Christa Wolf was East Germany’s favourite writer, with her generally accessible style and within-the-limits criticisms of the regime. Criticism she managed to combine with an essential loyalty to its ‘socialist mission’. A mission which can be seen as either in fact a socialist mission or the rule of a privileged elite spouting stolen slogans and backed up by a police state that minimised (generally) its use of open violence through its deadly efficiency.

It was nevertheless a dictatorship ruling in the name of a populist ideology. Which of course gives A Model Childhood, as a long and probing account of the Nazi years and their immediate aftermath from the double viewpoint of her remembered childhood and as a respected GDR writer in 1975 a special, probably unintended, twist. A good deal of what she says about the previous dictatorship to the one she favoured seems to apply to both.

This contradiction apart, A Model Childhood is a fascinating account of its period from the point of view of the small-time small-town nobodies that her family were. It is full of peculiar, frightening but enlightening details about everyday life seen from a teenage perspective. For example, one of the slogans of the Hitler Mädeln (Nazi Girl Scouts), which certainly bears reflecting on, was ‘My will is your faith’, a quotation from the Germans’ famous Austrian leader himself. The inculcation of Nazi ultra-nationalism in the young is well demonstrated too by a text that hung up in the young Christa’s schoolroom ‘We feel as Germans, are of German mothers/ our thinking’s German, has been so from birth/ First come our people, then the many others/ Our homeland first, then the entire earth.’

The details are accompanied by Christa Wolf’s hindsight as she tries to bring together the hubristic Nazi past with its aftermath. She tells of witnessing as a child the destruction by arrogant Stormtroopers of her town’s Synagogue in 1938 and then comments «177 burning synagogues in 1938 make for ruined cities beyond number in 1945».

It is this accounting of course that is so difficult — have the Germans in fact been punished for destroying half of Europe and 80% of its Jews? Should they be? Or has fifty years assuaged their guilt automatically? On the whole it seems they would like

everyone else to think so, conveniently for them... They are thus spared the horror of remembering — a task Christa Wolf has at least attempted here — and perhaps more sadly they have missed the opportunity for seeking redemption through, for example, a sustained humanitarian contribution, rather than just trying to be the first onto the beach.

‘Ignorance is bliss.

Their ignorance allowed them to feel lukewarm. They were also lucky. No Jewish or Communist relatives or friends, no hereditary or mental diseases in the family... no ties to any foreign country, practically no knowledge of any foreign language, absolutely no leanings towards subversive thought or, worse, toward decadent or any other form of art. Cast in ill-fitting roles, they were required only to remain nobodies. And that seems to come easily to us. Ignore, overlook, neglect, deny, unlearn, obliterate, forget.

According to recent discoveries, the changeover of experiences from short-term to long-term memory supposedly takes place at night, through dreams. You imagine a nation of sleepers, a people whose dreaming brains are complying with the given command: Cancel cancel cancel. A nation of know-nothings who will later, when called to account, assert as one man, out of millions of mouths, that they remember nothing.’ p149

If Christa Wolf has received a lot of criticism since German reunification for her officially-sanctioned role as an East German star writer this is the text — a publishing scandal in her Communist homeland — on which the defence rests its case. It’s ostensible subject is the young woman Christa T., whose entire tragically short life-history is unraveled by a former school friend. Christa T. is a wonderful person; lively, intelligent, spirited. Too much so for the new society that is born in the Eastern Zone of Germany after the war; a bleak but initially hopeful world in Christa Wolf’s vision, emerging from a bleak and hopeless one; ‘We crossed the empty squares where the wind was still blowing, the wind that rises out of the ruins every day in cities after the war’.

Christa is a square peg and it becomes obvious from this story that the GDR in the 1950s and 60s was a hell of a place to be a nonconformist. But not, of course, the only such place and Quest for Christa T. is much more than an excellent social history of East Germany 1945-1968 with its switches of party line between authoritarian liberalism, extreme ‘Chinese’ collectivism of communal kitchens, and the Marxism-by-numbers of the Brezhnev era. It’s a tender, thoughtful tribute and lament for square pegs everywhere. It’s a kind of ‘tale from the Resistance’ as the moral fortitude of a naturally honest person is continually battered by the truncheon of unquestioning, complacent servants of the state, like the young doctor who tells her ‘the essence of health is adaptation or conformity’. Christa T., meanwhile, nurses ‘her dangerous wish for a pure and terrible perfection’ and in many ways her brilliant life goes to waste.

It’s very clear though, despite her protagonist’s possible lack of realism, where Christa Wolf stands between her woman character and the real world of ‘really-existing Socialism’ (as its shamefaced admirers used to call it).

The Quest for Christa T. is a call ‘To become oneself, with all one’s strength’. It’s not though just a call to the victims of classic totalitarian regimes, because Christa T. is out there in every known socio-political setup when she feels ‘the secret that made her life livable... relentlessly escaping from her... She saw herself melting away in an endless welter of deadly banal actions and clichés.’

Every society has a tendency to grind down the individual, to ‘socialise’ him or her for its own purposes and this uplifting and engrossing book shows the negative side of that process through the life of one individual, an individual of an especially original and creative type — the sort who are either destroyed or perhaps survive to be greatly celebrated.

‘She began her walk home. In front of a flower shop in the centre of the city a dozen people were standing and waiting silently for the short midnight flowering of a rare and brightly lit orchid. Silently Christa T. joined them. Then she walked home, comforted and much divided in her mind.

Later she couldn’t remember how she reached her room and got into bed. She overslept, woke up at noon, and had missed the seminar at which she was due to read a paper. She walked to the window and the snow in the yard was reduced now to a few small islands. Soon, she thought, happy for no reason, it’ll be time again for this ornamental stonework to be washed. She laughed and sang, went into Frau Schmidt’s kitchen and convinced her that she simply had to take a bath, though it was the middle of the week. Frau Schmidt acquiesced with a sigh but don’t fill it all the way up!

Christa T., laughing still, let the water come right to the top. Then she put on clean clothes and bought, with the last of her money, the expensive bird book she’s wanted for a long time. She sat in her torn leather chair and quietly looked at it. Tomorrow she’d think of all kinds of excuses; she was confident that she’d have convincing ones ready when the time came.’ p58