fire”) and the statement: “The craving for authenticity is growing.” Authenticity, honesty, and integrity are the goals that the narrator sets for her writing in the hope that such relentless self-exposure will show how Fascism is not a phenomenon to be studied only in others but a latent tendency which everyone must confront.

Lenka is typical of the children of parents who lived under National Socialism, children who do not understand, despite all the books, films, and history lessons on the subject, how one could submit to the horrors of such a regime. Her function in the book is twofold: to keep the question of her mother’s complicity always in front of her and to keep open the possibility of greater personal involvement and social responsibility for her own and future generations. She is uneasy with what she finds in the present-day German Democratic Republic, a “pseudo-people, a pseudo-life,” she says. The Poles leave a positive impression on her, for they seem spontaneous and not obsessed with efficiency, discipline, and order. For her mother, Lenka is a constant reminder of the need for an honesty that would allow one to speak more openly and precisely about what was and is.

Of all Nelly’s relatives, only her parents and brother did not eventually flee to West Germany. Much more than her less cautious and more opportunistic and enterprising husband, Charlotte realized the unstable ground on which the family’s prosperity during the 1930’s was based. A “Cassandra behind the counter of her store,” she dared to tell several customers in 1944 that the war was lost, after which she was visited by two men in trenchcoats, to whom she denied the incident. After the war, Charlotte was the only family member with sufficient conscience and sensitivity to reach out beyond her own circle. When Bruno returned in 1946, she was devastated by his transformation—“with a single blow she had lost herself and her husband.”

Critical Context

Patterns of Childhood was published in the German Democratic Republic within weeks after Wolf, along with her husband and ten other prominent East German writers, protested publicly against the expulsion of the controversial songwriter and poet Wolf Biermann from the country. Despite the fact that she was looked upon with official disfavor, Patterns of Childhood was received positively by the critics in her country, and the first edition of sixty thousand sold out within two months. Her third novel, it represented a departure from Der geteilte Himmel (1963; Divided Heaven, 1965) and Nachdenken uber Christa T. (1968; The Quest for Christa T., 1970), both of which dealt with contemporary problems in the German Democratic Republic. Wolf next investigated the problems of self and authenticity in the context of German Romanticism in Kein Ort: Nirgends (1979; No Place on Earth, 1982) and of Greek myth and feminist theory in Voraussetzungen einer Erzahlung: “Kassandra” and Kassandra (1983; Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays, 1984). Storfall (1987; breakdown) is her report of a day in April, 1986, when news of the Chernobyl reactor disaster reached her at the same time her brother was undergoing an operation for brain cancer.

More than other recent memoirs and fiction dealing with the Fascist period, Patterns of Childhood achieves the formal richness and thought-provoking depth of such postwar masterpieces as Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus (1947; English translation, 1948), Gunter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel (1959; The Tin Drum, 1961), and Heinrich Boll’s Gruppenbild mit Dame (1971; Group Portrait with Lady, 1973). In the German Democratic Republic, only the dramatist Heiner Muller has dealt so uncompromisingly with the remnants of Fascism in the present. Critics have repeatedly compared Wolf’s novel to Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s psychological study, The Incapacity to Mourn (1977), in which they uncovered many of the same taboos and behavior patterns in West German society.

Bibliography

Ezergalis, Inta. Women Writers: The Divided Self, Analysis of Novels by Christa Wolf, Ingeborg Bachmann, Doris Lessing, and Others, 1982.

Frieden, Sandra. “‘In eigener Sache’: Christa Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster,” in The German Quarterly. LIV (1981), pp. 473-487.

Lamse, Mary Jane. “Kindheitsmuster in Context: The Achievement of Christa Wolf,” in University of Dayton Review. XV (1981), pp. 49-55.

Love, Myra. “Christa Wolf and Feminism: Breaking the Patriarchal Connection,” in New German Critique. XVI (Winter, 1979), pp. 31-53.

Love, Myra. “Das Spiel mit offenen Moglichkeiten”: Subjectivity and the Thematization of Writing in the Works of Christa Wolf, 1984.

Wendt-Hildebrandt, Susan. “Kindheitsmuster: Christa Wolf’s ‘Probestuck,’” in Seminar. I (1981), pp. 164-176.