City of Angels by Christa Wolf

Author:Christa Wolf [Christa Wolf]
Language: eng
Format: epub

* * *

To continue. I reached for the red folder, the letters from this L. whom I would never meet and who was nonetheless so close to me. I saw her before my eyes, her figure, her face, her haircut—I heard the way she talked, her voice, emanating from the letters to my friend Emma with no date, but probably from sometime in the late seventies:

My dear,

Don’t pressure me. I know you want someone at your side who can give you back a little of your lost sense of home. I can well imagine that people can feel homeless even when they’re not in other countries, in the emigration, and that it might be even worse to have to feel that way in your own country. When we were still in France—before the war, when most of the French still clung to their belief in appeasement and stayed away from us with our frightened, threatening prophecies—my dear gentleman said once: It’s so painful to see the old continent go under, even if it probably deserves it. And it did go under, didn’t it, old Europe? Yes, I know—it was largely destroyed but is working to rebuild itself, and maybe, with the help of God and the Americans, it will succeed.

But I am an old woman and I’d rather the people there were maybe not so industrious, I want to see them reflecting on how that catastrophe came about and the role they themselves played in it. People who dig down into themselves to try to leave a better, more humane country to their children.

Can you promise me that that’s what I’d find?

You see. I’m not coming back, Emma. Do you know what my dear gentleman is working on at the moment? He is collecting everyday observations. He asks me and everyone else he meets about their daily habits, and he reads as many German newspapers as he can get and clips out whatever he finds about the daily life of his former countrymen. So that he won’t be surprised again, if they ever decide to plunge back from harmless everyday life into madness.

Oh, Emma, don’t be sad.

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