Christa Wolf by Sonja E. Klocke Jennifer R. Hosek

Author:Sonja E. Klocke,Jennifer R. Hosek
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2018-05-13T04:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

In the final pages of the novel, the protagonist travels to the emblematically named Death Valley with some friends from the Research Centre. In the inhospitable surroundings of the desert, she experiences a final vision, in which she flies over the valley towards Los Angeles, the so-called ‘city of angels’, accompanied by Angelina, her rather whimsical guardian angel.639Floating over a barren landscape filled with ghostly figures from the protagonist’s past, who emit an uncanny pull,640 it becomes clear to the protagonist that this is a leave-taking, a gesture of farewell towards Angelina, Los Angeles and, perhaps, her past life: ‘Eine Arbeit ist getan, Angelina, aber warum bleibt das Gefühl der Vollendung aus?’ [A piece of work has been finished, Angelina, but why is there no sense of completion?].641 There is no obvious sign of conclusion here, no glimpse of what Said describes as the ‘harmony and resolution’ often associated with old age; nor is there a sense of what he terms the ‘deliberately unproductive productiveness’ of the late writer.642 Instead, the narrator introduces a tension between competing conceptions of time:

Müßte ich jetzt nicht eine große Schleife fliegen? sagte ich. Zurück auf Anfang?

Mach doch, sagte sie [Angelina] ungerührt.

Und Jahre Arbeit? Einfach wegwerfen?

Warum nicht?

Das Alter, Angelina, das Alter verbietet es.

[Shouldn’t I now fly in a great loop? I said. Back to the beginning?

Go on then, she (Angelina) said, unmoved.

And years of work? Just throw them all away?

Why not?

Old age, Angelina. Old age won’t let me.]643

The protagonist is encouraged by Angelina to follow her wishes and return to the beginning, to recover the utopian potential which was not realized in the GDR and build on the intellectual heritage of the émigré writers to whom she is so attached. However, this cyclical notion of time, expressed spatially in the image of the loop, is juxtaposed with a linear model, according to which the protagonist’s old age and proximity to death cannot simply be reversed. Unlike Angelina, who is unaffected by the passage of time, the protagonist is ultimately bound to her aging body and unable to escape being pulled towards her final demise.

Wolf’s narrative thus depicts the narrator being drawn in two different directions, pulled unstoppably towards her death while nevertheless longing to pause and recover the lost potential in the past, to undo what will have been and revive what might have been. These competing temporalities coalesce in the image of the Paul Klee’s ‘Angelus Novus’, which Benjamin describes in his ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’ [‘On the Concept of History’], the figure of the Angel of History who is blown backwards into the future while gazing at the wreckage of modernity left behind him. Benjamin’s angel longs to linger, awaken the dead and piece together what has been smashed; however, he is driven irrevocably onwards by a storm blowing from paradise. Wolf refers explicitly to this image at two points in Stadt der Engel, as the protagonist reflects on her past in conversation with Peter Gutman. In particular, Wolf appears to evoke

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