Revelation by Concealment: The Use of History and Myth

It is the last of these examples that we will explore in this chapter. Christa Wolf was one of the most successful and well-known writers in the GDR. Initially committed to the rebuilding of the “antifascist” state, she became disillusioned with the practices of “really existing socialism” and increasingly critical of the regime. She was the subject of intense Stasi (open) observation, especially after the Biermann Affair in 1976, as she details in her autobiographical text Ein Tag im Jahr (2003) and fictionalises in Was bleibt (1990).4See also Georgina Paul, “‘Ich, Seherin, gehorte zum Palast,’” 92. As revealed in 1993, Wolf also served briefly as an IM between 1959 and 1962, something that she later claimed to have repressed (see Introduction).5A good summary of Wolf’s biography and political positioning is given in Borgwardt, Im Umgang mit der Macht, 267–393. A documentation of Wolf’s involvement with the Stasi as informant can be found in Vinke, Akteneinsicht Christa Wolf. Based loosely on the Cassandra6We will use the spelling “Cassandra” to refer to the figure in Greek mythology and “Kassandra” to refer to the figure in Wolf’s text. of Greek mythology, the eponymous protagonist—princess, priestess and prophetess of Troy—reflects on her life as she approaches the gates of Mycenae, where she knows she will be killed. Her memories of life in Troy are of an increasingly authoritarian state, whose ideals are repeatedly sacrificed in the name of winning a war (started on false pretences) with a more powerful enemy. A central aspect of that authoritarianism is an ever-expanding security apparatus, ruled over by the hated Eumelos, whose power grows as the war progresses:

Wolf’s post-Wende diary text, Ein Tag im Jahr, is shot through with references to Kassandra, interwoven with reflections on world politics in the late 1970s and early 1980s and the role of the writer in the GDR. This provides insight into how Wolf’s engagement with contemporary concerns, her fear of the very real threat of world-ending nuclear conflict and her reflections on her role as a socialist intellectual, fed into her reading and re-writing of the Cassandra myth. She describes “das tie­fere Eindringen in ihre [Kassandra’s] Zeit, in ihre soziale und geogra­fische Lage, ihr mögliches Bewußtsein und das gleichzeitig über jede Vorstellung hinaus fortschreitende Wachsen der Gefahr, in der wir ­selber sind” (the deeper penetration into her [Kassandra’s] time, into her social and geographical situation, her possible consciousness and at the same time the danger which we are in ourselves, which is continuing to grow beyond all imagination).10Wolf, Ein Tag im Jahr, 295–96. Italics in original. Wolf adds that she sees it as a kind of authenticity, “das mitzulieferen, was in den Tagen, Wochen, Monaten, in denen ein Manuskript entsteht, sonst noch geschieht” (to include the things that also happen in the days, weeks and months in which a manuscript is produced).11Wolf, Ein Tag im Jahr, 296. We would note that one of those “things that also happen” was the intense Stasi observation of Wolf and her family following the Biermann expatriation.12This entry is dated September 27, 1981. Indeed, the entry for the September 27, 1979 in Ein Tag im Jahr, suggests that Wolf was working on the Kassandra manuscript at the same time as Was bleibt.13Wolf, Ein Tag im Jahr, 252.

The four lectures published alongside (and in many ways, as part of) the story—initially in a companion volume and later as a compilation—are not set in a mythical time and as such were more direct in their critique of both East and West in the context of the nuclear arms race.14Mcdonald, “Who’s Afraid of Wolf’s Cassandra,” 267. This did not escape the notice of the Stasi, who describe the essays as formulating Wolf’s political and ideological critique in “Klartext” (plain language) in contrast to the story itself in which the questions Wolf raises reach the reader only through “komplizierte Vermittlungen” (complex mediations) which reduce the “politische Schärfe” (political sharpness) of Wolf’s message.15Assessment of the text “Kassandra” by Christa Wolf, dated June 4, 1983, 225. One of these lectures was subject to censorship with the GDR edition appearing as a “gekürzte Fassung” (shortened version) and with eight removed passages being indicated with ellipses. As Peter Graves argues, where censorship usually functions to conceal, in this act it also worked to reveal itself.16Graves, “Christa Wolf’s ‘Kassandra,’” 944. It is the readers who must do the work to complete this revelation; they must infer what the three dots might suggest in terms of the publication process and they must source and compare the editions to uncover what has been hidden.17See Graves for an analysis of the passages that were removed. Graves, “Christa Wolf’s ‘Kassandra.’” Angela Borgwardt notes that this act of revelation was a deliberate response by Wolf to the demand that she edit her text: she agreed to remove the passages only if their absence was made clear in the revised version.18Borgwardt, Im Umgang mit der Macht, 372–73. This was an effective method of bringing the censorship to the attention of GDR readers, as “Abschriften der Kürzungen kursierten und wurden mit großem Interesse aufgenommen” (copies of the cuts circulated and were received with great interest).19Borgwardt, Im Umgang mit der Macht, 373. The Stasi files also contain such a list, though it is unclear how it was compiled or by whom: Additions to the Aufbau Verlag edition of Christa Wolf’s “Kassandra,” no date. As Borgwardt points out, this episode also shows the effectiveness of using myth as a means of concealment: the story was published in its original form, tolerated “aus taktischen Überlegungen … getragen von der Hoffnung, dass die komplizierte Erzählweise und der schwierige Stoff sowieso nur einen eingeschänkten Leserkreis finden würde” (out of tactical considerations … borne by the hope that the complicated narrative style and the difficult subject matter would only find a limited readership anyway).20Borgwardt, Im Umgang mit der Macht, 373. This interpretation is supported by the assessment in the Stasi files. See Assessment of the text “Kassandra” by Christa Wolf, dated June 4, 1983.

But the essays do more than reveal the public secret of censorship: they also speak to Wolf’s understanding of the relationship between knowledge, fiction, and myth. W. E. Mcdonald notes the impact of setting the essays alongside the fictional text, with the two formats offering contrasting claims about their relationship to reality and truth: “a fictional autobiography of the last hours in the life of a mythical character followed directly by an account of the conditions under which that fiction was produced.”21Mcdonald, “Who’s Afraid of Wolf’s Cassandra,” 268. It should be noted that in the Aufbau edition of the text, the essays in fact precede the story. Mcdonald adds that despite these very different forms, “the literary themes of the Erzählung and the knowledge claims of the Voraussetzungen are all but identical.”22Mcdonald, “Who’s Afraid of Wolf’s Cassandra,” 269. The four essays indicate how Wolf perceived the relationship between history and myth and how literature founded on a mythical story might reveal knowledge about the present. The lectures—presented in different forms (travelogues, open letter, diary)—recount the process of writing and especially Wolf’s visits to Greece to explore the Cassandra mythology and the history and memory of the civilisation(s) from which those myths emerged. We see a complex interweaving of history, myth, and imagination in Wolf’s descriptions: she seeks out the material traces of the world in which Cassandra would have lived, yet also tries to read between the lines of the myth (written and dominated by men) to reimagine Cassandra as “Kassandra”—a feminist figure of antipatriarchal resistance who might offer the key to finding a different form of coexistence.

In the “Zweite Vorlesung” (Second Lecture, translated in the English edition as “The Travel Report Continues, and the Trail is Followed”), Wolf describes the relationship between myth and reality as complex and as deeply connected to the aesthetic:

Part of this means creating Kassandra’s inner world, her thoughts, feelings, and consciousness. This is a kind of knowledge that, as Felski notes, only literature can offer: the “ability to read minds.”24Felski, Uses of Literature, 89. In the story itself, this manifests in a shift after the first paragraph from the third to the first person: “Mit der Erzählung geh ich in den Tod” (“Keeping step with the story, I make my way into death,” Kassandra, 209; Cassandra, 3). In the first lecture, we see this construction of Kassandra’s emotional world in process. Wolf states: “Ich denke sie [Kassandra] mir frei von Gottesfurcht. Doch eine andre ‘Schuld’ mag ihr zu schaffen machen: daß sie imstande war, sich so weit außerhalb des eignen Volks zu stellen” (I imagine her [Cassandra] as free of religious awe. But another “guilt” may have given her trouble: She was able to position herself outside her own people,” “Erste Vorlesung,” 22; translated in the English edition as, “Travel Report about the Accidental Surfacing and Gradual Fabrication of a Literary Personage,” 152). Wolf’s construction of Kassandra’s “guilt” fits with her use of this figure as an analogy for the GDR writer (including herself), who risks being distanced from her “people” owing to a proximity to power. Kassandra comes to realise that she too “gehörte zum Palast” (“was owned by the palace,” Kassandra, 282; Cassandra, 69).25See Paul, “Ich Seherin gehörte zum Palast,” 95–96. The gradual loss of “Glaube” (belief) in the gods of ancient Greece (in the sense of devotion, rather than questioning their existence) can also be read in the light of Wolf’s own dwindling belief in really-existing socialism. In this way, Wolf’s ability as an author of fiction to “read minds” allows her to abstract from her own experience, explore, and present as a “standard of representation” the perils of closeness to political power. In this regard, the post-Wende revelations about Wolf’s brief involvement with the MfS as an IM shed new light on Kassandra’s statement that it is “der Eumelos in mir” (the Eumelos inside me) that prevented her from shouting the truth to the people (rather than only to Eumelos) that Helen of Troy was a fabrication, a lie designed to justify war (Kassandra, 282; Cassandra, 69).

Mcdonald explores Kassandra’s search for self-knowledge as being produced not (or not primarily) through rationality, but through stories, images and the body.26Hilzinger similarly states that “Kassandra lernt nicht nur, den eigenen Sinnen zu trauen, sondern auch, auf die Sprache ihres Körpers zu hören” (Kassandra learns not only to trust her own senses, but also to listen to the language of her body). Hilzinger, Christa Wolf, 137. A kind of knowledge that is uncertain and which Mcdonald contrasts with the rational, patriarchal, dominating knowledge of Eumelos: “There is no mode of knowing that does not also mislead or deceive. To claim otherwise would be to fall back into the overweening claims of patriarchy; only Eumelos and his kind can be ‘sure,’ and therefore beyond the reach of knowledge. Men’s claim for absolute knowledge is nothing but rationalized domination.”27Mcdonald, “Who’s Afraid of Wolf’s Cassandra,” 275. Kassandra literally (albeit not always willingly) speaks truth to power; she sees the future “weil sie den Mut hat, die wirklichen Verhältnisse der Gegenwart zu sehen” (“because she has the courage to see things as they really are in the present,” “Dritte Vorlesung,” 128; “A Work Diary…,” 238). As Köhler notes, Kassandra’s visions are not supernatural, but the result of her courage to examine reality as it is and—we might add, building on Mcdonald—on the basis of knowledge that is intuitive rather than calculated.28Köhler, Brückenschläge, 35. See also Hilzinger, Christa Wolf, 136. In this way, in Kassandra, Wolf also represents ways of knowing and speaking knowledge that resist the knowledge construction of the Stasi in its observation and recording of every last detail of its subjects, but almost total lack of interest in their humanity.

This is also part of Wolf’s “re-visioning of the myth”29Weingartz, “Rewriting Kassandra.” Klingmann describes it as “enthmythologisierter Mythos” (demythologised myth). See Klingmann, “Entmythologisierter Mythos.”—her re-versioning of the story based, as the Vorlesungen suggest, on a close “reading” of the Cassandra figure as the “first woman who knew the truth about the patriarchy, and whom everyone now believes.”30Mcdonald, “Who’s Afraid of Wolf’s Cassandra,” 279. In contrast to her later text, Medea: Stimmen (1996), Wolf’s story is not without hope: a hope that is embodied in the alternative existence led by the women and few men in the caves outside the boundaries of Troy.31See Köhler, Brückenschläge, 37. As Emmerich puts it: “Sie entwirft auch in der Imagination von Leben der Frauen in Höhlen am Skamandros eine Utopie des anderen Lebens” (she also designs in her imagining of the lives of the women in the caves by the Skamandros a utopia of another life).32Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR, 344. The idyll Wolf creates in Kassandra is a non-place, a utopia that conveys a desire, not a reality. This too is a kind of knowledge that fiction can offer—knowledge about what might be possible, not only what is.

We see that Wolf’s text(s), based in myth and passing the critical eye of the censors, could reveal knowledge about the secret police, life in a panopticon, the perils of collaboration, the threat posed to humanity by patriarchal forms of power, and about the potential for a future outside of those structures. And yet it requires a particular kind of reader also to read Kassandra as containing knowledge about the GDR; a reader who is able to read between the lines, to pick up on vocabulary choices that make a link to the present moment and that indicate what is not being said explicitly. As we have noted, GDR readers were often adept at this. Interestingly, the (unnamed) Stasi reviewer picks out a passage that can be read as a clear reference to the activities of the MfS as an example of where Wolf’s text appears to offer “unmittelbare Verdeutlichung” (direct clarity) of its otherwise concealed message: