City of Angels: or, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud / A Novel by Wolf Christa

Author:Wolf, Christa [Wolf, Christa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2013-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

YOU WERE THERE. YOU SURVIVED

It didn’t destroy you. You can say what happened.

Actually, I don’t know, I said to Peter Gutman—it was one of the rare afternoons when I found him in his office, where he seemed to be busy with various important papers. Who is this reporting “I” supposed to be? It’s not just how much I’ve forgotten. What is maybe more troubling is that I’m not sure who’s doing the remembering. One of the many I’s who have taken shifts in me decided to take up residence in me, replacing one another in sequence, slowly or quickly. From which one of these I’s is the memory instrument extracting the memories? Well, Peter Gutman said, we all live with that fear—don’t we?—the fear that we won’t recognize ourselves.

Just take the postwar period, I said. The Führer was dead. An emptiness opened up and spread within you. You had a good pastor in the small town where your flight from the east had brought you, he was smart and appealing for you high school students, and he invited you to approach Christian belief in a new way under his guidance: as a religion of struggle. He banged the piano hard and said that was how you had to play and sing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” that was what Luther meant by the joyous struggle to get through life as a Christian. You went to church on Sundays for a while, sat in the gallery, and listened to him preach, he was happy and brave and intelligent, and you thought: Why not? But then, after a few months, you had no choice but to go to him and tell him that you wouldn’t be coming anymore, there was too much in his religion that you couldn’t believe: the immaculate conception, the resurrection, life after death. That’s a shame, he said, but you should be patient, he too had found his belief late, you had no way of knowing yet what God had planned for you.

I told this to Peter Gutman as proof that I was no longer susceptible to faith. The new faith must have found another way in. It snuck in through the head.

Yes, Peter Gutman said. Do you think you’re the only one who ever believed that reason is all-powerful?

I thought we were going to stay away from rhetorical questions … It was obvious, the old society whose ruling classes had caused the disaster had to be completely transformed. Obviously those who had been oppressed should now get their chance. And they did. The state supported the poor people, the families that up until then had brought forth factory workers and cleaning ladies; it made it possible for their sons and daughters to go to college; there was a new wind blowing in the universities, was that a bad thing?

No, Peter Gutman said. Who said it was?

* * *

THE SECRET LIFE OF J. EDGAR HOOVER. Right at the start of the Clinton era—in which it turned out

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