Even the purest of artists thrive under tension. For some artists, politics has provided a crucial source of tension which has led to great achievement. Usually, it doesn’t. Why? Because artists, like critics, are often poor at gauging political realities. (Artists are usually better off not getting involved with “ideological confusion and violence,” as Greenberg put it.) Occasionally, though, problems become so acute that being unserious about the world is not an option—the 1930s was like this for some, and maybe a second Trump presidency will have a similar effect on artists and critics today, although there is real room for doubt.
It is hard to describe what this book is about, except to say it is a profound attempt to think through the relation between memory and fact. Maybe the point is best summarized with the phrase, “One has to invent for the truth’s sake.”
Christa T. is Wolf’s creation and a real person, the act of writing her is an act of production, and maybe the best picture of Communism we have. Wolf is a complicated figure whose work—Marxist, feminist, deeply invested in subjectivity—is tougher and more serious about art and politics than any contemporary writer I know.
When The Quest for Christa T. was first published in East Germany ten years ago, there was an immediate storm: bookshops in East Berlin were given instructions to sell it only to well-known customers professionally involved in literary matters; at the annual meeting of East German Writers Conference, Mrs Wolf's new book was condemmed. Yet the novel has nothing eplicity to do with politics.
