The Quest for Christa T. by Christa Wolf

First published:Nachdenken über Christa T., 1968 (English translation, 1970)

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Testimony

Time of plot: Fall, 1943, to summer, 1964

Locale: Mecklenburg, Leipzig, and Berlin, East Germany

Principal characters

• The narrator, reconstructs the life of her friend Christa T.
• Christa T., a proud and talented student
• Günter, a student who loves Christa T.
• Kostia, a student who has poetical flirtations with Christa T.
• Justus, a veterinarian who marries Christa T.
• Blasing, a friend of Christa T. and Justus

The Story:

The narrator, a schoolgirl, becomes fascinated with Christa T., who, while walking in the street one day with her classmates, suddenly makes a trumpet from a rolled-up newspaper and blows it. Such exhibitionism, without any apparent concern for approval, characterizes Christa T.’s elusive personality. A daring, independent tomboy, Christa T. seems a Sternkind kein Herrnkind, that is, a “star-child” with a special destiny but without any inherited, unearned social advantages. Her modest origins are underlined by her regional dialect, Plattdeutsch (“flatland German”), which has a simplified vocabulary and syntax (and heavy admixtures of Dutch and English). Speakers of standard High German consider the dialect a barbarous, primitive patois.

Christa T. and the narrator are separated for seven years by the evacuation of civilians fleeing the advancing Russian army in 1945 during the final year of World War II. Christa T. suffers a nervous breakdown. When she recovers, she decides to become a teacher. She writes compulsively throughout her life because she fears vanishing without a trace. Her posthumous papers are full of sketches for stories, and full of unfinished drafts. The young school principal from the next village loves her, but he is ultimately rejected by her. Christa T. loves children, but after three years of unvarying classroom routine, she decides to leave her family rather than succeed her father at his school.

As a university student at Leipzig in 1952, Christa T. reunites with the narrator but turns out to be a neglectful friend. Timid despite her bravado, and unmotivated, Christa T. drifts. She finds no value in her education. Her diaries and letters reveal her confused need for perfection, alternating with mild self-abasement. Günter, another student, loves her, but he is frustrated by her lack of commitment. She mistrusts propaganda that glorifies the new Socialist era, and she loves dead poets now forgotten. Her unrealistic expectations shape her attraction to the fickle, poetical Kostia, a fellow student. She completes a successful dissertation on Theodor Storm, a kindred spirit and “predominantly lyrical” author with a “nervous sensibility.” His “conflict between willing something and the inability to do it thrust him into a corner of life.”

Christa T. returns to teaching secondary school in Berlin but becomes discouraged with her students’ facile, cynical conformity to official Socialist doctrine. Her weary, cynical principal urges her to compromise to survive. Then a thuggish student, on a bet, bites off the head of a toad, an incident that further depresses Christa T.

In 1955, in her last six months in Berlin, Christa T. stops writing. Knowing that a Mecklenburg veterinarian, Justus, has fallen in love with her on sight during one of her visits to her family, she decides to call him. She drifts into an affair with him, becomes pregnant, and marries him in 1956. Her return to the country, where she seems to have abandoned her former ambitions, seems a loss to the narrator and friends who had expected great things of her. In the same year, the Soviet invasion of Hungary destroys any hope of a fellowship of communist nations under the benevolent leadership of the Soviet Union. Both the narrator and Christa T. feel bitterness at this “end of Utopia.”

Despite parties and frequent visits from friends, Christa T. feels bored. She seduces a young forester to try to “feel alive.” Her husband, Justus, learns about the affair and suffers, but stays with her nonetheless. Christa T. seeks some purpose in life by planning to build a new house overlooking a lake, in the middle of the dairy farms where Justus works. His work is successful, and he even helps to increase local milk production. Christa T.’s questions help him learn about the area. Despite developing cancer, she persists in her house project.

The narrator contrasts herself and Christa T.—members of the generation that lived through the war and the Soviet occupation—with the complacent, cynical younger generation. “Christa T.,” the narrator says, “had the luck to be forced to create her identity at an age when one is passionate. With that as the standard, all other attractions are shallow.”

Blasing, Christa T.’s and the narrator’s skeptical writer friend, heightens their idealism by way of contrast: Christa T., he says, successfully uses her house designs as “a sort of instrument . . . to link herself more intimately with life.” The narrator echos her friend’s life-affirming motto, “When, if not now?”

Christa T. has developed an exceptional gift for nurturing all her friends without discrimination. During the narrator’s last visit by the lake, Christa T. passes a red poppy to her through the window of the car. “It won’t last, but you won’t mind, will you?” This gesture makes a final, symbolic gift of self. Christa T. soon dies of her illness. The narrator reciprocates the gesture by speaking of Christa T. as she really was. She does so to ensure that her friend will be remembered not as always good or wise but as an irreplaceable source of value.

Bibliography

Bunyan, Anita. “Christa Wolf.” In Landmarks in German Women’s Writing, edited by Hilary Brown. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. This chapter places Wolf’s work within the context of her times and describes how being a woman has affected her writing and the reception of her works. Wolf is one of twelve German women writers discussed in this collection of essays.

Drees, Hajo. A Comprehensive Interpretation of the Life and Work of Christa Wolf, Twentieth Century German Writer. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002. An ambitious study of Wolf and her work that draws connections between her fiction and her life. Focuses on the manifestation of identity, socialization, and artistic expression in Wolf’s work.

Finney, Gail. Christa Wolf. New York: Twayne, 1999. Provides a thorough introduction to Wolf’s life and her works. Argues that Wolf’s life and career are both distinctive and representative of those of other writers of her generation.

Fries, Marilyn Sibley, ed. Responses to Christa Wolf: Critical Essays. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1989. A collection of twenty-one essays that were originally delivered at a special session on Christa Wolf held during the 1982 convention of the Modern Language Association of America. Includes a list of secondary articles and books and review articles on each of Wolf’s books.

Porter, Laurence M. “Christa Wolf, Citizen of the World.” In Women’s Vision in Western Literature: The Empathic Community. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005. Examines Wolf’s perspective on Naziism. Part of a study of women writers who have imagined what Porter calls empathic and tolerant communities to deal with the threat, experience, and aftermath of war.

Resch, Margit. Understanding Christa Wolf: Returning Home to a Foreign Land. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. Provides solid analyses of all of Wolf’s major works up to 1990. Supplemented by an informative chronology, a list of selected articles in English, and an annotated bibliography of critical works.