Caroline Summers Auth - Examining Text and Authorship in Translation What Remains of Christa Wolf - Palgrave Macmillan 20

EXAMINING
TEXT AND
AUTHORSHIP
IN What Remains of
Christa Wolf?
TRANSLATION
CAROLINE SUMMERS
Examining Text and Authorship in Translation
Caroline Summers
Examining Text and

Authorship in
Translation
What Remains of Christa Wolf?
Caroline Summers
University of Leeds
Derby, United Kingdom
ISBN 978-3-319-40182-9 ISBN 978-3-319-40183-6 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40183-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016961254
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and
transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar
or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or
the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional
claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover design by Samantha Johnson
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgements
The experience of writing this book has been an exhilarating and a

challenging one and was made possible by the support of a number of
individuals and institutions.
The book is a revised version of my PhD, submitted to the University
of Manchester in 2013, and as such owes much to the inspirational and
enthusiastic guidance of my supervisors, Dr Matthew Philpotts and
Professor Mona Baker. I am also indebted to Professor Stephen Parker
and Dr Morven Beaton-Thome for their insights and suggestions over
the course of the PhD and to Professor Stuart Taberner for sound advice
and wise words as the book was being prepared for publication.
The research for this study was funded by the Arts and Humanities
Research Council, without whose generosity it would have been impos-
sible for me to undertake the project, and who also supported my
very fruitful research trip to Berlin. Much gratitude is also due to the
Association of German Studies for financial assistance with my research
trip to New York Public Library. I am thankful to members of staff at the
Akademie der Künste, New York Public Library and the Staatsbibliothek
zu Berlin for their assistance during and after my visits to the archives.
Thanks are also due to Karen Malpede, Anna Kuhn and Helen Fehervary
for their responses to my inquiries and their encouraging comments. I
am obliged to Suhrkamp, FSG and UCP for permission to quote textual
and archival material and to reproduce book cover images and to Getty
v
vi Acknowledgements
Images and Magnum Photos for the permission to reproduce photo-

graphs by Tom Stoddart and Peter Marlow.
Finally, I would also like to thank my family, who are a constant source
of support and encouragement. I am especially grateful to my parents
for their confidence in me and to Sam for inexhaustible supplies of good
humour and common sense that have helped to steady me through many
a wobbly moment.
© Caroline Summers, 2016

Material from the Introduction and Chaps. 1, 3 and 4 first appeared in
‘What Remains: The Institutional Reframing of Authorship in Translated
Peritexts’, in Paratext in Translation, ed. Valerie Pellatt (Newcastle upon
Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013). Published here with the permis-
sion of Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Permissions
The following have been reprinted with permission:
Marlow, Peter (photographer) (1980) Living in the Shadow of the Wall
[photograph], courtesy of Magnum Photos.
Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC: Excerpts from
unpublished letters written by Roger Straus to Christa Wolf, Hermann
Kant, and Dietrich von Boetticher from 1969–1988. Copyright © 2017
by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Archived in Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
Inc. records. Manuscripts and Archives Division. The New York Public
Library. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.
Reprinted by permission of Suhrkamp Verlag: Extracts from Christa Wolf,
Nachdenken über Christa T. Roman. First publication by Mitteldeutscher
Verlag, Halle, 1968. © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 2007. All
rights reserved by and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin.
Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC: Approx.
1370 words (excerpts as specified) from THE QUEST FOR CHRISTA T.
Acknowledgements vii
by Christa Wolf, translated by Christopher Middleton. English translation

copyright © 1970 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.
Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC: Jacket
design by Jacqueline Schuman from CASSANDRA by Christa Wolf, trans-
lated by Jan van Heurck. Cover design © 1984 by Jacqueline Schuman.
Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC: Jacket
design by Cynthia Krupat from WHAT REMAINS AND OTHER
STORIES by Christa Wolf, translated by Heike Schwarzbauer and Rick
Takvorian. Jacket design © by Cynthia Krupat.
Reprinted by permission of the University of Chicago Press: Jacket
design by Toni Ellis and illustration by Adam McCauley from WHAT
REMAINS AND OTHER STORIES, by Christa Wolf, translated by
Heike Schwarzbauer and Rick Takvorian. Jacket design © by Toni Ellis
and illustration © by Adam McCauley.
Stoddart, Tom (photographer). (1990). Marital Aid [photograph].
Retrieved from: http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/license/85272996.
Contents
1 Introduction1
2 Understanding Translated Authorship23
3 The Subjective Narrator: Nachdenken über Christa T.59
4 The Author as Feminist: Kassandra113
5 Politics, Morality and Aesthetics: Two Translations

of Was bleibt161
6 Conclusion: What Remains?217
Bibliography229
Index253
ix
List of Abbreviations
Christa Wolf, Werke
Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from Wolf ’s German texts will be
given as volume and page numbers from the collected edition of
her Werke.
Christa Wolf: Werkausgabe in 13 Bänden (1999–2003) edited by Sonja
Hilzinger, Munich: Luchterhand.
English Translations of Wolf’s Texts: Editions Cited
AD The Author’s Dimension: Selected Essays (1993) translated by Jan van

Heurck, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
C Cassandra. A Novel and Four Essays (1984) translated by Jan van
Heurck, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.
GR ‘What Remains’ (1990) translated by Martin Chalmers, Granta 33:
141–158.
MC A Model Childhood (1980) translated by Ursule Molinaro and Hedwig
Rappolt, Virago Modern Classics edition (1995), London: Virago.
xi
xii List of Abbreviations
Q The Quest for Christa T. (1970) translated by Christopher Middleton,

New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.
WR What Remains and Other Stories (1993) translated by Heike
Schwarzbauer and Rick Takvorian, 1995 edition, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Archival Sources
AAV Archiv des Aufbau-Verlags, Handschriften, Staatsbibliothek zu

Berlin—Preußischer Kulturbesitz.
ADK Christa-Wolf-Archiv, Literaturarchiv, Akademie der Künste,
Berlin.
NYPL Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. records, Manuscripts and Archives
Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and
Tilden Foundations.
List of Figures
Fig. 4.1 Front cover design, Cassandra. A Novel and Four Essays, 1984.
Design © Jacqueline Schuman, reprinted by permission of
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 125
Fig. 5.1 “Marital Aid”, 1990. Photograph © Tom Stoddart,
reprinted by permission of Getty Images 172
Fig. 5.2 “Living in the Shadow of the Wall”, 1980. Photograph ©
Peter Marlow, reprinted by permission of Magnum Photos 179
Fig. 5.3 Front cover design, What Remains and Other Stories,
1993. Design © Cynthia Krupat, reprinted by
permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux 195
Fig. 5.4 Front cover design, What Remains and Other Stories, 1995.
Design © Toni Ellis and illustration © Adam McCauley,
reprinted by permission of University of Chicago Press 196
xiii
List of Tables
Table 3.1 Omission of deictic indicators in The Quest for Christa T. 72
Table 3.2 Translation of elliptical syntax in The Quest for Christa T. 88
Table 3.3 Translation of “man” in The Quest for Christa T. 102
Table 3.4 Translation of modal particles in The Quest for Christa T. 103
Table 3.5 Translation of character-focalised syntax in The Quest for
Christa T. 105
Table 5.1 Publisher’s peritexts inside Granta 33 176
xv
1
Introduction
Es geht (doch) um Christa Wolf

In the early months of 1993, the East German writer Christa Wolf, a promi-
nent figure in the literary and public discourses of the former German
Democratic Republic (GDR) and the newly reunified Germany, revealed
that she had worked as an Inoffizielle Mitarbeiterin, or unofficial collaborator,
for the East German Stasi from 1959 to 1962. Her admission was a highly
significant one that provoked sharply contrasting responses from commenta-
tors in Germany and further afield. In the already turbulent context of the
ongoing post-Reunification German Literaturstreit, during which the politi-
cal and moral integrity of GDR writers was publicly questioned and the qual-
ity of their writing denigrated as politically compromised (documented in
Anz 1991; Deiritz and Krauss 1991), Wolf was already a target for criticism
of the “failure” of East German public figures seen to have benefited from the
patronage of a repressive state (Huyssen 1991). Amongst the factors making
her a focus of such criticism was her publication of Was bleibt [What Remains]
(1990), a closely autobiographical text written in 1979 which describes the
experience of a female writer being observed by the Stasi, and which was
attacked by critics such as Frank Schirrmacher (1990) and Ulrich Greiner
© The Author(s) 2017 1

C. Summers, Examining Text and Authorship in Translation,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40183-6_1
2 Examining Text and Authorship in Translation
(1990) as a belated and insensitive attempt by the author to align herself

with the victims of repression under GDR socialism. In 1993, against this
background of angst-ridden and public debates about guilt and victimhood,
Wolf’s previous cooperation with the Stasi was interpreted by many German
commentators as indicative of complicity with a corrupt regime. Having been
considered for some time the “conscience of the GDR, even of the divided
Germany” (Brockmann 1991: 26), and having been regarded as a strong can-
didate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Wolf was now denounced by many.
The comment by influential literary critic and essayist Fritz Raddatz on Wolf
and fellow GDR writer Heiner Müller that “sie haben uns verraten: nicht im
Sinne von ‘angezeigt’, sondern in einem viel tieferen Sinne” (1993)1 reflected
the feeling shared by many German commentators (see Vinke 1993) that
Wolf’s revelation deeply undermined the concept of her authorship that had
lain at the heart of her relationship with her German readers. While some of
her Literaturstreit critics defended her in the wake of her Stasi revelation (see,
e.g. Schirrmacher 1993), there were also calls for her to return the Geschwister
Scholl Prize that had been awarded to her in 1987 since she was no longer
seen to embody the “moral, intellectual and aesthetic courage” that the prize
rewards (Geschwister Scholl Prize 2016). The German response in general
demonstrated the extent to which the writing of East German authors was
being scrutinised through a political and moral, not simply a literary, lens.
Meanwhile, institutional voices amongst Wolf ’s British and American
readers acted as a counterfoil to this strong German criticism. As noted by
Anz (1991: 217–235), non-German interest in the Literaturstreit and its
impact on literary discussion outside of Germany had been limited and
more moderate, conditioned by less turbulent discursive contexts else-
where. Wolf scholar Marilyn Fries also reflects on the difference between
German and non-German commentary:
Wenn Christa Wolf den um sie tobenden Literaturstreit in der (west)

deutschen Presse durchgestanden hat, hängt dies teilweise damit zusammen,
dass ihre Rezeption außerhalb Deutschlands in mancher Hinsicht ausge-
wogener und schlichter gewesen ist als in Deutschland. (Fries 1992: 174)2
1
“They have betrayed us: not in the sense of ‘reporting’ us, but in a much deeper sense.”
2
“If Christa Wolf has survived the Literaturstreit raging around her in the (West) German press, this
is partly due to the fact that her reception outside Germany has in some respects been more
balanced and simpler than in Germany.”
1 Introduction 3
In this context, following Wolf ’s 1993 admission of her Stasi involvement,

the Anglophone press was reluctant to moralise, instead urging hesitation
before judgment and relativising her revelation in light of her recognised
skill as a writer of fiction and the minimal consequences of her actions (e.g.
Christy 1993).3 Challenging the German criticism most directly, a group
of American academics spoke out on Wolf ’s behalf with an open letter
in the weekly German newspaper Die Zeit (“Das Kind mit dem Bade”
1993). Responding in particular to Raddatz’s accusations of betrayal, the
letter distinguished between biographical accuracy and literary value:
Dass sie die eigenen früheren Gespräche mit Stasi-Agenten in die Erzählung
Was bleibt (1990) nicht integrierte, macht diese Erzählung zwar biogra-
phisch weniger aufschlussreich und vielleicht weniger aufrichtig, ist aber
dem Anliegen der Erzählung nicht abträglich, die ja gerade die
Verinnerlichung der Überwachung, die graduelle Selbstzensur unter Druck
von außen thematisiert.4
It also expressed sympathy for Wolf ’s situation and condemned the

narrow-mindedness of her critics:
Wenig Verständnis haben wir daher für den rechthaberischen Gestus—vor

allem männlicher—Kritiker, die Christa Wolfs Verhalten vor mehr als
dreißig Jahren aus sicherem Abstand abzuurteilen und den Menschen und
die (selbst)kritische Schriftstellerin Christa Wolf auf ihre kurzfristige,
offensichtlich folgenlose Stasi-Tätigkeit zu reduzieren suchen. Wir haben
nicht die tröstliche Gewissheit, dass wir in derselben Lage anders als Christa
Wolf gehandelt hätten.5
3
While recognising that the term risks eliding the differences between diverse traditions,
“Anglophone” is used here to refer broadly to an English-speaking discursive space dominated by
American and British voices.
4
“The fact that she did not integrate her own early conversations with Stasi agents into the story
Was bleibt (1990) makes the story biographically less revealing and perhaps less honest, but is not
detrimental to the content of the story, which indeed thematises the internalisation of surveillance
and gradual self-censorship under external pressure.”
5
“We have little understanding, therefore, for the self-righteous gesturing of—primarily male—
critics who seek, from a safe distance, to condemn Christa Wolf ’s behaviour from over thirty years
ago and reduce the human being and the (self )critical writer Christa Wolf to her short-lived, evi-
dently inconsequential Stasi activity. We do not have the comforting certainty that, in the same
situation, we would have acted differently from Christa Wolf.”
Confronting Wolf ’s (male) critics for reducing their statements on the

value of her work to moral judgments of her Stasi activity, the letter made
a crucial distinction, between the apparently incidental question of bio-
graphical accuracy and the broad categories of experience with which
literature, it seemed, had a responsibility to engage. This distanced Wolf
and her writing from the specific discursive context that made her revela-
tion problematic for German commentators, and it also defused criticism
of her authorship. The genesis of the letter was not without its own ten-
sions and debates, but its publication was a strong statement of support
for Wolf from outside the German literary institution—so strong, in fact,
that the newspaper prefaced it with a cautionary statement highlight-
ing the “geographische und historische Entfernung” [geographical and
historical distance] of the undersigned from the contemporary situation
in Germany (Lauer 2007: 77–81). This directly contrasts Marilyn Fries’s
view that the non-German response to the Literaturstreit was not only
simpler and more balanced but also an important redemptive influence
on Wolf ’s position in German discourse. Meanwhile, despite their dif-
ferences, the comments by Lauer and Fries reflect a crucial dissonance
between German and Anglophone accounts of Wolf.
In the 20 years since the revelation, a much greater degree of similarity
has emerged in treatment of the controversy in German and Anglophone
accounts of Wolf ’s authorship. While contextually significant to Wolf ’s
work, the debates of the early 1990s have continued to be viewed in the
Anglophone academy and media as discussions whose importance should
not be exaggerated: they are given only fleeting mention in studies of Wolf
(Resch 1997; Finney 1999), and tributes in British and American newspa-
pers after her death in December 2011 referred to her Stasi involvement
in neutral or mitigating terms, explaining that Wolf “had been used by
the Stasi” (Webb 2011) or “had briefly served as an informant for the East
German secret police in the early 1960s” (Binder and Weber 2011). Over
time, German institutional accounts of Wolf ’s authorship also moved
away from a moralising focus on the difficult revelations of the early 1990s,
something which may reflect her enduring popular appeal even amidst the
critical maelstrom. Having spent time in the USA before returning to
the German literary scene, in 1994 Wolf gave public lectures and read-
ings to sold-out audiences at venues including Dresden’s Semperoper; her
1 Introduction 5
retelling of the Medea myth, published in 1996, was a bestseller. While

the book itself was vigorously criticised as well as praised by reviewers—
Wolf ’s biographer notes that “nie war die Wertschätzung ihres Werkes und
ihres Wirkens gespaltener als in diesen Jahren” (Magenau 2002: 437)6—
her popularity with readers during this period is testament to her symbolic
value in the midst of German East-West identity debates that ranged far
beyond literary authorship. Rather than remaining an institutional out-
cast, Wolf also regained a position as a prominent and respected intellec-
tual in Germany (Tate 2007: 195) as indicated for example by her return
to membership of the Berlin Akademie der Künste in 1994, the publica-
tion of a biography by Jörg Magenau (2002) following the completion of
the 12-volume Werke edition, the award of the Deutscher Bücherpreis the
same year for her life’s work, the public celebrations of her 80th birthday
in March 2009 and the award of the Thomas Mann Preis for Stadt der
Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr Freud (2012). Like the Anglophone obitu-
aries, German posthumous tributes to Wolf made little of her Stasi col-
laboration in the context of her life and work, and some even omitted to
mention it altogether (Harms 2011). This more recent similarity between
Anglophone and German accounts of Wolf ’s authorship, in comparison
with former differences, raises the question of what kind of relationship
exists between them, and of how this has developed and been manifested
in difference at moments of crisis. It suggests a reading of the translated
author as an inherently fragmented identity, and leads towards three key
observations on translated authorship.
Firstly, the reaction of Wolf ’s German and Anglophone commenta-
tors reveals the importance of established ideas and previous behaviour
in the framing of an author’s identity. This is seen most clearly in the
problematic consequences that face writers whose actions contradict their
established authorial identities or transgress against institutional “rules”
of authorship (see Burke 1998: 1–7 on Paul de Man; Philpotts 2007 on
Günter Eich). While Anz claims in his title that the Literaturstreit “geht
nicht um Christa Wolf ” [is not about Christa Wolf ], German criticism
of Wolf following her Stasi revelation reflected a strong sense of personal
betrayal. The weekly news magazine Der Spiegel noted the strength of this:
“Appreciation of her writing and work was never more divided than in those years.”
6
“Eindeutig ist: Das Material wirkt—anders als im Fall des Dramatikers

[Heiner] Müller—erdrückend” (“Die ängstliche Margarete” 1993).7 This
response suggests that the moral authority Wolf had previously held in
the GDR, thanks to her attempt to reconcile a commitment to socialism
with the pursuit of subjective experience in her writing, had already been
called into doubt by the publication of Was bleibt and was now thor-
oughly destabilised by the revelation of her short history of collaboration.
The comments of her Anglophone supporters, however, show that Wolf ’s
revelation had not presented the same challenge to realities accepted else-
where. The “Das Kind” letter emphasises the brevity and ineffectiveness
of her collaboration and draws on an understanding of Wolf as an author
of fiction by distinguishing between the biographical truth of the author’s
work and the inherent quality of her writing. Variation between the con-
texts in which Wolf ’s writing had been received, then, is crucial to under-
standing the fundamentally different accounts of her authorship reflected
in responses to the Stasi revelation.
Secondly, Wolf ’s case exposes a central paradox of translated author-
ship: namely, that a selective corpus of texts translated for a new target
culture, while still marketed as the work of the same “author”, can engen-
der a new understanding of the writer’s identity, one that is not simply
derived from the source culture and instead poses an authoritative chal-
lenge to the author-figure emerging from the “complete” body of work
in the source language. The differing German and Anglophone responses
to Wolf ’s 1993 revelation reveal the fragmentation of authorial identity
through translation and suggest a struggle for dominance between inter-
pretations of the writer’s authorship. Accounts of translation as a reflec-
tion of power relations (Niranjana 1992; Venuti 1995a; Tymoczko and
Gentzler 2002), and especially those specific to the global literary field
(Venuti 1998; Heilbron 1999; Casanova 2010; Sapiro 2010) have rec-
ognised the influence of Anglophone culture in determining interna-
tional trends and behaviours. Casanova’s model of translation as “unequal
exchange” (Casanova 2010), for example, recognises the challenge posed
to the authority of a “source” text (or in this case, a “source” account of the
“What is clear is that—unlike in the case of the dramatist [Heiner] Müller—the effect of the
7
material is crushing.”
1 Introduction 7
writer) once it is received by a more powerful target-language discourse.

Her approach allows that, once “consecrated” (ibid.: 9) by the linguistic
cultures that dominate international literary discourse, translated authors
can acquire a degree of autonomy from institutions that prescribe the
values of the domestic field. There is, then, a sense in which the frag-
mentation inherent in the translation of authorship acts as a defence for
the author against censure in the source culture. However, neither liter-
ary studies nor translation theories have considered in detail the multiple
and simultaneous understandings of a writer’s authorship that emerge
from the transfer of texts into new discursive contexts. Wolf ’s translation
into the economically and culturally powerful English language is a note-
worthy example of the reconstruction of authorship through translation
between discursive spaces.8
Thirdly, the Anglophone account of Wolf reveals how the translated
author, entering a new discourse as a literary “other”, is dependent on
institutions in the target culture for the selection, translation, circula-
tion and approval of her texts. In English, Wolf has attracted interest not
only from academics in German Studies (notably book-length studies by
Buehler 1984; Smith 1987; Kuhn 1988; Fries 1989; Love 1991; Resch
1997; Finney 1999; Polster 2012)9 but also from publishers, readers and
reviewers who do not speak German or share the experiences she nar-
rates, but who nonetheless feel that they know her writing and can iden-
tify with the themes she explores.10 Endorsement by English-speaking
voices in academia and publishing has been crucial to the endurance of
her international profile, not least at moments of crisis for her authorship
in Germany, and the continuing economic and cultural dominance of
the Anglophone literary field means that her international authorship has
been strongly shaped by her authorial presence in the Anglophone c ultural
8
There is, of course, much that could be said about the differences between Wolf ’s authorial identi-
ties in the two former German states, and about how the tensions between these have been resolved
since 1989. A comparison of East and West German responses to Wolf ’s earlier writing is found in
von Ankum (1992).
9
See de Wild (1995) for a comprehensive bibliography of scholarship on Wolf up to the
mid-1990s.
10
The English translations of Wolf ’s writing have been reviewed by major British and American
newspapers and journals including the Guardian and Observer, Times and Times Literary Supplement,
London Review of Books, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and The Nation.
sphere dominated by British and American publishing institutions.

Crucially, the translator is one part of this framework, but is by no means
the only agent of institutional interests in the translation process: this
book explores the involvement of multiple institutional agents in the
reconstruction of authorship through the process of translation.
Wolf in English Translation

Wolf ’s texts are available in more than 30 different languages, and she
has been (whether willingly or not) one of the most important intel-
lectual ambassadors of the GDR, both before and since its collapse. In
this sense, her case exemplifies the enduring and influential nationalist
focus of the global literary field that has been identified and problema-
tised in studies of world literature (Damrosch 2003). This nationalised
categorisation of Wolf ’s texts initially presented an obstacle to her suc-
cess in English translation, since her writing was seen to represent too
accurately the political discourses that contextualised its publication in
German. Her first published text, Moskauer Novelle (1961) is seen by
some to reflect “the moment of Christa Wolf ’s strongest, least ambivalent
commitment to the socialism that underlay the founding of the GDR in
1949” (Finney 1999: 14), and has never been translated into English. A
translation of Der geteilte Himmel (1963) was commissioned by the GDR
state-owned publisher Seven Seas in 1965: Joan Becker’s Divided Heaven
failed to attract much interest in the USA or Britain, leaving apparently
its only Anglophone reviewer unimpressed by its “fatigued traditional-
ism of style and structure” (Caute 1967). It was later published in the
United States by Adler’s Foreign Books, in an edition including an exten-
sive bibliography and a lengthy foreword by Jack Zipes (1976), at the
time a Professor of German at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
The foreword is heavy with explanatory material that encourages a read-
ing of the text as a socialist artefact rather than a work of literature and
does nothing to broaden its appeal (Summers 2015). The only English
translation of Wolf ’s writing to have received detailed academic scrutiny,
it is described as “the most obvious attempt to adjust Wolf ’s text to the
masculine aesthetics of Socialist Realism” (von Ankum 1993: 229) and is
1 Introduction 9
accused of failing “to render the book’s unmistakable internal awareness

that such ideological ‘truth’ has neither absolute nor eternal validity but
rather represents an individually chosen commitment” (Koerner 1984:
214). Following Divided Heaven, however, there was a significant shift in
Anglophone engagement with Wolf ’s writing.
Published in 1970, the English translation of Nachdenken über Christa
T. (1968) as The Quest for Christa T. was much more warmly received
than Divided Heaven. Amounting for some commentators in the west-
ern Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) to a rejection of GDR social-
ism (Reich-Ranicki 1969), the text duly marks a turning-point in Wolf ’s
authorship, internationally as well as in the GDR. With its subjective
narrative style and implicit criticism of dogmatic socialism, Christa T. has
been described as “ein Werk aus der DDR, das man nicht als solches lesen
muss” (Fries 1992: 178).11 The obstacles encountered in Christa T.’s path
to publication (see Drescher 1991) also marked a phase of greater auton-
omy in Wolf ’s authorship, developing from the more orthodox stance in
her earlier writing and suggesting that here was a writer who could be
defined against her geographical context, rather than by it. Resounding
approval in West Germany and censure in the East, and reports in the
American press of East German institutional resistance to the text (“East
Germans Denounce Novel on Woman’s Travail” 1969), seem to have
attracted the attention of the American publisher Farrar Straus Giroux
(FSG) and its chairman Roger Straus. Publishing numerous Pulitzer and
Nobel Prize-winning authors such as T.S. Eliot and including writers such
as Czesław Miłosz, who spoke out against Soviet activities during the Cold
War, FSG occupied a powerful mainstream position in the American
literary field, aligned with officially sanctioned values: John Farrar was
consulted in 1955, for example, for advice about a new appointment to
the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom (Stonor Saunders 1999:
242). FSG wielded enough economic power and cultural authority to
consecrate Wolf as a translated author compatible with the political and
cultural interests of the powerful American literary field. In particular,
Wolf benefited from correspondence with Straus, who wrote personally
to declare his enthusiasm for her writing and maintained contact with her
11
“A work from the GDR that one doesn’t have to read as such.”
over a number of years. Thirty-five archived letters between them, written

between 1969 and 1988, reveal Straus’s continuing efforts to promote
Wolf ’s writing and his eagerness to arrange a meeting (NYPL 396/7-9;
NYPL 712/8-9, 19, 24). His interest in her is affirmed by his letter to
Hermann Kant in 1978, protesting against the apparent exclusion of Wolf
and six others from the East German writers’ congress (NYPL 396/9).12
Personal endorsement by influential public figures such as Straus was
instrumental in establishing Wolf ’s success in English translation since,
as a translated author and an East European writer during the Cold
War, she had limited access to Anglophone literary discourse. While she
continued to exercise influence in the GDR, as in her leadership of the
writers’ protest against the expatriation of Wolf Biermann in 1976, her
voice had not yet acquired the same authority in the Anglophone field.
There was little interest in her essays or interviews, and a translation of
the closely autobiographical Kindheitsmuster (1976) was not published
until 1980, by which time The Quest for Christa T. was out of print.13
Also indicating the instability of Wolf ’s Anglophone authorship, Fries
describes enduring scholarly reluctance to engage with Wolf ’s writing
even into the early 1980s, which she attributes to a continuing wariness
of East German literature (Fries 1989: 7). Nonetheless, Wolf ’s popular-
ity experienced a boost during the 1980s following the publication of
Kein Ort. Nirgends (1979) in translation as No Place on Earth (1982) and
especially of Kassandra. Vier Vorlesungen. Eine Erzählung (1983), which
acquired what Anna Kuhn (1988: 191) describes as “almost cultish popu-
larity” in translation as Cassandra: a Novel and Four Essays in 1984.
Representing for many English-speaking readers a convincing foray
into feminism, Cassandra brought about a surge in Wolf ’s popularity and
was interpreted as the culmination of her attempts to “universalise her
message” (Fries 1989: 24). The appeal of the text in both academic and
12
Straus’s letter attracted attention: it was reported in the New York Times (Mitgang 1978), sup-
ported by a similar letter from Stefan Heym’s American publisher (NYPL 396/9), acknowledged by
Luchterhand (NYPL 396/9) and received a public reply from Kant in Neues Deutschland (Kant
1978).
13
At this point, only one volume of Wolf ’s non-fiction writing had been published in translation
(The Reader and the Writer 1977). Like Divided Heaven, this Seven Seas translation was hardly
acknowledged by the Anglophone field.
1 Introduction 11
commercial contexts, as shown by the response from reviewers (especially

French 1984; Pawel 1984) and its enduring centrality in studies of Wolf ’s
writing, marks the peak of her popularity with Anglophone readers. The
1980s also marked the beginning of Wolf ’s collaboration with Virago,
a British publisher of writing for and by women, and saw her landmark
visit to the University of Ohio (in collaboration with the Coalition of
Women in German) where she gave several readings and public inter-
views. The enthusiasm of female Germanists at leading American univer-
sities, such as Helen Fehervary (Ohio State University), Anna Kuhn (UC
Davis, University of California), Marilyn Fries (Yale and Michigan), Sara
Lennox (UMass Amherst) and Myra Love (UC Berkeley and Purdue,
Indiana), identifies Kassandra and its translation as the focus of a period
of increased popularity for Wolf in Anglophone literary and scholarly dis-
course. Störfall. Nachrichten eines Tages (1987) was translated as Accident.
A Day’s News in 1989, and was the last of the translations to appear before
the context of Wolf ’s authorship was dramatically altered by German
Reunification, the Literaturstreit and her Stasi revelation.
While representing a moment of crisis for Wolf in Germany, the
debates of the early 1990s influenced only in part the Anglophone pub-
lication and reception of Wolf ’s short narrative Was bleibt, which was
published in English in 1993 alongside seven other short texts by Wolf,
in the collection What Remains and Other Stories. In a striking difference
from German parallel discourse on the text, the promotional material
for the translated collection minimises the profile of the Literaturstreit
debates, and the moderate Anglophone reaction to Wolf ’s revelation is
reflected in the comments in reviews. Since Reunification, and regardless
of the scandals faced by Wolf in Germany, English translations of her
writing have continued to emerge and to circulate. In 1995, only two
years after Wolf ’s Stasi revelation, Virago published new UK editions of
Christa T. and No Place on Earth as part of their Modern Classics series.
Her post-Reunification writing has also been widely translated: of these
texts, her retelling of the story of Medea in Medea. Stimmen (1996) has
attracted the most attention in the Anglophone field since its translation
as Medea: A Modern Retelling in 1998, not least because of the com-
parisons it invites with Cassandra. Luise von Flotow’s new translation
of Der geteilte Himmel (They Divided the Sky 2013) was well received, in
particular for its recreation of Wolf ’s narrative style in comparison with

the earlier translation (“Divided Soul” 2013; Summers 2015), and the
recent translations of City of Angels or the Overcoat of Dr Freud (Damion
Searls 2013) and August (Katy Derbyshire 2014) also met with a positive
response, with City of Angels making the longlist for the website Three
Percent’s Best Translated Fiction Award in 2014.
The published translations intersect with scholarly discourse on Wolf,
with academic voices participating as reviewers or translators in the
presentation of her writing to an Anglophone audience. However, the
translations are often viewed with suspicion in the scholarship. Academic
accounts of Wolf ’s writing are many and diverse, but what they share is
an acknowledgment of tension between a focus on the German-language
texts, as the basis for analytical observations about her authorship, and
a partial reliance on the published translations, quoted instead of the
German texts for the convenience of the non-German-speaking reader.
Some scholars explicitly challenge the translations: Resch ignores them in
favour of her own renderings of the text, suggesting that this is “because
the published translations often render the original text inadequately”
(1997: xi), while Kuhn (1988) makes use of the published translations
where possible but uses endnotes to admit reservations about particular
details.14 Although approaches vary, amongst those who have read the
German texts there is a shared sense of dissatisfaction with the English
translations, which is at its most intense in von Ankum’s and Koerner’s
criticisms of Becker’s Divided Heaven but which also extends to the later,
commercially successful translations (Faull 2000).
The reviewers, too, have sometimes bemoaned the lack of quality in
the translations. Michael Hulse (1982) described A Model Childhood as
“quite awful” and asked “must German literature, which in any case is
little read by the British, continue to be served by unreliable translators?”
and Margaret McHaffie (1983) warned of No Place on Earth that “the
translator has not always solved the difficulties or risen to the demands
of his task. His [sic] version is sometimes inept and curiously uneven in
tone”. Some reviewers identified inferiority of style as inherent in the
14
Kuhn’s comments include pointing out where the translation does not reflect the full meaning of
the text (1988: 233, 242), could be improved by a better choice of words (ibid.: 245) or is misleading
(ibid.: 247).
1 Introduction 13
process of translation: Fiona MacCarthy (1982) advised the reader of A

Model Childhood to “not be disconcerted by its wonkiness of style, that
peculiar nightmare no-man’s-land language of translation” and Peter
Redgrove (1985) surmised that “I suspect the tale [of Cassandra] suffers
in translation”. Joyce Crick’s damning summary of the Wolf translations
to date, in her review of Cassandra (1985), identifies a shared problem
between her translators:
More importantly than the local problems, the general difficulty in trans-
lating Christa Wolf lies in rendering her distinctive combination of inten-
sity of tone (which does not exclude a buried irony) with the broken syntax
and spoken rhythms of recollection and reflection. She is worth better than
the attempt that has been made here.
Despite this criticism of the English texts, the Anglophone response

to Wolf ’s Stasi revelation and the continuing commercial demand for
(and academic interaction with) translations of her writing show that
they have contributed to an understanding of her as an author of some
quality and interest. The English translations and the criticism they have
attracted raise two particularly interesting points: firstly, that there is a
tension between the perceived quality of the translations and their sub-
stantial influence on Wolf ’s authorial identity in the English-speaking
world; and secondly, that translators are by no means the only agents
with the authority to define authorship for the translated writer.
As the means by which Wolf ’s writing is made accessible to her signifi-
cant Anglophone readership, the numerous translations are at the centre
of her authorial (re)construction in English. However, it is crucial to also
look beyond the work of translators, to explore the interventions of other
powerful players in publishing institutions and the literary field. This
study explores how Wolf ’s Anglophone authorship has been constructed
by means of the shifts in language and context that characterise the trans-
lation of her writing into English. Moving far beyond general criticism
of the translations as individual or collected texts, the aim here is not to
provide a comparative study of Wolf ’s German and English authorial
identities but rather to explore in detail the translation of authorship by
multiple institutional agents and by contexts in the target culture that are
themselves unstable and shifting. Looking beyond the example of Christa

Wolf and the specific relationship of interdependence between German
and Anglophone accounts of her authorship, this study addresses the
question of how multiple, contingent authorial identities enable a writer
to acquire and maintain international status.
hat Remains? Understanding Wolf’s

W
Anglophone Authorship
The idea that authorship is a multiple and unstable category is explored
by post-structuralist theories that dismantle the authorial position as a
unified controlling force within the literary text.15 While Barthes (1977)
pronounces the death of the author in favour of the authority of the
reader and of the text itself, Foucault (1977) argues for the ongoing sig-
nificance of authorship as a discursive category, or author-function, that
prescribes textual meaning and is not identical to the identity of the indi-
vidual writer. In this context, while the author is no longer the sole source
of textual authority, the relationship between authorship and the text is
one of mutual dependence, since “the subject who is writing is part of
the work” (Foucault 1987: 186). By publishing a literary text, a writer
implicitly requests the status of “author”, an identity shaped both by inter-
pretations of the text and by its relation to the institutions in which it
is embedded. Discursive authorities such as publishers, editors, reviewers
and readers act as (distorting) mirrors of the author-function, maintain-
ing and constantly reconstructing it. In return, this construct provides a
framework for textual interpretation, identified under the name of the
writer as the author-function. For Foucault, the author is crucially “what
gives the disturbing language of fiction its nodes of coherence” (1981:
58), simultaneously uniting individual textual statements and embedding
writer and texts in the wider networks of the literary institution.
Translation, which stimulates the emergence of a new author-function
by enabling the circulation of the writer’s texts in new textual and contex-
tual forms, threatens to disrupt this coherence and reveals how an “author”
A discussion of key post-structuralist ideas about authorship is given in Burke (1998).
15
1 Introduction 15
is reconstructed through linguistic transfer and through repositioning in

a new discursive context. As the named agent of linguistic transfer, the
translator enters the frame as a contributor to the author’s construction.
Translation Studies scholars have recognised this, and attempts to apply
Foucault to the translated text have sought to define a “translator-function”
(Díaz-Diocaretz 1985; Robinson 1997; Arrojo 1997; Hermans 1999).
Foreshadowing the subversive or interventionist practices that have been
popular with feminist and postcolonial translators since the 1990s, Díaz-
Diocaretz reflects on how it might be possible for the translator to exploit
her position as “dual internal addresser/encoder” by “re-enacting” the
translated text to disrupt rather than affirm a normative authorial voice
(1985: 34). However, as Hermans notes, the discursive response to the
threat posed by translation to the stability and authority of the author-
function has been the emergence of a restraining “translator-function”
able to “contain the exponential increase in signification and plurivocal-
ity which translation brings about” (1999: 64). Even while speaking, the
voice of the translator is made “invisible” (Venuti 1995a) or muted by
the discursively circulating hierarchy of agents and texts that continues to
consolidate the author as origin. Reinforcing this hierarchy, more recent
work on translation and authorship has explored the status of the transla-
tor as author and concludes that significant legally inscribed differences
between author and translator activity prevent the translator from being
regarded as the author of the text (Pym 2011). This demarcation of roles
is discursively embedded in the metalanguage and practices of transla-
tion, in readers’ expectations of translated texts and in the legal condi-
tions under which translation takes place. Douglas Robinson therefore
suggests that the translator-function should be understood as “a social
construct created and wielded by the target culture as a vehicle for the
“reliable” or “faithful” or “accurate” (i.e. ideologically regulated) transfer
of foreign texts for domestic use” (1997: 69) or “a collective social con-
struct projected onto (and educated into) any given translator in order to
conform his or her professional activity to hegemonic norms” (ibid.: 75).
Thus, translation itself has come to confirm “the singularity of intent,
the coincidence of voice, the illusion of equivalence and, of course, the
unmistakable relation of power and authority” identified with the author
(Hermans 1999: 64).
While the prescribed invisibility of the translator-function demands

deference to authorial authority, then, the transfer of author and text to a
new discursive context has significant implications for the interpretation
of authorship. While the translator may not be seen explicitly as author,
his or her creative input into the translated text is undeniable (Bassnett
and Bush 2006; Loffredo and Perteghella 2006; Nord 2011; Bassnett
2011); meanwhile, Foucault says of the author-function that “its status
and its manner of reception are regulated by the culture in which it circu-
lates” (1977: 123), and the different responses to Wolf ’s 1993 revelation
demonstrate this. Wolf ’s example also contributes to an understanding of
the power relationship between these contexts, or between what is com-
monly seen as the “original” source-culture account and a “derivative”
target-culture understanding of authorship. A unilateral source-to-target
relationship of influence, drawing on an understanding of translation as
derivative, has been dismantled by translation studies scholars such as
Rosemary Arrojo (1997), who observes the implications of deconstruc-
tionist and post-structuralist criticism for the concept of authorship in
translation. She joins Lawrence Venuti in calling for “a hermeneutic that
reads the translation as a text in its own right, as a weave of connotations,
allusions and discourses specific to the target-language culture” (Venuti
1992: 8, cited in Arrojo 1997: 24), and goes on to comment that
the most important consequence poststructuralism could bring to transla-

tion studies is precisely a thorough revision of the relationships that have
generally been established between originals and translations, between
authors and translators, and between translators and their readers, which
are no longer adequately described in terms of the traditional notions of
meaning recovery, fidelity or equivalence. (1997: 30)
A worthwhile addition to this list, as this book suggests, would be a

new examination of the relationship between “original” and “translated”
author-functions. Wolf ’s example reveals how the translated writer, lack-
ing a sustained presence in target-language discourse, is especially reliant
on others embedded in that context for the construction of her author-
function; the critical discourse of 1990–1993 in German and English
also exemplifies the capacity of a translated authorial identity to remain
1 Introduction 17
stable while the author’s source-culture institutional position may be

under threat.16
Wolf ’s example demonstrates the construction of translated author-
ship over time and through productive tensions with institutionalised
and controlling interests outside the writer’s “home” discourse. This dia-
chronic and multi-discursive behaviour of the author-function is not
explicitly addressed by Foucault’s model. With this in mind, Chap. 2
looks to sociological theory to explore how the author-function, purport-
ing to offer a coherent and comprehensible account of the author’s writ-
ing and actions, can be understood as one of the essential social narratives
that make up the contextualising framework of the literary text. Narrative
can be understood as an inherent structuring impulse in social and indi-
vidual understandings of reality, in which “any given set of real events
can be emplotted in a number of ways” (White 1987: 44). Accounting
for the pervasive presence of narration, sociologists have identified differ-
ent types of narrative that reflect the various discursive levels on which
it operates, some of which are explored here (Hart 1992; Gergen and
Gergen 1997; Carr 1997; Crites 1997; Pratt 2003). Others, most notably
Bruner (1991) and Somers and Gibson (1994), have attempted to iden-
tify the characteristics shared by all narrative accounts.17 In particular,
the temporal aspect of narrative (recognising both its development over
time and the temporal positioning of events) and the inherent possibil-
ity of simultaneous and different accounts of events, bring to Foucault’s
theory the possibility for diachronic and contrastive analysis of multiple
author-functions.
Translation plays a vital role of negotiation between cultural and
linguistic spaces in which different narratives dominate (Baker 2006).
German or Anglophone discourse, or culture, can be seen as a space in
which various individual and collective narratives draw on one another
for validation and regeneration, and the narratives of “international”
16
Wolf ’s biographer Magenau alludes to this when he suggests that the steady income of royalties
from Wolf ’s work in translation (not exclusively into English) provided the necessary financial
stability for her husband Gerhard to set up the publishing house Janus Press in 1990 (2002: 421).
17
Somers and Gibson’s four characteristics cover many of the same features identified by Bruner,
but their model is more flexible than his more prescriptive concept of narratives as “tool kits”
(Bruner 1991: 2).
iscourse are those emerging as dominant from the tensions between the
d
(nationally or linguistically defined) discourses contained within it. The
translated author-function is no more and no less “true” than the writer’s
function in the source culture, since both are narrated constructions; it
is, however, framed by different discursive frameworks that validate it as
the “truth” about the author and categorise her writing within powerful
narratives of morality. The combination of narrative with a Foucauldian
understanding of discourse therefore offers a strong basis from which to
understand the frames that control the narration of translated author-
ship, using Wolf ’s example. By exploring how the category of authorship
is altered when it crosses and re-crosses discursive boundaries, this study
of Wolf addresses the unanswered question of how multiple contingent
authorial selves can emerge and interact to assign “international” status to
the writer. The thematic tendencies identified in this study of Wolf ’s writ-
ing in English translation are three amongst many discursive frames that
inform the construction of meaning in the translated texts and the result-
ing Anglophone understanding of Wolf ’s authorship. While they are
neither discrete nor comprehensive, these interpretive shifts are central
to the influential re-narration of Wolf ’s identity in English translation.
Beginning with Nachdenken über Christa T., Wolf ’s first successfully
translated text, Chap. 3 explores the boundary between self and other
in narratives of authorship, as well as in the text. The (translated) author
is positioned in relation to the “self ” of the institutions that control dis-
course, so from a Foucauldian point of view, the author’s success in target-
culture discourse depends on the consonance of her author-function
with the ordering unities of that discourse, and on its submissiveness
to their “prohibitions” (Foucault 1981: 52). The Wolf translations show
how this conflict between the translated and the translating self is often
negotiated in the translation of the text, and by the discursive agents
who promote its circulation, bringing about shifts in the narration of
the author-function. The comparative analysis in this chapter engages in
detail with the translator’s creative agency and the text of the translation,
to demonstrate how textual choices generate a “voice” that reframes the
author-function in particular social narratives. Building on a Bakhtinian
understanding of the inherent heteroglossia, or multi-voicedness, of the
literary text (Bakhtin and Medvedev 1978) and using Genette’s (1980)
1 Introduction 19
three categories of time, level and person to examine the construction of

narrative voice, an exploration of the voice of the literary narrator in
Christa T. and its English translation reveals the social narratives that
reflect the absorption of text and author into a new discursive context. An
important focus, here, is how translator Christopher Middleton’s status as
“an individual with linguistic and cultural skills and his … own agenda”
(Gentzler 2002: 216) identifies him inescapably as a “co-producer of the
discourse” (Hermans 1996: 197) in the translated text and thus as a cru-
cial narrator of the author-function.
Lying at the base of individual and group identities, for example in
the categories we use to describe our values and experiences, narrative
defines them as neither static nor impermeable. Chapter 4 explores how
the instability of narrative concepts at the heart of social movements
contributes to the framing of the author-function, looking at Wolf ’s
alignment with feminist interests in Anglophone discourse. In particu-
lar since the publication of Kassandra and its English translation, Wolf
has been associated in Anglophone discourse with concepts of femi-
nism embedded in Anglo-American narratives of experience. Such an
alliance can be a positive one for the “other”, translated author, but it
also constitutes a shift in interpretation for a writer such as Wolf, whose
East German context and own comments on her writing reflect some
considerable differences from Anglo-American feminist approaches.
Framing of authorship is seen here in the responses of reviewers and
also in academic engagement with Wolf ’s writing, revealing how the
participation of the media and other discursive authorities in the con-
struction of the author-function not only contributes generally to
maintain the institutions in which the author circulates but also spe-
cifically to the determination and definition of what or who an author
“is”. In this chapter, Genette’s theory of paratexts (1997a) is especially
useful in its identification of sites of authorial narration in material
that presents the text to a potential readership, examining the epitexts
(framing material not included in the book itself, such as reviews, pro-
motional material and letters) that circulate around the translation of
Cassandra and focusing in particular on the discursive authority of non-
translatorial, journalistic and scholarly voices as narrators of a writer’s
translated authorship.
Hayden White (1980: 18) describes the narrative instinct as “the

impulse to moralise”, identifying the way in which the narration of
events is directly linked to the moral frameworks in which the narra-
tor is embedded. Chapter 5 explores this where it is most evident, in
relation to Wolf ’s morally sensitive Stasi revelation and the publication
of Was bleibt. In cases such as Wolf ’s, the “right to narrate” authorship
has engendered the right to adjudicate: her author-function in Germany
depreciated in value in the early 1990s as powerful institutional voices
with the right to narrate her authorship embedded her actions in moral
frameworks that condemned her, while her Anglophone author-function
has been narrated within British and American discourses that do not
emphasise her collaboration with the Stasi. Anna Kuhn describes the
basis of the German author-function Wolf was seen to have betrayed as
the illusion that she was an “impeccable moral authority of the GDR,
an image that the media itself had been instrumental in construct-
ing” (1994: 200). However, since the translation of Wolf ’s writing into
English, amongst many other languages, has made her texts accessible to
a powerful Anglophone cultural space, the right to narrate and moralise
her author-function has been assumed by authorities external to German
literary discourse, resulting in an Anglophone author-function able to
operate independently from German responses and even to challenge
them. To explore this, Chap. 5 looks again at framing in paratexts to the
translation and this time explores the peritexts, material elements of the
object of the book (such as cover design, notes and information about
the author), for two translations of Wolf ’s controversial text Was bleibt.
Looking beyond named individuals such as the translator and reviewer,
this chapter focuses on the intervention of publishing institutions in the
construction of authorship.
Wolf ’s particular case demands reflection on the struggles for author-
ity and control that characterise relationships between linguistically and
nationally defined (and politically opposed) discourses, demonstrating
how the construction of multiple author-functions through translation
might to a certain extent insure the writer against the instability of the
source-culture author-function. It encourages observation of the framing
of the translated text as it is managed by three types of discursive author-
ity in particular: the translator, the scholar or reviewer, and the publisher.
1 Introduction 21
These three powerful sources of influence on a target-culture reading of

authorship illustrate the construction of the translated author-function at
a “geographical and historical distance” from the source, which in Wolf ’s
case can be said to have resulted in a powerful social narrative that con-
trasts and challenges German accounts of her authorship. By combining
Foucault’s model of authorship with a sociological theory of narrative,
and by focusing on three specific dimensions of authorial construction
in translation, the book looks beyond a monolingual approach to offer a
new model for understanding the construction of translated authorship.
2
Understanding Translated Authorship
The developing trajectory of Wolf ’s Anglophone authorship, and

especially her experience in the early 1990s, demonstrates how the

profile of an author is defined not only by the writer herself but also
by the powerful social agents and institutions that control the publica-
tion and reception of literature. These authorities have been instrumen-
tal in the emergence and circulation of Wolf ’s writing both within and
beyond the cultural and linguistic boundaries of the German Democratic
Republic (GDR), the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and reunified
Germany; the resulting multiple understandings of her authorship exist
in relation to various different national and linguistic contexts but also
compete with one another for authority. One helpful way of understand-
ing this shifting construction of authorship (and therefore also a starting
point for conceptualising translated authorship) is suggested by Foucault:
discussing authorship as a contingent and shifting category, he explains
the author’s role as a “function”, one of the myriad institutionalised dis-
cursive structures that regulate knowledge, experience and power.
Foucault sees the concept of authorship as “a principle of grouping
of discourses, conceived as the unity and origin of their meanings, as
the focus of their coherence” (1981: 58), so that, for example, the name

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40183-6_2
“Christa Wolf ” acts as a focus of knowledge about the writer. In this way
it becomes, for him, “what gives the disturbing language of fiction its
unities, its nodes of coherence, its insertion in the real” (ibid.), bridging
the gap between the living writer and the text and therefore creating a
basis for interpretation. Inevitably, this process of accumulated knowl-
edge about the writer produces inconsistencies and tensions, and so the
author-function contributes to the ordering of discourse by “neutralis[ing]
the contradictions that are found in a series of texts” (1977: 128). In
other words, ambiguity is eliminated in the interests of a coherent sense
of authorial identity. Foucault refers to St Jerome’s definition of exegesis
for the principles that guide this search for coherence, namely the qual-
ity of the writing, a writer’s theoretical position (e.g. political or religious
beliefs), stylistic traits and the text’s consistency with the historical period
in which it was written. Texts that do not uphold these established pat-
terns are either excluded from the author-function or (re)framed in a way
that justifies their inconsistency. This “neutralising” task includes adjust-
ment to accommodate new aspects of the author’s social and literary
identities as they evolve.
Foucault reveals that, whilst the author-function is a constraining
unity, it is made fluid and complex by the constant struggles for power
between the institutions that control the discourse in which it circulates.
These processes of tension and resolution form the basis of his “genealog-
ical” approach to discourse, which seeks out the ruptures and differences
that inevitably occur in the construction of what are perceived to be con-
stant and unitary meanings. He explains that, whilst belief in identifiable
authorship still directs the search for meaning in a text, the individual
writer is no longer able to claim sovereignty over the writing or even over
her own relationship to it: the function is a subject position “which can
be occupied by any individual” (1972: 105). Thus, the author-function
is a constantly varying construction, resulting from dynamic relation-
ships between the writer, the texts and their reception and the discursive
position ascribed to the author. Foucault notes the contextualising power
of the institution when he remarks that “the author-function is tied to
the legal and institutional systems that circumscribe, determine and
regulate the realm of discourses” (1977: 130). Applied practically to the
publication of a text, this suggests the possibility not only for the writer
2 Understanding Translated Authorship 25
but also for such agents as editors, translators, designers and reviewers
to intervene in the process of textual production and to articulate the
author-function.
Crucially, Foucault notes that the construction of authorship is not a
unilateral process: he describes it as a construction in which the writer is
embedded “as he receives it from his epoch, or as he modifies it in his turn”
(1981: 59). Rather than simply being defined by institutional agents, the
author-function is positioned at the centre of a complex dynamic network
that enables the individual to reconceive her own authorship and the
institutional norms that prescribe it. In this, the author-function differs
significantly from the linear concept of the implied author (Booth 1961:
70–77; Chatman 1978; Rimmon-Kenan 1983; Kindt and Müller 2006;
Schmid 2009), which identifies a unilateral path of communication from
the “real author” to the “real reader”. However, while the implied author
model has been extended to translation to incorporate the figure of the
“implied translator” (Schiavi 1996; O’Sullivan 2003), the considerable
implications of linguistic transfer for the status of authorship are not fully
accounted for in Foucault’s predominantly monolingual approach.
In translation, too, it seems that the author-function acts as a con-
straining and unifying category, since the author, and not the translator,
is legally and discursively inscribed as the origin and creator of the text
(Pym 2011). However, the intervention of the translator’s creative agency
and the shift to a new linguistic and institutional context inevitably bring
about changes in the means by which the writer’s authorship is defined.
At first glance, Foucault certainly seems sensitive to the potential changes
in author-function that could be brought about by linguistic shift. He
identifies the basic unit of discourse as the statement, “an ultimate, unde-
composable element that can be isolated and introduced into a set of
relations with other similar elements” (1972: 90) and which therefore has
great epistemological and ontological force. Foucault explains that, while
it is not directly mappable onto grammatical or syntactic frameworks,
the essence of the statement (and therefore of knowledge and existence)
is constituted in part by the materiality of language. He also notes that
the context provided by surrounding statements (or “field of stabilisa-
tion”) is significant to the content and status of a statement, and that
shifts in this field result in the formation of a new statement: Wolf ’s
experience and changed status in the debates characterising the German

literary field in the early 1990s demonstrate this effect on interpretations
of an author’s writing. These ideas seem to acknowledge translation as
the formation of new statements through shifts in linguistic material and
context; in fact, however, speaking generally of interlingual translation,
Foucault identifies some translation situations as offering identical state-
ments to the source, on the basis that the intention and context of the
statement remain the same (1972: 116). By assigning to linguistic trans-
fer the possible status of a shift in material situatedness rather than of a
new core proposition, he positions translation as a procedure inherently
“of classification, of ordering, of distribution” (1981: 56), and explains
the translated text as a secondary entity that contributes to the circulation
of a primary source. Effectively, then, Foucault suggests the continuing
primacy of the source-culture author-function in the understanding of
the translated writer’s authorship.
Foucault classifies translation as “commentary” on an original state-
ment, meaning that it “must say for the first time what had, nonetheless,
already been said, and must tirelessly repeat what had, however, never been
said” (1981: 58). In this context, the translation is framed as a ripple of
affirmation or the renewal of an existing source, an approach not at odds
with Benjaminian or Derridean theories of translation that call for diver-
gence from the source in the interest of preserving its afterlife (Derrida
1985; Benjamin 1996). However, while these approaches remain focused
on the life of the text, Foucault’s discursive model irresistibly returns to
the question of authorship and how this can be identified in the context
of translation. When he claims that “the author is asked to account for
the unity of the texts which are placed under his name” (ibid.), Foucault
seems to identify not simply the author but more specifically the author
in the source language as the principal unifying force. Like the lay reader
who assumes that reading Wolf ’s texts in translation equates to “reading
Wolf ”, Foucault does not account for the inevitable differences of con-
text and agency that characterise a translated text. However, as Wolf ’s
example shows, by repositioning the text in a new discourse, translation
disrupts the unity of textual voice and origin by emerging as a text in its
own right through the agency of the translator and the intervention of
other discursive agents such as publishers and reviewers. Thus, translation
is more than simply a ripple, pure or distorted, from the source statement:
it is the rupture of that statement and the creation of new meaning in a
different context, from which a distinct author-function emerges.
In the context of his genealogical mode of inquiry, Foucault moves
beyond identifying the constraints imposed by the category of “author”
to engage with the multiplicity of agents and sites of construction by
which the author-function is circulated. Adopting the translated author
as an object of study expands this discussion by necessitating a perspec-
tive that transcends linguistic boundaries to explore the question of why
the “author” of the source text is not the same “author” in whose name
it appears in other languages. The translator is identified as only one of a
number of (for the most part) named and visible discursive agents in the
circulation of the text, all of whom challenge the authority and ownership
of the writer over the author-function. Here, the study of Christa Wolf ’s
author-function in translation explores this fragmented construction of
authorship in a broad, discursive context, and it will be important to look
not only at the processes of authorial construction but also at the domi-
nant strands of knowledge and experience in the discourse in which this
takes place. It is notable, then, that the selective and coherence-driven
process of authorial construction, as well as the inevitable difference and
intersection between various contextually and institutionally motivated
accounts of a writer’s authorship, suggests some strong parallels between
the Foucauldian author-function and the sociological concept of narra-
tive that has been influential in recent Translation Studies research.
Narrating Authorship in Translation

Sociological theorists have explored the social narrative as a mode of
experience that reflects the constant state of flux in which we find our-
selves; it is the means by which we comprehend every aspect of our
experience, and is constitutive of individual as well as group identities.
Like Foucault’s understanding of discourse, the sociological narrative
is bound not by inert structures but by a coherent and cohesive set of
rules and practices that inform the circulation of ideas. Narrative theory
shares with Foucauldian discourse a focus on the shifting, non-discrete
nature of these practices and an inquiry into the conditions in which an

“enunciative function” (Foucault 1972: 99–118) is able to operate. Like
Foucault, theorists of narrative have sought not to distinguish between
ideas or statements as true and false, but rather to see how particular
types of narratives and their behaviours operate as a basis for under-
standing reality. The narrative approach therefore has great relevance for
the translation of literature between contexts in which different values
dominate, and usefully complements Foucault’s understanding of the
construction of authorship.
ypes of Narrative: The Personal, the Institutional

T
and the Abstract
In order to better understand the epistemological and ontological claim

exercised by narrative, theorists have attempted to categorise the levels
on which it operates. Typologies commonly differentiate between the
stories of the individual and the wider narratives with which these inter-
act in order to integrate with the collective, though distinctions are also
made, for example, between sacred stories, which transcend the conscious
world, and mundane stories, which occur within man’s phenomenological
horizons (Crites 1997: 31). Narrative models cover a typological spec-
trum from the particular reality of the individual to apparently objective,
abstract and universal truths and have been productively combined with
research into translation and interpreting in recent years, most signifi-
cantly through the use of Somers and Gibson’s 1994 typology and nar-
rative features (Baker 2006, 2007, 2010a, b; Baldo 2008; Boéri 2008;
Al Sharif 2009; Harding 2011, 2012). The narrative approach echoes
the denial of the sovereignty and stability of the narrative subject that is
central to Foucault’s discussion of authorship, and the permeability of
the boundaries between types of narrative reflects the dynamic nature
of socially constructed (and translated) meaning. It is not difficult to see
how these fluid boundaries between narratives and narrative types facili-
tate transfer between social and cultural spaces, allowing and even neces-
sitating a multiplicity of identities under the name of a single author.
Three common types of narrative emerge from sociological approaches
as particularly significant: the personal, the institutional and the abstract.
Personal Narratives: Stories of the Individual or the Self
The telling of stories equips individuals with a sense of self, enabling us to

connect with the world. We constantly come into contact with personal
narratives about ourselves and others, which can also be described, for
example, as first-order narratives (Carr 1997: 23), self-narratives (Gergen
and Gergen 1997: 162) or ontological narratives (Somers and Gibson
1994), and these function “to define who we are; this is in turn a precon-
dition for knowing what to do” (ibid.: 61). What is more, the inherently
social, relational nature of narration (which requires both a narrator and
a narratee) means that the personal narrative inevitably draws on those
of surrounding individuals and groups as “blueprints” (Baker 2006: 29),
resulting in shared narratives that relate experiences common to groups
of individuals. These are constantly reiterated as they are “told and retold
by numerous members of society over a long period of time” (ibid.). In
this sense, our stories always refer and defer to those of others, so we are,
crucially, “never more (and sometimes less) than co-authors of our own
narratives” (MacIntyre 1997: 251). The author-function draws on personal
narratives in so far as it constructs the identity of the individual writer
and is often explicitly aligned with the events and personal experiences
that constitute the writer’s biography. Like MacIntyre, Foucault suggests
(through the identification of the author as a “subject position” that can be
occupied by those other than the writer) that the self is not the sole narra-
tor of its own narrative: the author, a discursive construction, is narrated by
the social groups of which the writer, the creative individual, forms a part
and in whose shared narratives she is embedded. The narration of “Christa
Wolf ” is thus carried out not only by the writer herself but also by the pub-
lishers and publicists, translators, editors, readers, reviewers and other insti-
tutional agents involved in the production and reception of her writing.
As well as contributing to the narration of her authorship, personal
narratives play a central role in Wolf ’s writing. Many of her texts have
strong parallels with her own life, for example, the death of Wolf ’s pro-
tagonist Christa T. which recalls that of Wolf ’s friend Christa Tabbert, or
the experience of being observed by the Stasi as narrated in Was bleibt.
Wolf ’s concept of subjective authenticity, detailed in her essayistic writings
such as “Selbstinterview” or “Lesen und Schreiben”, employs personal
experience as a method of involving the reader, and the narratives of

characters (both real and fictional), of the narrator and of the author
herself, constantly overlap and intersect, revealing a network of shared
and individual experience. By exposing herself and her characters as sub-
jective story-tellers, the writer offers the reader a view of the process of
narrative construction and reveals the interdependence of the personal
narratives of the writer and the narrator. Significantly, her writing reflects
on the construction of individual identities as part of a group, and shared
personal narratives ensure the reader’s participation in the construction of
meaning: the narrator Nelly’s account in Kindheitsmuster of her family’s
flight from the Soviets in 1945, for example, invokes a narrative shared
by other Germans forced to leave their homes after the arrival of occupy-
ing troops at the end of the war. The prominence of personal narratives
in Wolf ’s texts is at the heart of her subjective-authentic approach, which
attempts to create a shared narrative out of the experiences of individuals
rather than recruiting them into official formulations.
These personal narratives, which are essential to authorship as under-
stood by Foucault and which play a particular role in Wolf ’s writing, are
vulnerable to renarration in translation. As Baker comments, “the interde-
pendence between the personal and the collective means that the retelling
is inevitably constrained by the shared linguistic and narrative resources
available in the new setting” (2006: 28–29). In translation, both the text
and the writer’s autobiographical experience are renarrated through the
words of a different writing self, as Anthony Pym has shown using prag-
matic concepts from Habermas and Goffman (2011). Translation refor-
mulates personal narratives as the text is refracted through the agency of
the translator and repositioned in the new narrative context of the target
culture, in which interpretations of the text, and of the authorship aris-
ing from it, are subject to change. Textual meaning may be lost through
omission or the absence of a resonating narrative in the receiving dis-
course: the specifically German (or East German) shared narratives that
feature in Wolf ’s texts and invite identification from German readers lose
their resonance when translated into a receiving discourse that lacks such
particular narratives. This is not specific to Wolf: Wiebke Sievers (2003)
shows how adaptation to target-culture narratives has informed the trans-
lation and marketing of several German-language writers including the
East German emigrant Sarah Kirsch. Thus, the author’s personal narrative
is recontextualised and translations of Wolf ’s writing reposition the nar-
ratives of writer and characters, and specifically the author-function,
in the framework of the target culture in which reader, translator and
translated text are situated (Foucault’s “field of stabilisation”). The dif-
ferent narratives that dominate in this context can contribute to a shift
in, for example, what St Jerome would call the author’s perceived “theo-
retical position”. As Foucault’s discursive model suggests, this framework
is largely informed by the narratives of societal institutions, which can
be identified as narrated and narrating subjects above the level of the
individual or the shared group narrative.
Institutional Narratives
The power relation between the teller and receiver of a narrative can vary:
individuals are unavoidably located in social contexts imbued with their
own founding and dominant narratives, and inversely, too, “the viability
of complex social institutions, large or small, benefits from the wide-
spread capability of [their] members to employ a circumscribed range of
narrative forms” (Gergen and Gergen 1997: 172). These institutional nar-
ratives (or public narratives, as Somers and Gibson call them) both pre-
empt and derive from the narrative of the individual so that they “help
to link men’s lives as well as orienting them to a common public world”
(Crites 1997: 40). They are crucially different from shared personal nar-
ratives in that, whilst a shared personal narrative concerns common expe-
rience and lacks clearly defined boundaries of influence, an institutional
narrative is circulated by a particular institution or a collective defined as
a group. Such institutions circulate narratives not only about themselves
but also about the world. As Baker (2006: 33) points out, “literature of
course constitutes one of the most powerful institutions for disseminat-
ing public narratives in any society”, and the author-function can be seen
as instrumental in this. In her study of globalisation and German lit-
erature, for example, Anke Biendarra (2012: 35) identifies economically
motivated “ritual patterns of identification” that inform the marketing of
literature and shape the projection of authorial identities.
In connection with institutional narratives of self, theorists discuss the

narrative status of theoretical concepts. Drawing on Somers and Gibson’s
category of conceptual narratives, or the “behind the scenes” construc-
tion of theoretical concepts, Baker describes as disciplinary narratives
“the stories and explanations that scholars in any field elaborate for them-
selves and others about their object of inquiry” (2006: 39). Baker’s choice
of “discipline” as a term invites another link to Foucault: “within its own
limits, each discipline recognises true and false propositions; but it pushes
back a whole teratology of knowledge beyond its margins” (Foucault
1981: 60). Clusters of disciplinary narratives about, for example, author-
ship contribute to a discursive understanding of what an author is: this
observation is coherent with St Jerome’s identification of continuity with
historical period as a criterion for believable authorship, and is borne
out, for example, in Biendarra’s comments on the shifting paradigm of
authorship in the German field during its move towards globalisation in
the last thirty years. Foucault repeatedly reveals the constraints exercised
on the individual by the institution and discusses how this limitation
and potential penalisation is inherent in the construction of authorship,
explaining the emergence of literary authorship as an institutionally nar-
rated category since “speeches and books were assigned real authors only
when the author became subject to punishment and to the extent that
his discourse was considered transgressive” (1977: 124). The author-
function, which is not a neutral interpretive tool but rather an ideologi-
cally loaded category, is thus informed by the narratives of institutional
self and theoretical concepts that contextualise it.
Wolf ’s author-function is embedded in the “truths” about author-
ship that emerge within political and literary institutions in various dis-
cursive contexts, and is contextualised by the narratives that circulate
about particular linguistic and national contexts. Foucauldian analysis
of GDR society has identified the role played by institutions of power
in regulating discourse through procedures such as literary censorship
(Emmerich 1991; Fox 1993; Bathrick 1995; Rider 1995; Prager 2004).
In this context, institutional narratives of the state, the family and the
workplace prescribed the roles of individuals within a socialist whole.
The institutionally allocated role of authors as mouthpieces of institu-
tional narratives endowed them with political responsibility, positioning
each author-function as allied or opposed to the structures of power. This

socio-political commitment expected from the writer was itself embedded
in institutional narratives of “author”, “art” or “text”, categories and
terms by which literature is defined. Specifically for Wolf, the officially
sanctioned aesthetic framework of Socialist Realism can be interpreted
as an institutional narrative based on “true and false propositions” about
the value of art, and about the responsibility of the artist. Wolf ’s turn
away from articulating these institutional narratives, and towards the
exploration of the subjective through the exposition of personal narra-
tives in her writing, marked her gradual departure from Socialist Realist
models (Buehler 1984). Her progression from the fixed character types
of Moskauer Novelle to the more independently minded, emotionally
motivated protagonists and narrators of texts such as Nachdenken über
Christa T. demonstrates a move, inside and outside the texts, away from
adherence to institutional narratives. By voicing personal narratives, Wolf
advocated a shift in the writer’s agency and invited the individual reader
and writer to participate in a bilateral, disruptive and critical relationship
with the text and with the narratives of socialist institutions. Moving
away from the public and institutional position of author in order to
exploit her private and personal experience as writer, her writing ques-
tioned dominant East German institutional narratives of authorship.
In translation, Wolf ’s writing and her author-function have been
embedded in new institutional narratives in which authorship has not
been framed by the same expectation of political commitment, and
where different aesthetic norms have defined literary quality. In this con-
text, narratives of the GDR are seen to belong to an undesirable “other”
(see also Sievers 2003), and Wolf ’s growing popularity in English trans-
lation has been accompanied by an increasing distancing of her writing
project from the narratives of East Germany, although her critique of her
national context continues to play a part in defining her universal appeal
by marking her as a dissident writer: “to be different from those who
are different makes you the same” (Bhabha 1994: 64). Wolf ’s incorpora-
tion by Anglophone literary institutions into an institutional narrative of
“international writers” as distinct from “GDR writers” has contributed
significantly to the narration of her Anglophone author-function, not only
by drawing on the marketable characteristic of “international” identity
but also through the selective marginalisation of politically problematic

institutional narratives specific to the GDR. These have been replaced, in
the interpretation of Wolf ’s writing and the shaping of her authorship, by
institutional narratives not bounded by nationality (such as a narrative of
“women writers”) and by apparently supra-national narratives that define
and examine the medium of literature. Viewed from a position outside
the institutional narratives of the GDR, the narrative of authorship as a
position of political responsibility is understood as “other”, and in this
discursive context, innovation or divergence from East German narra-
tives of authorship has been framed as dissident. Wolf ’s “weakness” as an
author in the East German context thus becomes her strength in transla-
tion, as the institutional narrative of authorship is repositioned alongside
those encouraging self-reflective, individualist and certainly non-socialist
literature. Translation therefore reveals both continuity and rupture in
the author-function: whilst authorship as a category appears to transcend
linguistic and discursive boundaries, the expectation placed on the author
varies with the institutional narratives in which she is embedded.
Abstract Narratives
Beyond individuals and societal institutions, narrative theory identi-

fies abstract concepts as narratable entities that are nonetheless shifting
and contingent. This type of narrative includes what Carr designates as
second-order narratives, or those above the level of practical constitu-
tion of identity (1997: 23); it also encompasses what Crites distinguishes
as sacred stories, or ritualised and allusive narratives that “[create] men’s
sense of self and world” (1997: 31). Somers and Gibson use the term
metanarratives, referring to stories “in which we are embedded as con-
temporary actors in history” (1994: 63). These encode theories about
the world by positioning in relation to one another the abstract catego-
ries (such as gender, race and nationality) with which we conceptual-
ise our identity. They provide a contextual map within which personal
and institutional narratives are arranged in meaningful relationships
to one another, and they place at our disposal the language we require
for categorising experience. By adhering to these narratives and to the
(often binary) frameworks they offer, we confirm them as compasses of

morality and as differentiating categories for our experience. Thus, we
assume a basis of absolute, “denarrativised” values at the heart of our
experience that are in fact negotiable and contingent. Similarly, Foucault
recognises the contingency and unreliability of the structures that control
our experience: he exposes as literary-historical constructions the “uni-
ties of discourse” such as “tradition” and “development”, which establish
and maintain a desire for continuity (1972: 23–24). Foucault’s examples
show precisely how abstract narratives permeate the institutional level
when they become individualised unities: the institutional category of
the specific literary tradition, for example, draws on an abstract narrative
of (non-specific) “tradition” in order to collect events together as discrete
narratives and assign them a particular interpretive value.
Wolf ’s author-function, certainly until 1989 and arguably for some
time afterwards, was embedded in the binary abstract narratives that
determined poles of opposition during the Cold War. Somers describes
such oppositions (tension between East and West, between Capitalism
and Communism) as “the epic dramas of our time” (1992: 605), divid-
ing the world up into poles of allegiance with (or against) which we align
ourselves. She explains that the inherent “other” in such binaries requires
that individuals identifying with one position are placed in conflict with
its perceived opposite, but that this can also leave them feeling alienated
if their personal narratives challenge the unequivocal notions of identity
offered by the abstract binary. Wolf ’s writing is preoccupied with this feel-
ing of displacement, reflecting not only her commitment to the develop-
ment of a socialist state but also her frustration at the uncompromising
manner in which its institutions seek to assert themselves. Her narrators
find refuge in shared personal narratives, and she appeals to widely famil-
iar abstract narratives of peace and female experience (not always in their
institutional manifestation as “isms”) that transcend her specifically (East)
German position but are also, for her, inseparable from her conscious-
ness of the geopolitical binary in which she is located. Together with
Wolf ’s perceived dissidence, this appeal to apparently universal experi-
ence beyond her own individual or national specificity increases the value
of the author-function outside a German discursive space, as Biendarra
has observed, for example, in the case of Judith Hermann (2012: 33).
In translation, these abstract narratives are deceptive in their a pparent

universality. They are so widely circulated and apparently self-evident
that they can underlie the arguments of strongly opposed individuals and
groups, and it is precisely in this that they display their cultural contin-
gency (see e.g. a founding narrative of democracy at the heart of post-
war administrations both in the USA and in East Germany). Baker has
discussed how, in zones of conflict, essentialised and binary principles of
identity guide distinctions between “us” and “them” by circulating narra-
tives of homogeneity within these groups and of the differences between
them (2010a: 198). Implicit in the act of translation, too, is the closing
of a gap between a translating “self ” and a translated “other”: Sievers
(2003) unpicks this binary, drawing on the work of Bernhard Waldenfels
to show how an East German “other” (in her example, Sarah Kirsch) that
disrupts and undermines the reality of the Anglophone translating self
is often transformed by translation into a controllable “other” defined
by opposition to the translating self. Thus, the apparent otherness of the
translated author or text as it is presented (even by the translation that
seeks to foreground its difference) may serve primarily to reinforce target-
culture narratives of self. This is a tendency Michaela Wolf has also iden-
tified as inherent in the process of literary translation:
Translation can be interpreted as a strategy to consolidate the cultural

Other, a process which implies not only the fixation of prevailing ide-
ologies and of cultural filters but also the blocking of any autonomous
dynamics of cultural representation. This phenomenon can be observed,
for instance, at different levels of the production of translations, from
the selection of texts to be translated to the modes of distribution, all
marked by power relations, including the translation strategies adopted.
(2002: 188)
Abstract narratives reveal the narration of Wolf ’s dissidence as a discur-

sive strategy by which she was aligned in the FRG and in Anglophone
receiving cultures as being on the “right” side of dominant Cold War
binaries, positioning her in opposition to GDR-specific institutional nar-
ratives and so also as a resistant voice against a Cold War “other”. In the
context of these Anglophone “self ” and “other” narratives, Wolf ’s critical
engagement with GDR socialism has at times been understood as dissent
against a less specific socialist “other”. Even where such narratives are not
explicit, it is possible to see how they underlie assumptions about her
authorship: the identification of Wolf as an East German author with
appeal for a Western readership ensures that the “international” relevance
of her authorship is understood by Anglophone institutions as meaning
“both East and West”, paradoxically affirming this division whilst also
being seen to overcome it.
These three broad categories of narrative offer insights into the levels on
which Foucault’s author-function is constructed, and which create new
meaning in the process of linguistic and cultural transfer. Meanwhile,
Foucault’s discussion of discourse as the essential context for the con-
struction of authorship shows how these categories are permeable and
co-exist within the identity of the author. Examination of the various
narrative levels on which the author-function is constructed reveals the
tensions that characterise Wolf ’s authorship in any discursive context,
and the shifts on and between these levels that take place in the process of
transfer into a new context. The instinctive and constant negotiation of
these tensions is essential to the authorisation of Wolf ’s authorship by the
institutions and dominant narratives of Anglophone literary discourse,
and narrative theorists have attempted to account for this negotiation by
identifying characteristic behaviours of the narrative form.
Features of Narrative: Relation and Selection
Foucault describes the constant reassertion of the author-function as a

non-spontaneous, “complex operation whose purpose is to construct
the rational identity we call an author” (1977: 127); in other words,
it is an ongoing process of negotiation between various discursive
agents and interests. His discussion of the organisational principles
that regulate this resonates with the features of narrative that have
been identified most notably by Bruner (1991) and by Somers and
Gibson (1994) but are also echoed in other sociological models. Like
Foucault’s discursive characteristics, these features are modes of devel-
opment and expression that operate both overtly and subliminally as
organisational norms in structures of knowledge and communication.
The two main strands of narrative behaviour that emerge from the
various models are, firstly, the construction of relational significance

through temporal and causal organisation, and secondly, processes of
selection by inclusion or exclusion.
Temporal and Causal Relationships
Sociological approaches to narrative are frequently concerned with iden-

tifying the nature and effect of relationships between narrated events and/
or between narratives themselves, and a common line of inquiry focuses
on the extent to which the co-existence of events in a narrative leads them
to contextualise one another. Bruner identifies a central feature of narra-
tive as “referentiality”, or the fact that the meaning of narrated events is
only revealed with reference to their status as parts of a whole. He cites
as an example of this the crucial relationship between the particular and
the general, where the former typically relies on the latter for recogni-
tion but may also reverse this relationship to enact a breach of canon
(1991: 7–13). Similarly, Somers and Gibson reference narrative “rela-
tionality”, explaining that “narrative precludes sense-making of a single
isolated phenomenon” and that “events” are turned into “episodes” by
their relation to larger structures (1994: 59); Gergen and Gergen com-
ment on the interdependence between narratives when they observe
that “the self-narrative is a linguistic implement constructed and recon-
structed by people in relationships, and employed in relationships to sus-
tain, enhance or impede various actions” (1997: 163). This positioning
of narratives and narrative subjects in relational frameworks of meaning
recalls the interdependence between personal and institutional narratives,
and is matched by Foucault’s claim that “one cannot say a sentence, one
cannot transform it into a statement, unless a collateral space is brought
into operation” (1972: 110). The principle of relational meaning and
context-dependence is at work in the author-function, where shifting
relationships of perceived difference from or similarity to other events
and narratives endow the author with meaning. Specifically, the relative
meaning of events can be identified by temporal and causal connections.
Temporal relations dominate discussions of the relationships within
and between narratives. Bruner opens his list of narrative features with
the concept of diachronicity, including in this category non-verbal

variants such as the convention in some languages of reading left to right
(1991: 6), and Somers and Gibson also specifically identify temporal
frameworks as important, arguing that narrative makes sense because we
are able to perceive the chronological order of events, whether or not
they are presented in this order (1994: 60). The centrality of structural
coherence is also highlighted by Walter Fisher as a key criterion for narra-
tive rationality in his influential model of the narrative paradigm (1987).
This underlying instinct for temporal organisation shapes the author-
function: authorship, for instance, typically features phases of develop-
ment from juvenile to late or mature work. The temporal ordering of
these phases and the expectations raised by their normative discursive
meaning, for example, that texts from the juvenile period foreshadow
the themes but have not yet attained the stylistic mastery of later writing,
contributes to the emergence of authorial identity. In the case of recur-
ring themes in the writer’s texts, the temporal framework that underlies
the author-function frames later writing as evidence of the development
of ideas or styles from earlier work; the sustained presence of such themes
over the course of a writer’s authorship helps to generate the narrative
categories by which her authorship is defined.
Alongside the temporal patterning of a succession of texts, the autho-
rial narrative is determined by its position in relation to two other tem-
poral frameworks: the personal narrative of the writer and (remembering
St Jerome’s criterion of historical consistency) the discursive context
in which the writing is circulated. Wolf ’s case demonstrates how the
meaning of a text or action can be significantly altered by its temporal
positioning in relation to the writer’s personal narrative: German com-
mentators on her Stasi involvement emphasised the timing of the revela-
tion (in relation to her now established public profile) rather than the
timing of the action (in relation to her youth at the point of her involve-
ment). As Foucault suggests, the genres or movements that contextualise
authorship are bound by temporal and spatial structures, and are organ-
ised in series by the relationships of co-existence or succession between
them (1972: 63–64). Authorial output is aligned with these so that an
author’s engagement with a particular idea or form may occur late in the
writer’s personal narrative but early in the institutional narrative of that
concept; equally, a young writer may engage with an already out-dated

theme. The writer’s position in relation to such temporally significant cat-
egories contributes to the significance of the author-function in the con-
text of broader abstract narratives describing her work, for example, as
traditional or progressive. Foucault also discusses how the material form
of the text embeds it in time and ensures that the same set of textual signs
can repeatedly re-emerge: as we will see, this is exemplified in the spatial
and temporal meaning attributed to the author-function by paratexts.
The author-function, as a narrative within narratives, inevitably shifts
in temporal meaning in translation. Most obviously, the delay between
the publication of a source text and its translation can be enough to
allow significant changes in the narration of the writer’s authorship, as
the case of Was bleibt demonstrates: although the German text appeared
in 1990, the full translation was not published until after Wolf ’s Stasi rev-
elation in 1993. In addition, without changing the order in which events
occurred, Anglophone responses to Wolf ’s writing have emphasised dif-
ferent aspects of its temporality, either within her authorial narrative or
in the wider context of the discursive space in which her international
author-function was circulating. Spatial positioning has also been sig-
nificant: Wolf ’s Anglophone author-function identifies her as an “inter-
national” or a “German” author, mitigating or at times obscuring her
more problematic positioning as an “East German” or “East European”
writer. The shift initiated by translation of Wolf ’s texts into English,
from discourse dominated by institutional narratives of progress through
socialism into a space where socialism has been perceived as a flawed
and out-dated political narrative, has consistently positioned her in the
“here” and “now” of narratives in the receiving discourse, securing her
status as an international author.
Sometimes derived from their temporal ordering, the causal relationships
between events and narratives are also significant to the construction of
meaning. By inferring causal connections—for example through “organ-
isation-shifters” that make such relationships explicit, or on the basis of
post hoc ergo propter hoc logic (Barthes 1970: 148)—receivers of a narrative
organise reality as a rational and moral framework. For Foucault too, cau-
sality is inherent in discursive participation: the relational arrangement of
subjects in discourse determines their “enunciative modalities” (1972: 55),
or what can and cannot be concluded about their relative significance.

Confusion and tension arise where more than one causal arrangement of
events emerges, or when none is apparent, and in such cases the coherence
or perceived reasoning of the narrative may be called into question, lead-
ing its status to depreciate (Fisher 1987). The assumption of causality
based on the timing of events can be highly unreliable: Bruner is critical
of what he describes as “bogus historical-causal entailment” (1991: 10),
and points to the need for what he calls “intentional state entailment”
(1991: 7), in other words the ability to identify reasoning (as distinct from
direct causality) behind the events in a narrative.
Authorship demonstrates a particular variety of causal relationality in
so far as the discursive persona of the author is instinctively held responsi-
ble for the text’s contents and effects. As Foucault explains, it is the subject
(i.e. the author) who is perceived as the source or origin of the statement,
rather than the agent who articulates it (such as the publisher, reader or
reviewer), although “the subject of the statement should not be regarded
as identical with the author of the formulation” (1972: 107). The origin
of the author-function is identified as a unified authorial subject, although
the authorial narrative is articulated by multiple “transmitters”. This
assumed relation between the text and the authorial narrative is apparent
in the common search for textual meaning in the writer’s biography, where
attempts to determine “what the text means” relate to the personal narra-
tive of the individual who produced it. Particular experiences or categories
seen to characterise the writer’s personal narrative enjoy increased autho-
rial significance if they are seen to be mirrored in her writing, and vice
versa. Perceived correlation between, for example, the writer’s gender and
the style or content of the texts enables this to become a significant autho-
rial category and marks her as a notably “female author”. It is not only the
specific personal narrative of the writer that acts in this way: the institu-
tional narratives in which she is (perceived to be) embedded, for example,
as politically “dissident” or “complicit”, are also powerfully suggestive.
This search for a causal relationship also results in what Foucault identi-
fies as the perceived culpability of the authorial subject, something that
has been significant in the development of Wolf ’s author-function: when
her acquired (or imposed) status in Germany as a “politisch-moralische
Instanz” [political-moral authority] (Fries 1992: 178) was undermined
by her 1993 revelation, critics attacked Wolf herself as the originator of

this conflict rather than identifying other agents complicit in the nar-
ration of her author-function. Similarly, Günter Grass was the target of
much criticism in Germany following his 2006 revelation that he had
been a member of the Waffen-SS, a fact that undermined his author-
function as a moral conscience for post-war West Germany (a role he had
at times both embraced and rejected) and a biographical detail that had
been hitherto concealed from his readership; while Grass was attacked for
the deception that had led to this loss of trust and moral authority, some
participants in the debate suggested that the keeping of this secret had not
been down to the author alone (Ascherson 2006).
Translation reveals the instability of these causal relations as they are
rearranged by target-language discourse. In East and West Germany,
Wolf ’s author-function consistently drew on relational links with domi-
nant institutional narratives of the GDR: her critique of and divergence
from socialist institutional narratives was contextualised by an emerging
tradition of critical engagement with socialism, by writers committed to
staying in the GDR but dissatisfied with the status quo. Her texts gained
significance when their plots or characters related to developments in
institutional narratives (e.g. the increased state scrutiny of writers follow-
ing the expatriation of Wolf Biermann in 1976) or the personal narratives
of the writer and those around her (such as the death of Christa Tabbert
as a starting point for Nachdenken über Christa T.). German responses to
Wolf ’s writing, such as reviews, have also typically positioned her in rela-
tion to such narratives, consolidating the relevance to her author-function
of an East German setting, even since 1989. In English translation, how-
ever, as Wolf ’s status as an international author has been established and
consolidated in opposition to identity narratives of the GDR, correlative
relational links to the East German context have been weakened, and
her author-function has more often been positioned in a space character-
ised by supra-national, abstract narratives. Translation between discursive
spaces necessitates the renegotiation of temporal and causal relationships
in the text, and of potent contextual terms such as “communist” and
“socialist”. The translation of Wolf ’s writing reveals the inherent tension
between the national and the supra-national as interpretive frames for
the translated text: as we will see, the shift away from GDR-specific and
towards supra-national narratives in the search for relational meaning has

overshadowed other significant causal relations in Wolf ’s author-function,
such as the correspondence between her personal narrative and the plots
of her texts, and demonstrates the problematic relationship between what
Foucault calls the author’s “collateral space” and the receivers of a transla-
tion, situated in a different discursive context.
Selection, Emphasis and Exclusion
Alongside the relationality of events and narratives, one other aspect of

behaviour that features prominently in theoretical models of narratives is
the question of selection. Since a single narrative cannot encompass all
experience, each must exclude some information, and the chosen empha-
sis of a set of events may vary as details are left out or incorporated into
the story: drawing on Barthes, Carr describes this as the exclusion of
“extraneous noise or static” (1997: 13). Somers and Gibson agree that
selection is a necessity in the face of potentially limitless experiences
(1994: 60), and Bruner comments, for example, on the limiting power
of genre in the telling of narratives (1991: 14–15). Similarly, Foucault
comments that by excluding certain voices and by controlling interpre-
tive possibilities at “points of diffraction” (1972: 73), discourse exercises
mastery over our ability to express our experience. Shifts in the collateral
space can bring about “a modification in the principle of exclusion and
the principle of the possibility of choices” (ibid.: 75), determining not
only the causal relations between events, as already discussed, but also
the exclusion or inclusion of ideas. Events that challenge our ability to
narrate them (such as apparent contradictions in authorial behaviour) are
unsettling: this tension drives the narrative and we renegotiate events to
complement our existing knowledge so that “information that doesn’t fit
the symbolic mo[u]ld can be ignored, denied, or rationalised out of seri-
ous consideration” (Bennett and Edelman 1985: 158).
Selection can be seen at every stage of the genesis of the literary
text, beginning with the self-censorship of the author: in Was bleibt,
Wolf ’s narrator engages in dialogue with an inner censor, suggesting
internalisation of the discursive rules on which her author-function is
contingent. In the published material surrounding a text, or paratexts

(Genette 1997a), the selective inclusion of detail such as context from
the writer’s personal narrative, cover images, points of emphasis for
the blurb and quotations from reviews contributes to the narration
of the author-function. Active in the behaviours of editors, publish-
ers, reviewers and readers, the processes of selection and exclusion that
had most impact on Wolf ’s author-function in the GDR were those of
state censorship. Kassandra shows the marks of institutional censorship
in the East German edition, where some passages of the third lecture
are omitted that oppose the GDR’s legitimisation of defensive nuclear
armament, and the 1976 expatriation of Wolf Biermann is a well-known
example of the selective exclusion of a GDR writer from the discourse
of the literary institution. Wolf, too, found herself excluded from the
official GDR delegation to the PEN Writers’ Congress in 1978, and
attended as an individual delegate (Magenau 2002: 305). Of course,
selection is not always overt, and the instinctive narrativising behaviour
of discursive agents may result in the subconscious “selection” of par-
ticular meanings over others. The dominance of institutional narratives
of socialism in the East German literary field, for example, limited the
interpretive possibilities of published texts. Aligning modernism with
fascism and decadence, the literary institution of the GDR rejected
polysemy in art (Bathrick 1995: 16) and sought to exclude from lit-
erary discourse any writing that was not explicitly in line with the
political and aesthetic norms endorsed by an institutional narrative of
Socialist Realism. Of the examples given here, the Kassandra omissions
in particular show not only how selection operates on the author but
also how the exposure of this selection might function as a subversive
strategy to challenge dominant institutional narratives: Wolf ’s text was
published in the GDR with ellipsis to replace the omitted sentences,
drawing attention to their absence.
In translation, the narrative of the author-function is similarly sub-
ject to processes of selection, for example, through the selection of texts
for translation. An ambiguous event like any other, translation poses a
potential challenge to target-culture narratives. On a textual level, for
example, selection may lead to the omission of chapters or passages that
contradict dominant target-culture narratives. The American literary
institution has been accused of particular guilt on this score, described

as hosting “a domestic [literary] culture that is aggressively monolingual
and receptive to the foreign only when it meets American expectations”
(Venuti 1998: 310). Wolf ’s writing has been no exception: Moskauer
Novelle (1961), her strongest endorsement of socialist narratives through
a Socialist Realist aesthetic, has never been translated into English, and
the first edition of the Kindheitsmuster translation omitted several criti-
cal references to US actions in Vietnam (compare e.g. Werke 5: 57 and
MC: 34; see Summers 2014). Wolf ’s opposition to American interven-
tion in Vietnam finds no resonance with institutional narratives of the
US as a democratic force for international good, nor with the abstract
narratives of heroism and justice that contextualise the Vietnam War in
official American discourse. The selection procedures inherent in the nar-
ration of the author-function show how dominant agents and institu-
tions in Anglophone literary discourse interfere in the narration of the
author-function just as much as those embedded in the more explicitly
constraining context of East German public discourse. Like temporal and
causal relationships, selection and exclusion operate pervasively through-
out the emergence of the author-function in order to control the “variety
of egos” that arise from the writer’s presence in discourse.
Bringing together the concepts of selection and relational significance,
Bruner notes the importance of “hermeneutic composability”, meaning
the ability to make sense of and interpret narrative by divining “the mean-
ing of the text as a whole in the light of the constituent parts that make it
up” (1991: 7). Authorship, too, can be understood as a “text” or narrative
in this context. Hermeneutic composability relies on the human ability
to tell and interpret stories in a narrative mode, in which interpretation
is inevitable and is guided by the selection and presentation of events in
relation to one another and to the whole. There is no single correct read-
ing of a narrative, he explains, but the most successful narratives are those
that guide the reader intuitively towards one interpretation. In the case of
the literary text, this interpretation is particularly strongly guided by two
identifiable sources of textual authority: firstly, the narrative voice as the
perceived representative of (authorial) authority in the text and secondly,
the paratexts, or material that physically surrounds the text and presents
it to the receiver. Baker (2006, 2007) combines the narrative model with
a discussion of framing in order to demonstrate the impact of narration

as a conscious intervention in the interpretation of reality, and this can
be usefully applied to narrative voice and the paratext to explore how the
reader is guided by the text to a particular reading of authorship. Through
implicit and explicit strategies of framing, narrative voice and paratexts
help to bridge a gap between the social narrator and the reader, and are
therefore central to the construction of the author-function.
F raming Authorship: Texts, Peritexts

and Epitexts
The concept of framing, applied by Baker to narrative and transla-
tion, is taken from Goffman, who defines conversational frames as
“principles of organisation which govern events and our subjective
involvement in them” (1974: 11). This definition suggests consider-
able overlap with the behaviour of narratives, in their organisational
characteristics, their existence on multiple levels and their reliance on
participants’ existing knowledge of the world to provide a meaningful
context for each new interaction. As Baker shows, frame analysis can
be reconciled with narrative to offer valuable insights into the processes
that inform our understanding of experience, and specifically into the
transfer of experiences to new contexts through translation. Frames
replicate features of narrative, such as the construction of temporal
relationships and selective inclusion (2006: 112–122). In the literary
context, these contingent, unstable structures include, for example, the
identity of the narrating agent, the medium, time or location of the
text’s delivery, or the identified themes of the text. Such framing sug-
gests what a text or narrative is “about”, and this information guides
the reader’s instinctive or conscious response. Whether deliberate or
incidental, such interpretive prompting is also an integral feature of
the translation process, which mediates between the differing contexts
of the narrative and its receivers.
The use of frame analysis to reflect on narratives and transla-
tion follows the appropriation of Goffman’s model in sociological
studies of narrative as a motivational force in protest movements
(summarised in Benford and Snow 2000; see also Zuo and Benford
1995; Polletta 2006) and of the function of frames in the circulation
of “official” accounts (Ehrenhaus 1993; Noakes 2000; Cunningham
and Browning 2004). Baker suggests that Goffman does not fully
reflect on the potential of frames as conscious strategies of interven-
tion, and discusses how the active framing and reframing of the narra-
tives of others pervades translational practice (2006: 106). Whilst her
work focuses on translation and interpreting in conflict situations,
both narrative and Foucauldian theories of communication suggest
that any translation is a confrontation between narratives of the self
and the other, which must be reconciled in the interests of acceptance
by the target culture. Just as the translator may decide to intervene
creatively in the text in the interest of entertaining a target-language
readership, the publisher or reviewer may highlight particular ele-
ments of the text in order to secure such a readership. The transla-
tion of literature thus constitutes a conscious reframing of the social
narratives present in the text, with literary as well as sociological
consequences that collide in the author-function. Authorship, or the
authority to narrate the text, is destabilised by the diversification of
agency through translation and by the writer’s lack of authority over
the frames placed around the translated text. What can be described
as sites of textual and paratextual narration of the author-function
demonstrate strategies of framing carried out mostly by agents other
than the writer.
Textual Framing: Narrative Voice
Genette identifies as a common error in readings of the literary text the

assumption that the act of narration is the same as the act of writing,
or in other words, that the narrator can be identified with the author
(1980: 213). The elision of difference between the voice of the text and
the voice of the author is at odds with an understanding of authorship
as socially constructed. Bakhtin (1981: 314) also identifies this when he
explains that the “level” of the author is inferred from the characteristic
heteroglossia of the literary text, the mixture of voices that articulate the
textual narrative:
Behind the narrator’s story we read a second story, the author’s story; he
is the one who tells us how the narrator tells stories, and also tells us about
the narrator himself. We acutely sense two levels at each moment in the
story; one, the level of the narrator, a belief system filled with objects,
meanings and emotional expressions, and the other, the level of the
author, who speaks (albeit in a refracted way) by means of this story and
through this story.
Discussing literature as a social and a dialogic phenomenon, Bakhtin char-

acterises literary prose as resistant to “the naively self-confident or obtusely
stubborn unity of a smooth, pure single-voiced language” (ibid.: 327), and
observes that “the unity of a literary language is not a unity of a single,
closed language system, but is rather a highly specific unity of several ‘lan-
guages’ that have established contact and mutual recognition with each
other” (ibid.: 295). The text is a site of competition between these languages
that, like social narratives, in their multiplicity contest the possibility of a
single authoritative voice by revealing various worlds of social meaning.
Bakhtin offers the terms centrifugal and centripetal to describe a nar-
rative voice as either speaking through various languages or remaining
centred in a single dominant language. Centrifugal narration, dispersed
between languages, resists the centripetal pull of the unitary narrator; as
her objectivity and control are placed in doubt by the inclusion of other
social languages, the relationship between the voice of the narrator and
the voice of the author is reformulated. As the narrator’s “authority” to be
believed and her “authorised” status are challenged, the voice of the narra-
tive can no longer be easily identified as (or mistaken for) the voice of the
author. Bakhtin argues that, while the reliability of the narrative voice as
an account of a singular “truth” of events is displaced by this heteroglossia,
its power to engage the reader is increased: he terms the heteroglot nar-
rative voice internally persuasive because it internalises the languages and
subjectivities of others, rather than imposing on them the authoritative
force of a unitary language (ibid.: 342). Bakhtin’s arguments in favour
of an internally persuasive, heteroglot narrative voice (rather than an
authoritative, unitary narrator) find resonance in the subjective authen-
ticity favoured by Wolf as a mode of narration, in which the narrative is
authorised precisely by its reliance on individual, unverified experience.
The combination of languages in a text, then, contributes for both

Bakhtin and Wolf to the construction of an author-figure behind the
writing. Significantly, Bakhtin establishes a clear connection between
social narrative and literary narratology when he argues that the lan-
guages of the heteroglot narrative voice establish an essential relation-
ship between the textual narrative and its concrete social context (ibid.:
300). This context includes the personal narratives of writer, narrator and
characters, and the institutional narratives that mark their world views
and reveal their membership of particular social groups. Dialogised het-
eroglossia (ibid.: 273) challenges the dominance of a centripetal narrative
voice, introducing different perspectives through the various languages of
the text that expose the narrative act as a contingent performance. These
languages intersect in the literary and social category of the author:
the author does not speak in a given language (from which he distances
himself to a greater or lesser degree), but he speaks, as it were, through lan-
guage, a language that has somehow more or less materialised, become
objectivised, that he merely ventriloquates. (ibid.: 299)
According to Bakhtin, the author exists in the spaces between the lan-
guages of the text and the social narratives they invoke. The text thus
frames the author in the dynamic relationships between multiple social
languages: these constitute the narrative voice, which is authorised to
narrate the author-function by a commonly assumed affinity between
the two. This observation that the author speaks through the languages
of the narrative reveals an affinity with Foucauldian and narrative models
of authorship as a discursively constructed category. The narrative voice
not only acts as an explicit frame for the events of the narrative, but also
implicitly frames the author-function at the convergence of the social
narratives that circulate in the text.
Marking an intervention in the language of the text, translation has
the powerful potential to pull the narrative voice in a centripetal or a
centrifugal direction. Adding the language of the translator to the hetero-
glot narrative voice, the translated text increases the tension between the
unifying pull of the author-function and the inherent heteroglossia of the
literary narrative. Susan Bassnett (2011) has highlighted this, describing
the source text as a centripetal force driven by the work of a single creative
agency, while the translation represents a centrifugal act of creation and dif-
ference that begins with the decoding of the source. Similarly, Christiane
Nord (2011) has described the translator as an author not in the legal
sense but in the sense of permitting and enabling the growth of the text
towards a function, and Jean Boase-Beier (2006: 88) has argued that, by
challenging the reader with stylistic features such as non-standard lexis or
syntax and revealing gaps or ambiguity in the textual narrative, translation
has the potential to enhance the complexity of the narrative voice and
encourage active engagement with the text. As Bakhtin points out, the
literary text is a social medium, so the translator’s language is informed by
her position within social and linguistic institutions: attempts to study the
style of individual translators (Baker 2001; Bush 2006; Xu 2006; Munday
2008; Saldanha 2011) have acknowledged the emergence of style in the
translated narrative voice not only through the linguistic choices of writer
and translator but also under the explicit or implicit influence of insti-
tutional narratives such as target-language (literary) norms, or assump-
tions about the target reader. Theories emerging from the cultural turn
in translation studies have contextualised such influences as inherent in
the translation process (Lefevere 1992), and have even shown that such
guiding limits can stimulate greater creativity on the part of the translator
(Boase-Beier and Holman 1998). Aside from such conscious decisions
or interventions, the process of linguistic transfer inevitably locates the
text in a new social and discursive context, in which the languages of the
heteroglot narrative voice assume different meaning. Through the inclu-
sion of the translator’s language and of those dominant in the receiving
culture, translation has the potential to reform the narrative voice and
thus renarrate the author-function.
From a Bakhtinian perspective, this suggests the potential of the
translated text to maximise and even increase heteroglossia. However,
in practice it is often the case that heteroglossia and code-switching are
defused by instinctive and deliberate standardisation (Suominen 2001;
Grutman 2004, 2006; Meylaerts 2006; García Vizcaíno 2008; Boyden
and Goethals 2011), a shift that (re)asserts the voice and identity of an
authoritative narrator, replacing “the inner dialogism of a text with dis-
crete voices, and the heteroglossia ‘from below’ with greater literariness
‘from above’” (May 1994: 4). Such translation invokes a translator

persona that is submissive, or at least not resistant, to the norm of fluent
domestication identified by Venuti (1995a) as characteristic of transla-
tion into English in particular. This centripetal tendency suggests that
the translated text, by minimising the presence of different languages
in the narrative voice, might in fact move to reinstate the authority of
a unitary narrator. The selective exclusion of other languages from the
narrative voice would constitute a return to what Bakhtin defines as a
“Cartesian poetics of neoclassicism” (1981: 271). Such a return would
also be anathema to Wolf ’s narrative style, which challenges the author-
ity of a singular, detached narrating position and has been explicitly
identified as a move away from a Cartesian ideal (Love 1983: 2). The
“internal persuasiveness” identified by Bakhtin as characteristic of the
heteroglot narrative voice can be seen in Wolf ’s German texts, where
the inclusion of multiple alternative and subjective viewpoints is central
to her attempts to engage critically with socialism, and therefore consti-
tutes a vital link between her literary narrators and the social narrative
of her own author-function.
It is possible to examine in more detail the socio-literary construction
of narrative voice by applying Genette’s structuralist approach (1980),
which identifies the components of the narrative voice through which the
languages of the text speak. Genette explores narrative voice as an ostensi-
bly “auctorial” presence, in which the elements of story (what happened),
text (the organisation of events into a tale worth telling) and narration (the
process of telling) converge (1980: 258). Whilst acknowledging voice to
be the author’s principal means of intervention in the text, along with
Foucauldian, narrative and Bakhtinian views of authorship, he recognises
that an inferred connection between authorship and textual authority is
inevitably compromised, since “the role of narrator [in fiction] is itself
fictive, even if assumed directly by the author” (ibid.: 213). He hints at
the possible multiplicity of identities inherent in the voice of the narra-
tive: as he understands it, “the [narrative] subject here [is] not only the
person who carries out or submits to the action, but also the person (the
same one or another) who reports it, and, if need be, all those people who
participate, even though passively, in this narrating activity” (ibid.: 213).
Like Bakhtin, Genette acknowledges that the languages of those who
carry out, report and participate in events are all present in the narrative,
contributing to the diversity of textual narration which is in tension with
the assumed singularity and unity of the narrative voice.
The narratological components identified by Genette can therefore be
understood as complex sites of social as well as literary narration that
frame the authorship of the text. He establishes three categories as the
key features of the narrative voice, naming these as time (the relative posi-
tioning of the narrator and the story), narrative level (whether or not
the narrator exists “inside” the story) and person (whether the narrator
is telling her own story or that of someone else). Variation in each of
these contributes to the textual framing of the author-function by the
narrative voice, and Chap. 3 demonstrates how an analysis of the three as
categories of interaction between textual and social narratives reveals the
function of the literary narrator as a frame for the discursive construction
of the author. This structuralist approach to the construction of meaning
in the text extends to its material presence: Genette also explores in detail
the material structures of identity, or paratexts, that present a text to its
(potential) reader.
Paratextual Framing
As the most visible site of interaction between the text and its surrounding
discourse, the paratexts, or the referential material surrounding the text,
frame it for the reader in a figurative and in the most literal sense. Even
for those who ultimately choose not to engage with the text itself, para-
texts contribute to an understanding of the author’s function: Genette
(1997a: 2) describes them as a “threshold … that offers the world at large
the possibility of either stepping inside or turning back”. Borrowing from
Jauss, Keith Harvey (2003: 48) explains that paratexts delimit “horizons
of [textual] expectation”, and consequently of the author-function. They
are identified by Genette as “the most socialised side of the practice of
literature” (1997a: 14), marking them as characterised by the narrative
and discursive forms of knowledge already discussed. This understanding
is shared by others who have adopted Genette’s concept: writing about
identity in the paratexts to translated Francophone Caribbean literature,
Richard Watts claims that “it is only in circulation that a text assumes
its significance, and the paratext is perhaps the most useful site for
understanding how, for whom, and at what potential cost that significance
was constructed” (2000: 42–43), and Harvey has described the bindings
of translated texts as occupying “a crucial—indeed revelatory—position
at the interface of the domestic and the foreign” (2003: 50). Urpo Kovala
(1996: 135) explains that the paratextual space “works together with the
entire universe of discourse of a certain society at a certain point in time”,
identifying the diachronic as well as the discursive element of the para-
textual frame, and the link to authorial construction seems clear: Guyda
Armstrong (2007: 40) shows how the paratexts to various editions of the
Decameron have created “the English Decameron—and by extension, the
English ‘Boccaccio’”, identifying the formative role of textual presenta-
tion in the identification of authorship.
Although ostensibly a mediating, permissive space, from a Foucauldian
perspective the typical role of the paratext is one of control. In transla-
tion, paratexts negotiate the otherness signalled by the translated status of
the text: Watts notes that “the publisher faces a dilemma similar to that
of the anthropologist” (2000: 40) in the task of presenting the cultural
other in an accessible and ostensibly neutral way (although this compari-
son ignores the considerable factor of commercial gain that typically dis-
tinguishes the publisher’s dilemma from that of the anthropologist). He
describes a process of “cultural translation” in the bindings of the foreign
text that often results in reducing the cultural specificity of the source
text, in order to attract and reassure readers unfamiliar with the narrative
realities of the writer’s social context (Watts 2000: 39, 2005: 19). This
reimagining of the other as a reference point for the translating self, also
seen above in the comments of Sievers and Michaela Wolf, reframes the
contextual realities of the text, with the result that the target-language
reader is encouraged to see the common ground between text and target
culture, and to recognise in the text the echoes of familiar narratives.
On the other hand, Keith Harvey’s analysis of the bindings of gay
literature translated into French shows how paratexts can intervene to
emphasise the disruptive potential of the translated text, encouraging
“interface” between discursive contexts. Target-culture narratives are
confronted with the need for dialogue, as the provocative otherness of
the text is displayed alongside its shared frames of reference with the
target-culture reader (Harvey 2003: 55). Harvey draws on the claim that
“proactive translation is as much an attempt to create an audience as it
is to find one” (Cronin 1996: 153) to show how paratexts construct the
reader’s horizons of expectation. Recalling processes of narrative selec-
tion, for both Watts and Harvey the framing of the translation is achieved
as much in what the paratext does not say as in what it says: where it is not
counteracted, instinctive “cultural filtering” (House 1977, 1997; Katan
1999) by the reader implicitly contextualises the text in familiar narra-
tives and frames of reference. As we will see, the paratexts to Wolf ’s writ-
ing in translation reflect the findings of Watts more strongly than those
of Harvey, showing an explicit or implicit shift towards abstract framing
narratives that seem to transcend contextual contingency and away from
GDR-specific institutional narratives.
Genette subdivides paratexts into two categories. Firstly, peritexts (fea-
tures of the text in its published form such as prefaces, notes and cover
material) physically frame the text within particular narratives. Secondly,
epitexts (texts circulating independently from the book itself but which
nonetheless contribute to its significance, such as interviews, letters and
marketing material) perpetuate such narratives by affirming the place of
the text within them. Genette admits the possibility of fluid boundar-
ies between epitext and peritext, and even between text and paratext,
and he acknowledges the possibility of multiple “senders” (1997a: 8).
However, he insists that the crucial, unifying criterion of the paratext is
that the material be “characterised by an authorial intention and assump-
tion of responsibility” (ibid.: 3). On the basis of this unified assump-
tion of authorial authority, he includes peritextual material such as the
allographic preface written by someone other than the author, which is
not strictly authored but (he explains) implicitly authorised by the writer.
On the same basis, he excludes from the epitext any material not seen
to be authorised by the writer, most significantly reviews of the book.
Following a Foucauldian understanding of authorship as a complex dis-
cursive construction, however, and considering the writer’s participation
in literary discourse to be a form of assent to this shaping of her author-
ship by the voices of others, it is entirely plausible that the review or the
scholarly article should come under the category of paratext just as much
as the front cover or the allographic preface, and for that reason they are
included in the analysis in Chap. 4.
Genette does identify paratexts as a site “not only of transition but

also of transaction” (1997a: 2) and acknowledges the fluid boundaries
between a text and its so-called commentaries, as shown, for example,
in the frequency with which reviews are quoted in peritexts; however,
one significant criticism of his approach is that “Genette questions the
‘function of the author’ as little as he questions the function of the book”
(Stanitzek 2005: 35). This is a significant shortcoming in view of the
Foucauldian understanding of authorship that has been outlined here.
While Genette’s paratextual model provides a valuable starting point for
analysis of the multiplicity of sites at which the text interacts with its
surroundings, the stability he ascribes to the authorship and boundar-
ies of the paratext is problematised by post-structuralist approaches that
dismantle prescriptive notions of author and text. Stable unities of the
book and the author inform his definition of paratextual categories,
and reveal how his model is both complemented and contradicted by a
Foucauldian approach to authorship that presumes a bilateral, unstable
dynamic between authorial identity and textual meaning. Bringing the
two theories together means a consideration of the paratext as a discursive
space that permits and controls the circulation of narratives including the
author-function. This approach expands Genette’s model by problematis-
ing his definition of “authorial intention” in the paratext (1997a: 3) to
show how, in a discursive model of authorship, what he considers to be
“unauthorised” voices and texts may wield much paratextual authority.
This perspective is reinforced by Jerome McGann’s seminal work on the
textual condition in which he observes, for example, that “the chief (but
not sole) authority over the bibliographical text normally falls to the pub-
lishing institution within which an author is working” (1991: 66–67).
Genette presumes that authorship is a unified and powerful identity,
an assumption contradicted by discursive and narrative approaches that
establish the contingency and the multiplicity of the author-function.
Particularly in translation, where linguistic, spatial and temporal bound-
aries distance the writer from the target text, the author’s control over
presentational elements that introduce her writing to target-culture dis-
course is minimal, and examination of paratexts indicates how multi-
ple discursive agents assume the narration of an identity perceived as
authorial, in other words the author-function. In light of this, Harvey
moves away from identifying individual agents in the construction of the
aratext, and towards a concept of the agency of the translation-event,

p
arguing that “it is the translation-event’s participation in and contribu-
tion to collectively elaborated discourses that is central to its agentive
role” (2003: 69). He recognises the complexity of agency in the transla-
tion and publication process, and acknowledges the interpretive inter-
vention of the discourses in which individuals and the text circulate, as
suggested by the Foucauldian approach to authorship. This is significant
to a discussion of Wolf ’s texts in translation, where there are very few
explicitly “authored” paratexts such as forewords and introductions, and
where multiple voices often speak alongside one another (e.g. on the back
covers of the books, where several reviews are often quoted). The osten-
sibly unified and revelatory role of the paratextual space means that, like
all frames, paratexts are most effective when able to operate “without
detection” (Stanitzek 2005: 34)—there are echoes here of Bruner’s her-
meneutic composability and the desire for a single, clear interpretation
of the authorial or textual narrative. While tensions exist between the
competing demands of various discursive agents, then, paratextual mask-
ing of the multiple discursive interventions of translators, publishers and
reviewers often projects a unified narrative of authorship that conceals
the fragmented narration of the author-function.
owards a New Understanding of Translated

T
Authorship
Like Foucault, Genette subordinates translation as commentary to an
“original”. He views translation as a paratextual process, naming it in
his conclusion to Paratexts, alongside serial publication and illustration,
as one of three “practices whose paratextual relevance seems to me to be
undeniable” (1997a: 405). The assumptions made by Genette through-
out his book about unified authorial control of the paratext lead him to
define translation as an authorised, derivative process that extends the
writer’s authorship (Tahir Gürçaglar 2002: 46–47). However, as seen
above, this categorisation is undermined by a Foucauldian and narrative
account of authorial construction, especially in the context of intercul-
tural transfer. This approach to the text demands that it be seen as a
site of two-way exchange, not just offering a view into the world from
(ostensibly) the author’s perspective but also showing how the world
through discourse (re)constructs the author. In translation in particular,
the stability of textual authority and authorship is challenged by the sta-
tus of the text as a site of competing authorities and multiple authorita-
tive personae such as the editor, publisher and translator. The process of
intercultural transfer not only permits but also necessitates the recontex-
tualisation of authorship by the textual and paratextual frames that medi-
ate between the writer and the surrounding discourse. Understanding
the author-function as a narrative emerging over time and space at the
intersection of the literary text and surrounding discourse, the analysis in
the following chapters shows how this reframing in translation generates
parallel and divergent narratives of the writer’s authorship.
Focusing in turn on three texts as moments of particular significance
for Wolf ’s Anglophone author-function, each of the following three
chapters explores particular textual and paratextual mechanisms of
authorial construction to show how these operate alongside one another
to construct the translated author-function over the course of time,
“as [the writer] receives it from [her] epoch”. The shifts and tensions
in Wolf ’s Anglophone author-function show how this account of her
authorship continues to be modified by new publications and events in
the author’s life, resulting in a narrative of authorship that at times chal-
lenges the author-function emerging from her positioning in German
discourse. Whilst the three analytical chapters each engage with differ-
ent texts and with varying approaches to the exploration of the author-
function, they are linked by the common theme of the negotiation of
the discursive space between writer and author. Revealing authorship
as a complex construction and looking specifically at how this has been
significant in the development of Wolf ’s Anglophone presence, a nar-
rative and Foucauldian understanding of the author-function calls for
a reconsideration of the assumed unity of authorship in paratexts and
narrative voice to reflect the multiple voices that construct authorship
and the many spaces in which they speak.
3
The Subjective Narrator: Nachdenken
über Christa T.
Since any study of the discourse surrounding authorship requires attention

to the texts through which the author-function is seen to express itself, it
is helpful to start an exploration of Wolf ’s Anglophone author-function by
looking at the detail of the translated text. As we will see, the developing
author-function is strongly informed by the social act of textual narration,
and in Wolf ’s case the narrative voice is a vital tool for exploring the unsta-
ble, unreliable and personal voices that lend her writing what she terms
its subjective authenticity. She identifies a crucial shared objective between
literature and socialist society:
Die tiefe Wurzel der Übereinstimmung zwischen echter Literatur und der
sozialistischen Gesellschaft sehe ich eben darin: Beide haben das Ziel, dem
Menschen zu seiner Selbstverwirklichung zu verhelfen. (“Selbstinterview”,
Werke 4: 141)1
Wolf considers the task of literature to be the empowerment of author,

narrator, characters and reader as voices of narrative experience, freeing them
1
“I see the deep root of affinity between real literature and socialist society as this: both have the
goal of helping human beings to self-realisation.”

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40183-6_3
to develop a sense of self. This exploration of multiple subjectivities aligns her

both with Bakhtin’s identification of multi-voicedness as the key characteris-
tic of the novel and with Genette’s definition of the narrative subject as “not
only the person who carries out or submits to the action, but also the person
(the same one or another) who reports it, and, if need be, all those people
who participate, even though passively, in this narrating activity” (1980: 213).
The relationships between the author’s writing and the social narratives
by which it is contextualised, such as the writer’s individual narrative or
institutional narratives of subjectivity in art, are reframed in translation,
and the text of the translation plays a significant role in this. As Bakhtin
(1981: 295) argues, framing through the social languages of the narrative
voice is integral to the identity of the novel, and therefore of its author.
The presence or absence of languages demonstrating narrator and char-
acter subjectivity in the narrative voice, and the perceived interaction
between these subjectivities, plays a vital role in framing the narrative
as “authoritative” or “internally persuasive” (Bakhtin 1981: 342). Wolf ’s
fictional and essayistic writing explores authenticity in narration as being
derived precisely from the subjective and complex position of the narra-
tor, who does not claim sovereignty over the narrative and whose account
may be decidedly unauthoritative. So for Wolf, the centrifugal mode of
experience is a prerequisite for the subjective authenticity of narrative: her
writing reflects what Bakhtin might describe as “the [enormous] impor-
tance of struggling with another’s discourse, its influence in the history
of an individual’s coming to ideological consciousness” (1981: 348), as
multiple narrating languages converge in the narrative voice.
Wolf argues in “Lesen und Schreiben” that the subjective is what makes
the literary narrative authentic:
Der erzählerische Raum [hat] vier Dimensionen; die drei fiktiven

Koordinaten der erfundenen Figuren und die vierte, “wirkliche”, des
Erzählers. Das ist die Koordinate der Tiefe, der Zeitgenossenschaft, des
unvermeidlichen Engagements, die nicht nur die Wahl des Stoffes, sondern
auch seine Färbung bestimmt. (Werke 4: 265)2
2
“The narrative space has four dimensions: the three fictive coordinates of the invented figures and
the fourth, ‘real’ one of the narrator. This is the coordinate of depth, of contemporaneousness, of
unavoidable engagement, which determines not only the choice of material but also its colouring.”
3 The Subjective Narrator: Nachdenken über Christa T. 61
In Wolf ’s subjective-authentic prose, the individual narratives of nar-

rator and writer are by no means distinct from the narrative of the text:
on the contrary, the narrator’s subjective “dimension” is present in the
voice of the textual narrative. This embeds the text in the narrator’s social
reality, establishing the literary-social connection identified by Bakhtin
as vital to the narrative voice. Echoing Bakhtin’s language, Myra Love
describes the inclusion of this dimension in Wolf as a rejection of the
Cartesian narrative subject: “the displacement of the logic of identity and
opposition is also the loss of human identity in the form of the inter-
national constitutive subject of the Cartesian tradition” (Love 1983:2).
Love’s reference to Descartes suggests a parallel between Wolf ’s de-centred
approach and Bakhtin’s description of the heteroglot narrative voice that
contests the unitary language of “Cartesian” poetics.
Wolf ’s prose, then, derives its authenticity not from a claim about the
truth of the narrative but from the sincerity of the experience narrated.3
This definition of authenticity is at the centre of her concept of “epic
prose” which, following the model of Brecht’s Verfremdung and epic the-
atre, seeks a dynamic relationship with the reader’s own individual nar-
rative: “Die epische Prosa sollte eine Gattung sein, die es unternimmt,
auf noch ungebahnten Wegen in das Innere dieses Menschen da, des
Prosalesers, einzudringen” (“Lesen und Schreiben”, Werke 4: 268).4 The
three aspects of Wolf ’s fourth, “real” prose coordinate of the narrator,
characteristic of the subjective-authentic narrative, recall Genette’s time,
level and person of the narrative voice: Wolf strives for a voice that is con-
temporaneous with events, that engages with them closely from within
the story and that has access to the depth of internal perspective required
to reflect the experience of characters and narrator.
Applied to Wolf ’s writing, Genette’s categories of time, level and per-
son in the narrative voice can be used to identify a vital relationship
between the “authenticity” or persuasiveness of the narrative and the
individual narratives or subjective languages of narrator and characters. It
is the narrator’s very inability to isolate the textual narrative from her own
3
She explains this, for example, in her letters to Gerti Tetzner (see especially Werke IV: 214–222).
4
“Epic prose should be a genre that undertakes to penetrate the interior of that person there, of the
prose reader.”
personal narrative that should encourage the reader to explore her own
sense of self. To examine the translation of this essential feature of Wolf ’s
style, this chapter takes as an example of her subjective-authentic prose
the narrative voice of Nachdenken über Christa T., the text whose transla-
tion marks the establishment of her authorial narrative in Anglophone
discourse and as such could be seen as a starting point for later expecta-
tions of “quality” or “theoretical position” in Wolf ’s writing.
Nachdenken über Christa T.

Nachdenken über Christa T. (1968) presents Wolf ’s first consistent appli-
cation of a subjective-authentic aesthetic in her prose, and her first unam-
biguous challenge to an institutionally circulated narrative of Socialist
Realism: it has been described as showing the first symptoms of the “death”
of Socialist Realism in her writing (Buehler 1984). As such, Christa T.
marked an important event in Wolf ’s author-function in the GDR,
where the more orthodox values and opinions evident in her earlier texts
Moskauer Novelle (1961) and Der geteilte Himmel (1963) and in her activi-
ties as a literary reviewer for the periodical Neues Deutschland were now
questioned by reviewers suspicious of the text’s subjective aesthetic and of
the ambivalent relation to socialist narratives suggested by its heteroglot
narrative voice (Haase 1969; Kähler 1969; see also Drescher 1991).
German critics interpreted Wolf ’s self-critical socialism and her more
experimental aesthetic as either a failure or a refusal to endorse key institu-
tional narratives of socialism. Manfred Behn (1978: 17) accuses Germans
on both sides of the Wall of committing “den Fehler, die Normen eines
ahistorischen Kategoriensystems von ‘sozialistischem Realismus’ an das
Werk heranzutragen, um dann frohlockend festzustellen, daß Christa
Wolf diesem nicht entsprochen hatte.”5 Behn’s comment suggests that
widespread failure to recognise the category of Socialist Realism as a
developing narrative, rather than as an inert pattern, led to the causal
framing—in both Germanies—of Wolf ’s subjective authenticity simply
5
“…the mistake of imposing the norms of an ahistorical ‘Socialist Realist’ category system on the
text, only to confirm joyfully that Christa Wolf had not satisfied these.”
as a challenge to a static idea of socialism. This framing is also reflected in

marketing decisions relating to the 1970 English translation, for which
the peritexts implicitly present Wolf ’s Anglophone author-function as
“dissident” in relation to an institutional narrative of the GDR as an inert,
totalitarian culture.6 Bathrick explains how the polysemy of Wolf ’s style
was antithetical to the unambiguous affirmation of socialist narratives
required by GDR institutions (Bathrick 1995: 14–21); the responses of
Anglophone reviewers such as Ernst Pawel (1971) suggest that it was not
only this ambivalence but also Wolf ’s imagination and, significantly, her
perceived individualism that were most clearly framed as her dissident
counterdiscourse by the translational paratexts.
The first Wolf translation into English for a publisher outside of the
GDR, The Quest for Christa T. (1970) established Wolf as an interna-
tional author in a way that Divided Heaven (1965) had been unable to
do. Christa T. is significant not only in its own right but also with regard
to the expectations it raised of future texts, establishing Wolf ’s interna-
tional author-function:
Ungefähr seit dem Erscheinen von Nachdenken über Christa T. (1968; The
Quest for Christa T., 1970) ist Wolf … auch in Amerika zum Begriff gewor-
den; kein anderer Schriftsteller(in)name aus der DDR ist so bekannt. Diese
Anerkennung liegt nicht nur an der hohen literarischen Qualität, sondern
vor allem auch an der—trotz aller formalen Schwierigkeiten—
Zugänglichkeit ihrer Werke, d.h. an deren dialogischer Struktur und deren
Untersuchung von universalen Fragen und Problemen. (Fries 1992: 171)7
Retrospectively noting the landmark significance of Christa T. for Wolf ’s

author-function in America, Fries identifies “accessibility”, “dialogic struc-
ture” and “examination of universal questions and problems” as the key
6
Wolf ’s opposition to (or at least independence from) the institutions in which she was embedded
was emphasised, for example, by Virago’s typical note on the author as a “committed socialist of
independent temper” in editions before 1990.
7
“Approximately since the appearance of Nachdenken über Christa T. (1968; The Quest for Christa
T., 1970) Wolf … has become a familiar name in America too; no other GDR author’s name is so
well-known. This recognition is not only down to the high literary quality but also—despite all
difficulties of form—to the accessibility of her writing, i.e. its dialogic structure and its examination
of universal questions and problems.”
to the appeal of Wolf ’s ongoing authorial narrative in America. As we will

see in later chapters, the paratextual framing of Wolf ’s translated texts in
particular has typically excluded specific source-culture narratives that had
characterised their reception in the GDR and FRG, in favour of emphasis
on the more “universal” and thematically accessible shared or abstract nar-
ratives addressed by Wolf. This brings about an inevitable shift in the “dia-
logic structure” identified by Fries, as the Anglophone reader’s discursive
context equips her differently to recognise or ignore Wolf ’s inter-narrative
dialogue. The complex narrative voice of Wolf ’s writing thus undergoes
what Bakhtin might call “reaccentuation” (1981: 421) in translation,
against a new background of discursive and social contexts. Focusing on
Wolf ’s key concept of subjective authenticity, this chapter looks closely at
how the accessibility, dialogism and universality of her writing have been
constructed in translation. Textual analysis reveals the reshaping of the
author-function through intervention from the social languages of the
translator and target culture in the heteroglot narrative voice. The focus
here is not on scrutinising the translation for error, but rather on revealing
the mechanisms by which translated authorship emerges. In this context,
the interpretation of shifts in the translated text can be informed by an
understanding of the translator’s individual identity and strategies.
At the time of the translation of Christa T., its translator Christopher
Middleton had been a published poet for over 20 years, a fact that for some
reviewers was an influential frame: “the gifted translator, Christopher
Middleton, graduated from Oxford, teaches German literature, is found
in anthologies of contemporary literature and has been particularly con-
cerned with Twentieth-Century German poetry. Here is very decided
evidence of the novel’s aesthetic stature” (Thompson 1971). While few
reviews refer so overtly to the framing power of Middleton’s author-
function, Middleton’s privileged position in Anglophone discourse may
have functioned as a consecrating frame for Wolf ’s writing in translation.
Alongside the associative links the translator’s identity brings, however,
are the equally important implications of Middleton’s author-function
for his translation strategy. The hypothesis that a translator such as
Middleton, with an established author-function, might feel “ authorised”
to renarrate the text in line with his own stylistic or thematic prefer-
ences is supported by his own comments on the translation. Middleton
reported retrospectively that he found some of Wolf ’s prose simplistic and

thus decided to strengthen the style in places (personal correspondence
with Middleton, 12 October 2010). He cited The Island (1963), a novel
by his contemporary and fellow poet Robert Creeley which Middleton
had read shortly before translating Christa T., as a stylistic influence in
the translation, and acknowledged his attempt to freshen up the style of
Wolf ’s narrative.8 The re-stylised language of the translator thus enters
into the heteroglossia of Wolf ’s narrative voice, and shifts in the narrative
of Christa T. have a significant impact on a reading of the text in English.
The Island, Middleton’s stylistic reference point, demonstrates consider-
able contrasts with Christa T. Most importantly, there are significant differ-
ences between the narrative voices adopted by Creeley and Wolf: Creeley’s
narrator maintains an authoritative distance from the temporal and expe-
riential worlds of the characters, while for Wolf the subjective authentic-
ity of the narrative is expressed in part in the non-standard, speech-like
language of the narrator’s voice. While Wolf ’s narrative regularly breaks
into what Bakhtin calls “oral everyday narration” or “semi-literary every-
day narration”, both replicating natural and spontaneous language use,
Creeley’s is more firmly embedded in the authority of “direct authorial
literary-artistic narration” (1981: 262), an altogether more organised and
formal mode. Like Christa, Creeley’s protagonist (John) is disorientated
by relationships with others and by his feeling of not belonging to the
linguistic community that surrounds him; however, John’s alienated per-
sonal narrative is not framed by the search for conciliation with institu-
tional narratives that troubles Christa. Similarly, the detached narrative
voice of the text does not reflect the internally persuasive language of
John’s experience. John’s relationships to his surroundings, and the narra-
tor’s relationship to the protagonist, lacks the authenticity and social dia-
logic Wolf creates in her prose by exploring subjective narratives as frames
for institutional narratives. Instead, Creeley’s narrating voice does not
draw on shared or familiar narratives and is framed by abstract narratives
of progress, modernity and the individual that endow his isolation with
8
It is interesting, if most likely coincidental, that the translation of “June Afternoon” published in
Grand Street in 1992 was followed immediately in the same issue by a selection of three Creeley
poems.
meaning but do not make it “real”. Responses to Creeley’s poetry support

this reading of his prose: Daniel Hoffman (1979: 533) comments that
“Creeley has never included ideas, or commitments to social issues, in the
repertoire of his work; his stripped-down poems have been, as it were, a
proving of Pound’s belief in technique as the test of a man’s sincerity.” In
taking his inspiration from The Island, then, Middleton moves away from
the persuasive subjectivity that authenticates Wolf ’s narrative voice.
The shifts in narrative voice explored in this chapter are foreshad-
owed by the title of the translation, The Quest for Christa T. Wolf ’s title,
Nachdenken über Christa T., exposes the duality and uncertainty of the
text by exploiting the ambiguity of “Nachdenken”, which might be read
as either a verb (to contemplate) or a verbal noun (contemplation/s),
framing the text as both the action and the product of the narrator’s
thoughts. This reflects the contemporaneousness of narration and expe-
rience that Wolf advocates, and the coexistence of multiple strands of
thought, or what Bakhtin calls the “internal dialogism of the word”
(1981: 279). It is very difficult to reflect this succinctly in English; how-
ever, the translation seems to move actively away from the duality of the
German, opting for a definite article and the unambiguous singular noun
“the quest”. Although Middleton’s title has been praised for invoking a
universal motif (Finney 1999: 33), a quest is a far more unitary, linear
and teleological process than that undergone by Wolf ’s narrator, and sev-
eral studies note the loss of the text’s crucial interiority, intimacy and
subjectivity in the title of the translation (Kuhn 1988: 67; Crick 1989:
94; Resch 1997: 55–56). With this in mind, a comparative reading of the
German and English texts demonstrates how the translation of Christa
T. restores the centripetal Cartesian “authority” of the narrative voice
by reframing its subjectivity as authoritative rather than persuasive. The
tendencies towards a distinction between the temporal and spatial fram-
ing of narrator and characters, and towards the consolidation of a narrat-
ing position outside the narrative and the externalisation of experience,
show how Wolf ’s centrifugal subjective authenticity is reframed through
translation as what might be described as a centripetal “authenticated
subjectivity”: a narrator-controlled and individualist aesthetic that in its
turn frames her Anglophone author-function by distancing the writer’s
personal narrative from the textual narrative. This can be explored by
looking at how Wolf ’s requirements for the subjective-authentic narrative

intersect with Genette’s three elements of the narrative voice.
“ Contemporaneousness”: Narrative Time

and Space
In her writing on literature, Wolf notes the importance of the narrator’s
temporal position in relation to the past. She aligns epic prose with the
aims of socialist society when she identifies socialist discourse and epic
prose as, ideally, parallel spaces in which individuals are enabled to come
to a sense of self. In this context, she seeks to establish what Genette
would describe as a contemporaneous relationship between the narrative
voice and the events of the narrative, in which the moment of narra-
tion shares time and space with the narrated story. Wolf ’s re-examination
of the past establishes a bilateral dynamic in which “Gegenwart und
Vergangenheit—wie sie es in uns Menschen ja andauernd tun—auch
auf dem Papier sich nicht nur ‘treffen’, sondern aufeinander einwirken,
in ihrer Bewegung aneinander gezeigt werden können” (‘Subjektive
Authentizität’, Werke 4: 416).9 It is a mode of narration that is embedded
in, and therefore deeply affected by, the events of the narrative, and this
contradicts norms of the Socialist Realist model of literature such as the
stable narrative voice. Recognising this tension, Wolf cites the narrator’s
“dimension” as crucial to the function of literature as a medium for com-
ing to terms with past events that shape present identities:
Für diejenigen, die in der Zeit des Faschismus aufwuchsen, kann es kein
Datum geben, von dem ab sie ihn als “bewältigt” erklären können. Die
Literatur hat dem Vorgang nachzugehen, was heißen kann: ihm voran-
zugehen, ihn vielleicht mit auszulösen: Eine immer tiefere, dabei auch
immer persönlichere Verarbeitung dieser im Sinn des Wortes ungeheuren
Zeit-Erscheinung. (ibid.: 414)10
9
“Present and past—as they do constantly within us—also on paper not only ‘meet’ one another
but influence one another, in their movement can be shown to one another.”
10
“For those who grew up in the time of fascism, there can be no date after which they can declare
it ‘dealt with.’ Literature must pursue this, in other words: anticipate it, and perhaps in doing so set
Wolf understands the individual’s relationship with the past as an

intensely personal one, in which personal and institutional narratives of
times past are in some sense always present in the language of the narrating
voice. Literature creates a space in which the subjectivity of the individual
can enter into dialogue with the controlled language of officialdom that
frames the past as “bewältigt”: by exploring the languages of past and pres-
ent in the narrative voice, reflecting their coexistence in personal narratives
of the individual, Wolf contradicts the temporal framing of the Third Reich
as distant history by institutional narratives of the GDR that recounted a
complete break from fascism with the liberation of Germany by the Soviet
army. This contemporaneousness of narrator and narrative, mixing past and
present in the narrative voice, is central to Wolf’s exploration of human
experience, which reconciles past and present rather than alienating the two.
The characteristically complex relationship in Wolf ’s writing between
the moment of narration and the moment of experience is expressed even
in the opening line of Christa T.:
Nachdenken, ihr nach—denken. (Werke 2: 11)

[Reflections/to reflect, after her—thinking.]11
The quest for her: in the thought of her. (Q: 3)
Exploiting the meaning of “nach” as either “subsequent to” or “after

the manner of ”, Wolf ’s narrator begins by revealing the contingency and
instability of her narrating position. Fluid boundaries between the narrat-
ing present and the remembered (or imagined) past dissolve distinctions
between the realities of narrator and protagonist. The protagonist’s per-
sonal narrative is thus present in that of the narrator: Wolf demonstrates
that the self is constituted through engagement with the other and the
present through ongoing confrontation with the past. The opening of
the text reflects the same oneness of self and other that Wolf identifies in
“Selbstinterview” as being integral to a subjective-authentic aesthetic and
it off: an ever deeper and therefore ever more personal processing of this phenomenon which was
monstrous in the true sense of the word.”
11
Acknowledging the difficulty of providing a literal translation that also reflects the effect of the
German, the “literal translations” in this chapter are provided principally for the purpose of compari-
son with the restructuring of Wolf ’s syntax and expression that occurs in the published translation.
A more effective translation of this particular sentence might read “Reflection—her reflection.”
which is explored throughout Christa T. in the permeable boundaries

between the personal narratives of narrator and protagonist. However, in
translation the narrator’s opening words frame the text as a positivist and
unilateral search for truth in memory. While recognising the narrative as
a process of reconstruction from the narrator’s memories, this opening
to the text does not capture the interchangeable nature of narrating and
remembering, in which memory is transformed by individual perspective
and, conversely, can result in a transformation of the remembering self.
The framing of the text as the thought of Christa, rather than allowing
the possibility for thinking as her, makes her the object rather than the
subject of the narrative voice and places the “right to narrate”, and to
moralise, solely in the language of the living, interrogating narrator.
The ambivalent temporal positioning of Wolf ’s narrative voice in both
past and present suggests that, when we remember, we do not stand out-
side memory but rather narrate it from inside ourselves. While suggesting
that “wir haben es, da wir mitten drin steckten, nicht gesehen” (Werke 2:
80) [we, since we were in the midst of it, did not see it], the uncertainty
of Wolf ’s narrator that the story she is telling really is consigned to the
past is reflected in her temporal framing of her earlier years:
Wir entdeckten auf einmal—keiner von uns älter als fünfunddreißig—dass es

schon etwas gab, was den Namen “Vergangenheit” verdiente. (Werke 2: 184)
[We discovered suddenly—not one of us older than thirty-five—that there was
already something that would earn the name “past”.]
We suddenly found—not one of us over thirty-five—that we had some-
thing you might call a past. (Q: 165)
In the German, the quotation marks express the narrator’s lack of

conviction that the events she describes really are “vergangen” (recall-
ing Wolf ’s challenge to the status of the past as “bewältigt”), whereas
the translated narrator assumes the integrity of the category of “past”.
Elsewhere, the temporal ambiguity created by the dual meaning of the
German “Geschichte” is under threat in translation, since the lack of a
similarly ambivalent term in English necessitates the loss of polysemy in
a choice between “story” and “history”. Middleton chooses the former
(e.g. Q: 65), but this inevitable loss of duality masks the dialogue between
past and present that is reflected in the multiple languages of Wolf ’s

narrative voice. While Wolf ’s narrator draws her authenticity from her
inability to prevent languages of the past from permeating her internally
persuasive narration, the translation more often redefines the authentic-
ity of the narrative through the authority of a narrator whose confident
retrospective enables her to comment conclusively on events.
As this suggests, throughout the translated text the narrative voice is
repositioned in relation to the story in two significant ways. On one hand,
the act of narrating is distinguished from the distant “past” of Christa’s life
and her narrative is framed as singular and specific rather than representa-
tive of shared experiences. This frames the translated narrative as a tempo-
rally distant story that can reveal abstract truths to the reader through its
individual specificity, rather than contesting shared or institutional narra-
tives. Christa’s narrative undergoes a shift in translation to become con-
tained in the past, closing off the possibility for continuity between the lives
of protagonist and narrator. On the other hand, the spatial relationship
between the narrator and the story is reconfigured, as the language of GDR
narratives is excluded in favour of framing by these “universal” narratives.
Temporal Specificity: Isolating Christa in the Past
As in sociological models, the literary narrative typically unfolds within

recognisable frameworks of temporality and sequence: the languages of
the narrative voice express events as past, present or future, and Genette
argues that the literary narrator’s account expresses a temporal relation to
the story being told. He describes how explicit “trace[s] of enunciating” in
the narrative voice can imply a temporal interval between story and narra-
tion that is concealed in what he terms a more “transparent” narrative, one
that prioritises the visibility of the story rather than the narrative act (1980:
219).12 In addition to revealing the process of organisation, the narrative
voice might express distance from the story by using a retrospective tense
such as the standard narrating mode of the simple past or by establishing a
bounded, “perfective” aspect (see Dahl 1985; Verkuyl 1993) that distances
Barthes (1975) comments on the effect of explicit organisational structures in non-literary genres
12
when he exposes such devices as a strategy for asserting the authority of the historian in historical
narratives.
the moment of narration from the finite, completed event.13 Conversely,

the narrating act might be temporally positioned in continuity with the
events of the story by use of the present tense or non-bounded (“imperfec-
tive”) aspect or by language use that establishes relational links to social
narratives belonging to the “past” reality in which the story is embedded.
The internalisation of the past by Wolf ’s narrator, which is reflected
in the continuous (or imperfective) mode of narrating Christa’s life, is
diminished by lexical choices in the translated narrative that contain the
past as a bounded temporal space. For example, Wolf ’s narrator invokes
Freudian theories of the unconscious when she suggests that Christa is
not absolutely forgotten but remains a continuous and latent presence in
the minds of those who knew her.
…eine längst vergangene, dem Bewusstsein der Nachwelt entrückte

Gestalt. (Werke 2: 89)
[…a long-past figure, slipped from the consciousness of posterity.]
Meanwhile, the translation consigns her to the finite and closed past:
…a person long past, a person of whom posterity is ignorant. (Q: 75)
Particularly in the context of “the past” as an unproblematic, bounded

space, this framing isolates Christa as temporally distant and unknown
to the present. Such choices suggest a linear progression from a bounded,
finite past to a narrating present in which the story is “bewältigt”, selec-
tively excluding the past from the present and framing the protagonist’s
personal narrative as a closed unit, best narrated and understood from
outside. The possibility is excluded that the narrator (or the author) is
inhabited by her own story.
The narrator’s internalisation of events as she recounts them is reflected
throughout Wolf ’s text by deictic expressions that relay an integral con-
nection between past and present. This simultaneity reflects the narrator’s
unwillingness, or inability, to separate the past from the present in order
to narrate it. However, the translation often omits indications of deixis
that reveal this dual temporal positioning of the narrative voice, as in the
following examples (Table 3.1):
Genette pays hardly any attention to the category of aspect, other than in his discussion of fre-
13
quency in narrative (1980: 113).

Table 3.1 Omission of deictic indicators in The Quest for Christa T.

Nachdenken über
Christa T.(Werke 2, The Quest for Christa T.
my emphasis) Literal translation (Q)
i Sehe sie bis heute, See her until today, but I can see her now, today,
aber heute erst today for the first time but it’s only today that
recht. (19) properly. I can see her aright.
(10)
ii Nichts davon damals Nothing about it at the Not a word about this to
zu mir. (20) time to me. me. (11)
iii Wie ich alle ihre How I see through all her How clearly I can see
Ausflüchte jetzt evasions now! through all her
durchschaue! (66) evasions! (55)
iv Der Brief blieb in ihrem The letter remained lying The letter stayed in her
Tagebuch liegen in her diary until today diary. (69)
bis heute. (83)
In (ii) and (iii), the omission of temporal adverbs conceals the temporal
duality of the narrator’s perspective suggested in the German, where she is
present both in the moment of narration and in the narrated past. “Damals”
and “jetzt” express a relation between the events of the story and the moment
of narration by implying they are part of one and the same narrative, in
which the narrator is embedded. In the translation, however, the narrator
is framed in an atemporal position of authority over Christa’s narrative: by
omitting “damals” the translation states simply that Christa told the narra-
tor nothing and does not reflect her later discovery; the omission of “jetzt”
weakens the suggestion that the narrator’s understanding of her friend has
changed. Similarly, in examples (i) and (iv) the continuous link between past
and present is broken by the omission of “bis” or “bis heute”. In each case,
narration and events are positioned in a non-durative temporal binary of
“now” and “then”, and the narrative voice of the translation is positioned in
a non-continuous, authoritative space. While Wolf disturbs a binary concept
of experienced time as a clean movement from past to present, the translation
moves back towards this by re-establishing the temporal frameworks that
separate the living narrator from her deceased friend and from narratable
“history”. The result is that the translated narrator makes an implicit claim to
authority in her framing of Christa’s narrative as under her control.
The bounded temporality of Christa’s story in the translated text
is consolidated by shifts in tense that distance the narrator from her
own memories. The narrator reflects, for example, on the difficulty of

talking about the past:
Allein dass man trennen muss und hintereinanderreihen, was in Wirklichkeit

miteinander vermischt ist bis zur Unlösbarkeit.… (Werke 2: 77)
[Even just that one must separate and line up in order that which in reality is
mixed together to the point of inextricability….]
In order to make the story tellable, one has to separate and put into
sequence events which were so entangled as to be inexplicable…. (Q: 64)
The translation crucially frames ambiguity as a state of the past that

contrasts the present authority and clarity of the retrospective narrator,
again excluding language in which the past is “present”. As Christa is
dying, too, Wolf ’s narrative voice is transposed to the present tense, fram-
ing the protagonist’s suffering as an immediate experience:
Sie nennt die Angst nicht bei ihrem Namen, sie sagt Schock, sie sagt
Einsamkeit, Hilfsnamen. (Werke 2: 199)
[She does not call fear by its name, she says shock, she says loneliness, euphemisms.]
She called the fear not by its name: she said “shock” and she said “loneliness”—
nicknames. (Q: 179)
In the translation, the remark remains in the conventional narrating

tense of the simple past. The unbounded aspect of the German, sug-
gested by the switch to the present tense which transports the reader to
the moment of experience, is reconfigured in translation by the tempo-
ral distinction between the narrated and narrating subjects. Similarly, in
instances where the temporal relationship between the voice and the story
is ambiguous in the German, the translation tends towards explicitation:
Die Fliegeralarme wurden länger, die Fahnenappelle düsterer und

schwächlicher, wir merkten nichts, und darüber wurde es wieder November.
Ein grauer Tag jedenfalls, also wohl November. …Wir zogen in kleinen
Rudeln durch die Stadt, die Entwarnung hatte uns überrascht, zu spät, um
zur Schule zurück, zu früh, um schon nach Hause zu gehen. (Werke 2: 17)
[The air-raid alarms got longer, the drills bleaker and feebler, we didn’t notice
anything, and meanwhile it turned November again. A grey day in any case, so
probably November. …We trailed in small groups through the town, the all-
clear had surprised us, too late for back to school, too early for going home.]
The air-raid alerts grew longer, the draft calls gloomier and feebler, we
didn’t notice anything and then November had come again. Anyway it was
a gray day, so probably it was in November. …We were walking through
the town in small groups, the all-clear had taken us by surprise: it was too
late to go back to school and too early to go home. (Q: 9, my emphasis)
Wolf ’s narrator alternates between the simple past and verbless phrases
in which ellipsis ensures that the narrative voice is not clearly positioned in
relation to the temporality of the story. These multiple possibilities of tem-
poral framing have a centrifugal effect on the narrative voice, revealing the
instability of the narrator’s account as she simultaneously remembers events
and experiences them afresh. In the translation, however, the inclusion of
verbs renders both types of statement in the simple past. Such shifts affirm
the authority of the translated narrator by positioning her at a distant,
“objective” (or at least knowledgeable) vantage point, rather than allowing
for internal persuasion through the language of narrator and characters.
While Christa’s life is framed in the translation as a bounded and dis-
tant narrative by undermining the continuity between past and present,
the multiple layers of reference in the text are also sometimes reduced in
the translation, which does not always reflect the polysemy of Wolf’s lan-
guage. The language of the translated narrator tends towards specific lexical
choices that are restricted in their referential value. For example, describing
Christa on her “Ewigtrampler” bicycle, the narrator comments that she
…rollt und rollt, denn sie kann nicht bremsen. (Werke 2: 28)
[…rolls and rolls along, since she can’t brake.]
This might be read not only as an observation about the bike but also as a
reflection on Christa’s unpredictable and unrestrained character. The term
“Ewigtrampler” [literally: eternal trampler] emphasises this suggestion of
the bicycle’s metaphorical significance, emulating Christa’s relentless and
haphazard energy. This is lost in the translation, where the narrator’s com-
ment makes the brakes rather than Christa the subject of the phrase:
rolls … slap into the middle because the brakes don’t work. (Q: 18)
This shift limits the denotational possibilities of the remark, which

can now only coherently refer to the bike. It is typical of a shift towards
more specific meaning in the translation. Similarly, earlier on, the nar-
rator comments on Christa’s tendency to walk on ahead of the others or
break with set behaviours:
Ich suchte, wann sie schon einmal so vor mir hergegangen sein konnte,
und fand, dass es kein Vorbild für diesen Vorgang gab. (Werke 2: 18)
[I sought out when she might once before have gone before me like that, and
found that there was no model for this event.]
I tried to recall a previous occasion when she could have walked on ahead
of me, yet found there wasn’t one. (Q: 9)
The important potential for a more figurative reading (that Christa

has always been ahead of her time) is weakened in the translation. As a
combined result of the linguistic resources available in the target language
and the more specific term used, with “walked on ahead” for “vor mir
hergegangen”, the translation excludes the suggestion that the “Vorgang”
is more than simply Christa’s manner of walking. There is a nod here to
Wolf ’s own break with institutional narratives of literature that is sig-
nificant in its absence from the translation. The suggestive ambiguity of
Wolf ’s unstable narrative voice is diminished, which unifies the language
of the narrative under the narrator’s authority.
Much later, the narrator invites the reader to join in her reflection on
Christa’s life, drawing another parallel between the present tense of nar-
ration and the life of the protagonist:
Gehen wir in die Jahre, wie sie selbst hineingegangen ist. (Werke 2: 157)
[Let us go into the years as she herself went into them.]
We can enter the years that she entered. (Q: 141)
As in the opening sentence to the book, the narrator reflects her desire
to remember Christa by living through her. The translation, however,
focuses on the object rather than the manner of this engagement. The
reader is invited to “enter the years that she entered”, looking back at
Christa’s story in the past rather than experiencing her narrative as an
alternative view of the present. Similarly, the narrator instructs the reader:
Vergessen wir, was wir wissen, damit unser Blick sich nicht trübt.
(Werke 2: 157)
[Let us forget what we know, so that our sight is not clouded.]
Let’s forget what we know, otherwise we shall see her only obscurely.
(Q: 141, my emphasis)
In the translation, the focus of the translated narrative is on seeing

Christa, rather than seeing as her. Instead of encouraging empathy and
dialogue with Christa’s experience through its potential as a shared nar-
rative and a lens for present narratives of the self, the translated narrator
frames her friend as an individual whose experience offers a behavioural
example from which the reader might learn—but which is specific to her
own long-distant personal narrative. The invitation positions the narrator
and reader on an authoritative level of understanding that is authenti-
cated not by internal persuasiveness but by retrospective distance. The
dialogic quality of Wolf ’s narrative is lost in this temporal and causal
framing of memory. Moving on to look at spatial framing of the text in
German and English, it is possible to see in more detail how Christa’s
story is transformed from a shared narrative into a specific and individual
account that is appropriated by abstract narratives of individuality.
patial Universality: Framing Christa in Supra-national

S
Narratives
The spatial positioning of the narrative voice is regarded by social theorists

as significant, though Genette discounts it as less meaningful than the
temporal dimension (1980: 215). As with the temporal, the narrator may
mark the difference between the spaces of story and narration by framing
the social narratives of the story as “other” in contrast to a narrating self,

or may internalise the contextual social discourse of the story within the
language of the narrative voice. This is particularly relevant in translation,
where the spatial repositioning of the translated narrative (i.e. its move-
ment between literary fields) can redefine the relationship between the
narrator and the text. In Wolf ’s case, while the temporal shifts in the trans-
lated narrative voice in part limit the denotational value of Christa’s story
to the events of her own specific narrative, they also selectively exclude
specificities and nuances of Wolf ’s writing that reflect the language of an
East German cultural space. The integral link between narrative space and
time in Wolf ’s writing invites a distinction between different possibili-
ties of representing space in the narrative, for example, as near or far, self
or other (Zoran 1984; Shenhav 2005). In the case of Christa T., where
the temporal positioning of the translated narrative is limited to the dis-
tant past, what could be considered its spatial positioning is broadened,
extending the denoted context of Christa’s story beyond the GDR.
In Christa T. Wolf makes use of the politically loaded semantics of
East German public discourse to demonstrate how the internalisation of
politicised modes of expression can alienate individuals from their own
subjectivity. The language of official institutional narratives enters into
the narrative voice of the text to establish a dialogue with the languages
(and with the personal narratives) of narrator and protagonist. However,
in translation this language loses its relation to politicised institutional
narratives since it is not contextualised by the same social discourse. The
following passage demonstrates this:
Als von allen Beispielen—denn nichts anders ist schreiben als: Beispiele
anbieten—gerade sie sich aufdrängte. …Nie wäre ich, das möchte ich doch
schwören, auf sie verfallen. Denn sie ist, als Beispiel, nicht beispielhaft, als
Gestalt kein Vor-Bild. Ich unterdrücke die Vermutung, dass es nicht anders
erginge mit jedem wirklich lebenden Menschen, und bekenne mich zur
Freiheit und zur Pflicht des Erfindens. Einmal nur, dieses eine Mal, möchte
ich erfahren und sagen dürfen, wie es wirklich gewesen ist, unbeispielhaft
und ohne Anspruch auf Verwendbarkeit. (Werke 2: 55, my emphasis)
[When, of all examples—because writing is nothing other than: offering exam-
ples—she of all [people] forced herself forward. …Never, I swear, would I have
thought of her. For she is, as an example, not exemplary, as a figure, no model.
I suppress the inkling that it would be no different with any really living person,
and I profess the freedom and the duty of invention. Once only, just this once, I
would like to be able to experience and say how it really was, unexemplary and
with no demand for usefulness.]
As if she—of all the exemplary people (and that’s what writing means—to
furnish examples), she was the one who suggested herself. …It would never
have occurred to me, I swear, to think of her as an exemplary person. For
she isn’t an exemplary case at all. I won’t say that the same could be pre-
sumed of every real and living person; and I profess the freedom and
responsibility of invention. Just for once, for this once, I want to discover
how it is and to tell it like it is: the unexemplary life, a life that can’t be used
as a model. (Q: 44–45, my emphasis)
Through repetition and partial repetition, Wolf exploits the mean-

ing of “Beispiel” as either an illustrative sample or an archetypal model.
Christa is a “Beispiel” in the first sense because she acts as a focal point
for constant tension between personal and institutional narratives, such
as those framing socialism as an antidote to the fascism of the past.
However, in the evaluative framework of Socialist Realism, Christa is
considered “unbeispielhaft” precisely because of her volatility and this
inability to reconcile the personal and the institutional: she clashes with
other students and with her superiors, her landlady despairs of her, she
loses control of her pupils, and she has an extramarital affair. In Socialist
Realist terms, Christa fails as a positive heroine and the text fails to affirm
socialist narratives of the East German literary institution; however, from
Wolf ’s point of view, Christa’s exemplary value stems directly from her
questioning of the set roles offered to her by social narratives. The inter-
nal dialogism and repetition of the narrative voice reveal the multiple
languages competing for ownership of particular lexemes, enabling the
personal to challenge institutional discourse.
The translation, however, does not establish the same semantic tension
between “example” and “exemplary”. Referring to Christa as an “exemplary
person” rather than the more ambiguous “example”, the translated text does
not subsequently expose the contested meaning of the concept (sample vs.
archetype), particularly since pairings such as Beispiel/unbeispielhaft and
Gestalt/kein Vor-Bild are lost. The contradiction between “she—of all the
exemplary people” and “she isn’t an exemplary case at all” is confusing,
and the paradox of “exemplary non-exemplariness” is not brought out.

The language of institutional narratives of socialism is perhaps inevitably
lost from the narrative voice because of the differing semantic value of the
English terms, which do not reflect the two senses in which “example” is
used. The choice of “I won’t say” for “Ich unterdrücke die Vermutung”
continues to deny Christa the status of representative and to assert control,
while the German implies exactly the opposite: Christa’s predicament pre-
cisely does relate to the conflict between personal and political narratives
experienced by many others, and the narrator only reluctantly dismisses
this idea, implicitly granting it a voice by taking the trouble to deny it. The
centripetal shifts in the translation unify the narrative voice by excluding
this reference to institutional narrative, thus reducing the conflict inherent
in the multiple and competing languages of the text.
Echoes of the language of East German socialism are removed from the
translated narrative voice in a number of other places. Christa’s language
reveals her internalisation of institutional narratives, for example, at one point
during her studies when she reflects on her need to work harder, suggesting
not only work in the sense of studying but also working to improve the self.
Sie gab ja zu, dass man an sich zu arbeiten hatte. (Werke 2: 46)
[She admitted, indeed that one had to work on oneself.]
She admitted that she really must go and study. (Q: 35)
As seen in the previous example of Christa’s Ewigtrampler, the transla-

tion here reduces the relevance of the statement to an observation about
Christa’s obligation to do her academic work, losing the text’s resonance
with a narrative of self-improvement through socialism by specifying
“study” and translating the generalising pronoun “man” as “she”. Elsewhere,
a similar reduction of potential meaning is notable. The nurse treating
Christa’s leukaemia, for example, adopts politically loaded language when
she discusses the illness, using the historically significant term “Macht”:
In diesem Bereich sind wir machtlos. (Werke 2: 196)

[In this area we are powerless.]
We can’t do anything. (Q: 177)
Wir sind zur Macht gekommen, Sie, Sie selbst. (Werke 2: 198)
[We have come to power, you, you yourself.]
We’ve got the better of it, and you too, you have. (Q: 178)
Here, the translation replaces the suggestive language of the German

with more innocuous expressions that do not draw political narratives
into the narrative voice of the text. Playing also on the semantic poten-
tial of “Grenze” as “border” and specifically the German-German border,
Christa notes local farmers’ reluctance to take
…ein unerhörter Schritt über die Grenze, die ihnen gesetzt schien. (Werke 2: 161)
[…an unprecedented step over the boundary that seemed set for them.]
…an unprecedented step beyond their apparent maximum capacity. (Q: 144)
The implications of the phrase are shifted in translation because “capac-

ity” suggests a limit of quantity rather than space and does not bear the
same strong connotative value in Anglophone discourse as does “Grenze”,
particularly in a pre-1989 German context whose institutional narratives
inevitably reflect the division of the two German states. “Grenze” reap-
pears in relation to Christa’s death, when the narrator remarks:
Da sie die Grenze überschritten hat, gelten andere Gesetze. (Werke 2: 196)
[Since she has overstepped the border, other laws apply.]
Since she has crossed the limit, other laws apply. (Q: 177)
Again, the translation lacks the double-voiced quality of the German

because “limit” does not denote as strongly as “Grenze” the idea of a
physical boundary and does not invoke the same institutional narratives
of a German-German border that cannot normally be crossed without
some form of transgression.
The translation also undergoes shifts in reference to shared memory,
moving towards a less bounded spatial context: the “Trümmerfeld”

(Werke 2: 115) [field of rubble from bombing] in which Christa’s pupils
go scavenging, embedding symbols of the recent past in the language of the
narrative voice, becomes a “dump” (Q: 102) in the translation, distancing the
narrator’s memory from collective narratives of war-bombed German cities.

Christa is disentangled from the hereditary narratives of German kulturelles
Erbe she explores and into which she is inserted by the narrator: Kostja’s status
as “ein romantisches Motiv” (Werke 2: 72) [a romantic motif] is reduced to
that of “a romance” (Q: 61), and slightly later, the translation brings about a
similar shift in reference when Kostja comments to Christa that:
Bettinen und Annetten gibt es nicht mehr. (Werke 2: 74)

[Bettinas or Annettes don’t exist any more.]
Bettina and Annette, nobody goes by those romantic names any more. (Q: 62)
Kostja is referring to Bettina von Arnim and Annette von Droste-

Hülshoff as representatives of narratives of Romantic (with a capital
“R”) and female writers to which Christa herself relates, in her subjective
engagement with the world and, for instance, in her choice of the author
Sophie von la Roche as a character for a fancy dress party. The transla-
tion draws the focus away from the narratives embodied by von Arnim
and Droste-Hülshoff and towards the specific question of naming. In the
translation, then, the author-functions of the (female) writers in which
Christa frames her personal narrative are excluded from dialogue with
Christa’s own narrative, and are reframed by the gloss, which identifies
them with romance (with a small “r”). Like Creeley’s text, the translation
of Christa T. establishes interpretive relationships with abstract narra-
tives, rather than with those expressed by the varying authentic languages
of characters, narrator, writer and reader in the German text.
Wolf ’s narrator comments on the inadequacy of the authoritative nar-
rative voice when she describes Günter’s unhappy love story:
Denn eine richtige kleine Geschichte war es, wie ich jetzt merke, mit
Einleitung, Hauptteil, Höhepunkt, Umschlag und schnellem Abfall, mit
Kabale und Liebe, bloß wir haben es, da wir mitten drin steckten, nicht
gesehen. Da sie erzählbar geworden ist, scheint sie hinter uns zu liegen…
(Werke 2: 80)14
“For it was a proper little story, as I now realise, with introduction, main body, climax, transition
14
and quick ending, with Kabale and Liebe [Love and Intrigue], but since we were in the midst of it
we simply did not see it. Since it has become tellable, it seems to lie behind us….”
Articulating a main theme shared by “Lesen und Schreiben”, her impli-

cation is that the conventional tools of authoritative literary narration do
not adequately reflect subjective experience. The narrator refers to Schiller’s
Kabale und Liebe, aligning the controlled forms of Weimar classicism with
the prescriptive categories of Socialist Realist narration she is trying to escape.
By implying that these clear categories are inadequate and by inviting a more
subjective, Romantic approach to writing, Wolf comments on the selective
construction of a narrative of German kulturelles Erbe in the GDR. By
establishing Socialist Realism as a successor to the controlled and rational
forms of Weimar classicism, institutional narratives of the GDR excluded
the possibility of developing socialism through subjective dialogue with the
individual. Christa T. challenges this by establishing an affinity with the lan-
guage of German Romanticism, continued through Wolf’s engagement in
later texts with writers such as von Arnim and Karoline von Günderrode.
Wolf reveals the irony of appropriating inherited set forms that are unable to
reflect authentic experience, framing Christa T. as an attempt to redress this
by engaging with socialism through the subjective narrative of an individual.
However, while the Schiller reference may be familiar to the Anglophone
reader, the publication context of the translation is inevitably isolated
from the discourse of a struggle to reclaim narratives of German kulturel-
les Erbe. The absence of these social narratives against which Wolf ’s text
protests contributes to a substantial loss of relational meaning. Rather
than opening up the possibility for an alternative, subjective mode of
narration and centrifugal dialogue with dominant narratives, the narra-
tor’s comment seems to do exactly the opposite, claiming authority for
the narrator and the present. In translation, the narrator of Christa T. is
positioned as temporally separate from the events of the story, authorita-
tive in her distance rather than authenticated by the internal persuasive-
ness of her account. The narration of the story undergoes a shift towards
denotation of a specific set of events, rather than exploiting the ambigu-
ous interpretive gaps that allow a dialogic reading of the German text.
The exclusion of narratives that delimit Christa’s (and Wolf ’s) particular
discursive space emphasises the symbolic meaning of the story as a vehi-
cle for “universal” narratives. Meanwhile, Christa’s own language is con-
tained and framed in the bounded category of “the past”: it is not a claim
to the truth of her experience that makes it significant as it intervenes in
the narrative voice, but rather her exemplary value in relation to abstract
narratives of the self or the individual as expressed by the authoritative

narrator. These spatial and temporal shifts have had considerable impli-
cations for the framing of Wolf ’s authorship through links between the
texts and the writer’s personal narrative. Looking further into this, we can
move on to examine the distancing of the narrator from events through
the weakening of her ability to speak from within the story.
“Engagement”: Narrative Level

Like Bakhtin, Genette identifies an affinity between social discourse and
literary narrative, revealed in the formation of identities through the tell-
ing of stories and the interdependence of teller, audience and tale. This
mutual dependence destabilises a typical unilateral framework of the
author/text or narrator/narrative relationship, and his exploration of nar-
rative level represents a key point of intersection between his narratologi-
cal model and a social narrative framework. According to this model, the
extradiegetic narrator exists outside the story, whereas the (intra)diegetic
narrator is embedded as a character in the narrative at the same time as
communicating it to the reader. Stories within the story, such as those
told by the characters to the narrator or to each other, are termed meta-
diegetic. Crucially, Genette is careful to note that “we shall not confound
extradiegetic with real historical existence, nor diegetic (or even metadi-
egetic) status with fiction” (1980: 230). He returns to the idea that the
role of the narrator is always fictional, identifying the possibility “that
the extradiegetic is perhaps always diegetic, and that the narrator and his
narrates—you and I—perhaps belong to some narrative” (ibid.: 236).
Wolf ’s narrators inhabit events as they narrate them, meaning they are
embedded in the narrative and are integral to its construction. For Wolf,
engagement of the narrative voice on this intradiegetic level increases the
subjective authenticity of the text. As early as Der geteilte Himmel and par-
ticularly from Nachdenken über Christa T. onwards, Wolf explores how
institutional narratives of socialism might exist in a dynamic relationship
with the personal narratives of the individual, showing that the narrative
voice is marked by the languages of both. The epigraph to Christa T. asks,
“Was ist das, dieses zu-sich-selber-Kommen des Menschen?” [What is it,
this human coming-to-self?] (Werke 2: 9), and Wolf ’s central concern for
the path of the individual towards self-understanding within a socialist

framework, is developed by her use of narrators who admit their own
and their author’s participation in (and dependence on) the narratives
they recount.15 Their inability to retreat to an authoritative, extradiegetic
position is integral to the subjective authenticity of their accounts, and
through them Wolf hopes to encourage the reader to engage with the
institutional narratives in which the text is embedded. The heteroglossia
of her literary narrative challenges narratives of socialism and Socialist
Realism that demand affirmative statements of knowledge rather than
discursive exploration of ideas.
Genette discusses the possibility of shifts between narrative levels, for
example, if a metadiegetic episode (a story told by a character) is appropri-
ated at the diegetic level and becomes part of the story proper (so it appears
to be told by the narrator): such a move consolidates the authority of the
extra- or intradiegetic narrator as the voice of the text, rather than allowing
the languages of other characters to be heard. Conversely, frequent shift-
ing between narrative levels in a text destabilises the narrator’s authority
by revealing the centrifugal nature of the narrative act. Dissatisfied with a
normative institutional narrative of the narrator as an extradiegetic posi-
tion detached from events, Wolf ’s narrative voice frequently slips into an
intradiegetic position to reveal how her personal narrative is interlinked
with that of her protagonist. The narrative voice, moving between extradi-
egetic remembering and intradiegetic experience, reflects a dynamic rela-
tionship between the narrative event and the events narrated. Features of
oral everyday narration allow the narrator to blend in and out of the story
and to internalise the language of characters, and she is helped and hin-
dered in her attempt to rediscover her friend by the semi-literary languages
of various books, letters and documents left behind by Christa, and by
conversations remembered and new with others who knew her. Moving
between memory, imagination and reflection, the narrative is character-
ised by ambiguity and by fragmented or incomplete syntax, inviting the
reader to participate in a dialogue of interpretation. However, just as the
temporal positioning of the translated narrator’s voice establishes a binary
between the closed, distant past and the authoritative vantage point of the
15
In “Selbstinterview”, for example, Wolf discusses her inability to distinguish her own identity
from that of her protagonist or to tell fact from fiction in her writing (see Werke IV: 139–144).
present, shifts in the translation move towards a more stable relationship

between the narrating voice and the events in the story. The immediacy of
the narrative voice is significantly reduced in the translation by a tendency
towards explicit constructions that emulate authorial, literary-artistic lan-
guage and express a greater degree of detachment from the narrative. By
“filling in” syntactic and interpretive gaps through explicitation or stan-
dardisation of the narrative voice, the extradiegetic narrator implicitly
asserts control of the text. The result is the repositioning of the narrative
voice as a stable, ostensibly authoritative and external agent.
tabilising the Narrator’s Extradiegetic Authority:

S
Explicitation
The translated narrator’s extradiegetic reframing of the text is exemplified

in the opening passage, which precedes the second chapter and frames
the whole narrative:
[1] Nachdenken, ihr nach—denken. [2] Dem Versuch, man selbst zu sein.
[3] So steht es in ihren Tagebüchern, die uns geblieben sind, auf den losen
Blättern der Manuskripte, die man aufgefunden hat, zwischen den Zeilen
der Briefe, die ich kenne. [4] Die mich gelehrt haben, dass ich meine
Erinnerung an sie, Christa T., vergessen muss. [5] Die Farbe der Erinnerung
trügt. …[6] Vor dem Vergessen, beteuern wir aber doch, müsse man sie
nicht schützen. [7] Da beginnen die Ausreden: Vor dem Vergessenwerden,
sollte es heißen. [8] Denn sie selbst, natürlich, vergisst oder hat vergessen,
sich, uns, Himmel und Erde, Regen und Schnee. (Werke 2: 11)
[[1] Reflection, her reflection. [2] On the attempt to be oneself. [3] So it stands
in her diaries, which are left to us, on the loose sheets of manuscript that have
been found, between the lines of the letters that I know. [4] Which have taught
me that I must forget my memory of her, Christa T. [5] The colour of memory
deceives. …[6] From forgetfulness, we insist however, she need not be protected.
[7] Then the excuses begin: from being forgotten, it should be. [8] For she herself,
naturally, forgets or has forgotten, herself, us, heaven and earth, rain and snow.]
[1] The quest for her: in the thought of her. [2] And of the attempt to be
oneself. [3] She speaks of this in her diaries, which we have, on the loose
manuscript pages that have been found, and between the lines of those
letters of hers that are known to me. [4] I must forget my memory of
Christa T.—that is what these documents have taught me. [5] Memory
puts a deceptive colour on things. …[6] Yet she still needs to be protected
against oblivion. [7a] This is where the evasions begin. [7b] It’s not against
oblivion that she must be protected, but against being forgotten. [8] For
she, naturally, forgets; she has forgotten herself, us, heaven and earth, rain
and snow. (Q: 3–4)
This influential passage at the opening of the text offers numerous exam-
ples of a shift in the narrative voice, away from oral everyday narration and
towards literary-artistic narration. In [3], for example, the conjunction
“and” is added. Rather than emulate the spontaneity of oral narration,
where a speaker might omit this final conjunction, the translation con-
forms to rhetorical conventions for lists. Other information made explicit
that is implied or encoded in the German includes the linking “and” in [2]
which is encoded in the use of the German dative and is arguably covered
by the English “of ”, the “of hers” in [3] that identifies the owner of the
letters, the need for the indirect object “on things” in [5] and the refor-
mulation of [8] to position “she has forgotten” as the start of a new clause.
In [7b], the explicitation is particularly noticeable: while the German text
implies the relationship between this comment and the preceding clause,
the translation separates them into two sentences and repeats the theme.
One of the more striking differences between source and translation in
the above passage is in [6]: aside from the mistranslation that omits the
“nicht” of the German, the translation also removes the reporting clause
“beteuern wir aber doch”. In German, the distancing of the narrative voice
from the reported speech, implied by the subjunctive, conflicts with the
narrator’s identification of herself as part of a speaking “wir”; in the trans-
lation, it has not been possible to reflect this tension within the narrative
voice due to the lack of an equivalent reporting structure in English.
From the opening of Wolf’s text, the narrator reveals her ambivalent
relationship to her own account, in which she is a narrative subject in
Genette’s double sense of carrying out an action and reporting it (1980:
213; see p. 59). This dialogic is not reflected in the translation, where the
translated narrator’s language consistently reflects an authoritative, extradi-
egetic position. One feature of this is the explicitation that can be seen, for
example, in the narrator’s consideration of Christa’s approach to writing:
Dichten, dicht machen, die Sprache hilft. Was denn dicht machen, und
wogegen? (Werke 2: 26)
[To write poetry, to seal off, language helps. Seal what off, and against what?]
Write poems, “dichten”, condensare, make dense, tighten; language helps.
What did she want to make tight, and against what did it have to be resis-
tant? (Q: 16)
The German follows the quotation from Christa with a question in

which the speaker is unclear: this could be read as Christa’s own voice or
as the voice of the narrator addressing Christa or the reader. In transla-
tion, these interpretive possibilities are no longer concisely available as the
English language does not permit the same play on words: the position-
ing of the narrator as speaker of the question, with Christa in the explicit
past tense and third person, affirms a binary relationship of external nar-
rator and internal character that shifts towards literary-artistic narration.
By explicitly locating herself outside the narrative and addressing a rhe-
torical question to the reader, the narrator asserts extradiegetic authority,
rather than persuading through intradiegetic dialogue.
In addition, by shifting away from the elliptical style and implica-
ture of oral everyday narration (see Table 3.2), the translation estab-
lishes a more controlled and “transparent” voice, distinguishing clearly
between the temporal and spatial contexts that define the act of narra-
tion and the event. Rather than occupying a position on the boundary
between what Genette would term the text and the narration, drifting
spontaneously between diegetic levels as she remembers and reflects,
the narrator is placed in a more stable, extradiegetic position, where
her authority is implied by her standardised use of literary-artistic lan-
guage and where dialogue is not invited with the intradiegetic lan-
guage of the characters. Whether or not the reader accepts this implicit
claim to reliability, the filling in of syntactic (and therefore interpre-
tive) gaps means that we too are excluded from dialogue and are not
invited to participate in the narrative. As the following section shows,
this is consolidated by the selective exclusion of other social languages
from the narrative.
Table 3.2 Translation of elliptical syntax in The Quest for Christa T.

Nachdenken über The Quest for
Christa T. (Werke 2) Literal translation Christa T. (Q)
i Weiß aber die ganze Zeit: But know the whole But all the time I
ein Schattenfilm spielt ab. time: a shadow-film is know that it’s a film
(12) playing. of shadows being
run off the reel. (4)
ii Sie, die Ältere, nun schon She, the elder, now She was older than I,
jünger. (12) actually younger. and now she’s
younger. (4)
iii Zwingen, wen? (13) Force, whom? But who is being
compelled? (4)
iv Kraucht aus einem Crawls out of a village Here she comes
Dorfschullehrerhaus, schoolteacher’s house creeping out of her
keine fünfzig Kilometer not fifty kilometres village-schoolteacher
von hier, und dann dieser from here, and then father’s house, hardly
Blick. (16) this look. thirty miles from
here, and gives us
this kind of look. (7)
v …so und nicht anders (34) thus and not otherwise …it had to be thus
and only thus (24)
vi Wird auch nicht jeder Don’t all get sent off Not all the letters are
abgeschickt. (65) either. sent, either. (54)
vii Ein Examen steht bevor, An exam is imminent, You’ll soon be taking
sagt ihr General. (94) says her General. an examination, her
general says. (80)
viii …graumelierte …grey flecked clip-file, …a greyish springback
Klemmappe, grüner green leather back folder with a green
Lederrücken (108) calf spine (94)
ix Duzen soll man sich, damit One should use the We ought just to use
erst gar keine Fremdheit ‘du’ form, so that no the familiar “du”,
aufkommt, ist mir gleich. strangeness at all then we shan’t feel
Ich vermeide die Anrede. springs up, all the strange, but I don’t
(141) same to me. I avoid mind. I’ll get around
forms of address. it by not calling her
anything. (125)
x Daß alles, was erst einmal That everything, once …that everything,
dasteht—dieses Wort it stands there—even once it’s out there in
schon!—, so schwer this word!—, is so existence—even this
wieder in Bewegung zu difficult to get phrase which puts it
bringen ist. (187) moving again. out there—is so
difficult to get
moving again. (167)
(continued)
Table 3.2 (continued)
xi Fand auch das Blatt nicht, Didn’t find the sheet Also I didn’t find the
das sie doch vor meinen [of paper] either, that sheet of paper she’d
Augen an jenem she had even written been writing on that
seltsamen Morgen on before my very strange morning.
beschrieben hatte. (191) eyes that strange (172)
morning
xii Das Wunder, nun ja. (200) The miracle, well. I told you we could do
wonders. (180)
nifying the Language of the Narrative Voice:

U
The Loss of Heteroglossia
The translated narrator’s control of the centripetal narrative voice extends

beyond her own utterances, to reformulate the speech and thoughts of
the characters. This unitary language of the narrator contains and con-
trols the presence of other languages within the text, reducing variation
by asserting her own authority. In Christa’s letter to her sister following
the break-up from Kostja, for example, she writes:
Das alles ändert nichts, unlösbarer Widerspruch, an meiner tiefen

Übereinstimmung mit dieser Zeit. (Werke 2: 84)
[All that changes nothing, unsolvable contradiction, about my deep affinity
with this time.]
All of which makes no difference; the contradiction can’t be resolved—
none of this makes any difference to my deep sense of concurring with
these times of ours and of belonging in them. (Q: 71)
The difficulty of translating “Übereinstimmung” and its sense of total

agreement or accord results in a wordy construction that contrasts the con-
ciseness and conceptual sophistication of the German. Explicitation of the
term in the translation establishes authoritative distance from the intradi-
egetic level, which is reinforced by the more straightforwardly organised
syntactic structure. The words on the page may be framed as Christa’s by
their presence in her letter, but their tone aligns them with the controlling
voice of a detached, extradiegetic narrator.
The wordy translation here is also incongruous with what we are told
of Christa’s use of language, most notably in her thesis on Storm, where
the narrator notes her surprise at Christa’s departure from inflexible aca-
demic language:
So lese ich sie zum ersten Mal, gefasst auf den überlegenen Tonfall, die
vorgeformten, klappernden Sätze, mit denen wir unsere Themen damals
mehr attackierten als ergriffen. Auf mitgehendes Verständnis, auf
Bekenntnisse war ich nicht gefasst, noch weniger auf Selbstprüfung und
fast unverhüllte Selbstdarstellung, auf den Einbruch persönlicher
Problematik in die leidenschaftslose Untersuchung. (Werke 2: 109)16
The intrusion of intradiegetic voices and personal narratives (whether

belonging to characters or to the narrator) into the authority of the extradi-
egetic narrator is concealed in the translation, which marginalises subjec-
tive-authentic narration in favour of a unitary, authoritative voice. Some
shifts even remove words from the mouth of an intradiegetic character and
attribute them instead to the narrator, as in the following examples:
Wenn man Blasing hörte, steckte die ganze Welt mit der ganzen Welt unter
einer Decke, und das war in Ordnung so, wer’s nicht begreift, ist selber schuld.
(Werke 2: 165)
[If one listened to Blasing, the whole world was in cahoots with the whole
world, and that was just right, those who don’t understand it have themselves
to blame.]
Blasing made it sound as if everyone was plotting with everyone else and
that was how it should be—if you didn’t see the point, you only had your-
self to blame. (Q: 148)
Sie nannte den Namen des Medikaments, merkwürdigerweise weiss ich
ihn noch, aber er soll hier nicht stehen. Prednison, sagte sie, in großen
Dosen. Das war das einzige Mittel. Dafür muss man anderes in Kauf
nehmen. (Werke 2: 179)
16
“So I read it for the first time, prepared for the superior tone, the pre-formed, clunky sentences
with which we used to attack our topics back then, more than engage with them. I was not prepared
for companionable understanding, for confessions, still less for self-examination and barely con-
cealed self-expression, for the intrusion of personal problems into the dispassionate investigation.”
[She named the medicine, strangely I still know it, but it should not stand here.
Prednisone, she said, in large doses. That was the only treatment. It means one
has to put up with other things.]
She names a medicine she’d been taking; oddly enough I still recall the
name. Prednisone, she said, in large doses. It was the only remedy. It meant
one had to put up with certain other troubles. (Q: 161)
Wolf ’s multi-voiced narrative destabilises the narrator’s authority and

instead reveals the multiple subjectivities implicated in the internally
persuasive, dialogic narration of Christa’s story. By shifting to the pres-
ent tense, the narrative voice signals the narrator’s internalisation of past
events, and narration shifts to an intradiegetic level. In the translation,
however, the speech of the characters remains in the simple past and is
filtered through the narrator’s observation. There is a double shift here:
not only is the visibility of the act of narration reduced by the homogene-
ity of the narrative voice, hiding the “nuts and bolts” of story-telling that
expose the narrator in the German; in addition, the agency of narration
is returned exclusively to the extradiegetic narrator, establishing a clear
distinction between the events and the telling of the story.
A significant aspect of the shift from oral to literary-artistic language
in the translation is the standardisation of regional variants. The use of
non-standard German allows multiple voices to enter Wolf ’s narrative
through the “intrusion” of variation in grammar, lexis and o rthography
and contributes to the oral feeling of the narration. Such strongly marked
voices are often intradiegetic. However, as we have already seen, the
translation tends to neutralise multiplicity and maintain greater unifor-
mity of the narrative voice. The Quest for Christa T. infrequently makes
use of lexis indicating the source language: the calque “burgomaster” for
“Bürgermeister”, for example, is used occasionally (Q: 22). By using a
less familiar term than the usual “town mayor”, the translation hints at
the German contextual narratives in which the source text is embedded.
However, above the level of the occasional individual word, linguistic
variation is hardly observed in the translation. This stabilises the author-
ity of a single narrator’s extradiegetic, neutral voice, rewording the speech
of characters strongly characterised by dialect and idiom.
By reframing remembered intradiegetic voices from an extradiegetic
perspective, the standardisation of linguistic variants severs the narrator’s
immediate connection with the narrated moment. Short phrases signal

the vividness of such experiences in the narrator’s mind, as in the follow-
ing examples:
Mäkens spellen nich mit! (Werke 2: 28)

[Lasses can’t play!]
Spoilsports can’t play! (Q: 18)
Warum traurig? (Werke 2: 39)
[Why sad?]
Why are you so sad? (Q: 29)
The translation standardises these, shifting away from the intradiegetic

level of the characters themselves and towards extradiegetic neutrality.
Christa’s words in the first of these examples are translated into a non-
dialect construction, and the soldier’s question in the second is rendered
in correct English. The linguistic variation brought to the narrative voice
by the broken German of the soldier and the Plattdeutsch dialect of the
young girl is excluded from the translation, restoring the narrator’s cen-
tripetal control through the standardised narrative voice.
In places, different social languages do appear, for example, when
Christa’s pupils ask her to recite local proverbs:
Die Mädchen betteln, sie soll noch ein paar plattdeutsche Sprichwörter
zum besten geben. Wenn’t Hart man swart is, seggt de Köster, dann hadd
hei taun Gräwnis ne rod West antreckt.—Noch eins, bitte!—Ja, Geld up
de Sparkass is schön, seggt de Deern, aber Kauken is doch noch’n bätten
schöner!—Sick de Arbeit bequem maken, is kein Fulheit, seggt de Knecht
taun Burn. (Werke 2: 122)
[The girls beg her to tell them a few more Low German proverbs, for a laugh. Even
when the heart is black, says the verger, it wears a red vest for burial—another one,
please!—Yes, money in the bank is nice, says the girl, but cake is a little bit nicer!—
Taking the work easy is not laziness, says the farmhand to the farmer.]
The girls beg her to tell them, for laughs, a few more Plattdeutsch proverbs:
Wenn’t Hart man swart is, seggt de Köster, dann had heu taun Gräwnis ne rod
West antreckt.—Another one please! Ja, say das girl, das money in der cashbox
ist nicest, but der cake in der tummy ist nicer!—Say der laborer to der farm
chief, Tekkin der work easy ist not bein’ lazy. (Q: 108)
Unusually, there is variation in the translation of these three proverbs,

suggesting a more heteroglot voice. The first is untranslated and un-glossed,
having been explicitly identified as a Plattdeutsch proverb and perhaps
assuming the reader’s understanding that Plattdeutsch is a German dialect.
The second is translated into pidgin English (“say das girl”) but also shares
features of the source language (“das”, “ist”), and the third mimics African-
American dialect and pronunciation in its translation of the Plattdeutsch
(“der”, “tekkin”, “bein”). However, the infrequency with which the narra-
tive voice is varied elsewhere has an othering effect on this heteroglossia.
Unlike that of the source text, the non-standard language is incongruous
because of the earlier exclusion of such linguistic variants from the trans-
lated text. Italics distance the proverbs from the “real” voice of the narra-
tive: used in both the German text and the translation for direct quotations
from Christa’s writings, they suggest a voice that can be physically separated
from that of the narrator. Made visible through linguistic and typographi-
cal means, a clear boundary is thus established in the translation between
the voices of self and other. The connection between the proverbs and
Christa, whose voice occasionally slips into colloquial forms of German,
is reframed in the translation, which emphasises the comedic value of the
proverbs for the pupils through exaggerated dialect forms. The result is that
Christa herself is also distanced from the dialect forms she mimics here.
Thus, the variation of the narrative voice between intradiegetic and
extradiegetic levels in Christa T. is mostly standardised by the translation,
which locates the narrator in an extradiegetic position of authority over
a unitary narrative voice by preventing dialogue with the characters or
the reader. The shift away from heteroglossia, towards a centripetal nar-
rative voice, frames the narrator of Wolf ’s translated text as complicit in
a move away from subjective authenticity and towards an “authenticated
subjectivity” that reflects a more individualist, less co-dependent narra-
tor. Using Wolf ’s narrator’s words about Christa, we might say of the
narrator herself that “sie ist aber plötzlich so bestimmt, wie sie nie war”
(Werke 2: 190).17 Instead of being marked as authentic by the visible
17
“But she is suddenly more defined than she ever was.”
intervention of intradiegetic voices in the acts of remembering and nar-

rating, the translation seeks “authenticity” in relation to a controlled,
Cartesian narrative that selectively excludes the subjectivities of narrator,
author and reader. This reformulation has had implications for Wolf ’s
author-function: the unity and authority of the narrative voice frame
her “authenticity” in translation in relation to an abstract narrative of
individuality, rather than positioning it on the contested border between
personal experience and institutional narrative.
“Depth”: Narrative Person

The third of the qualities Wolf assigns to the subjective-authentic nar-
rative voice is that of depth, identifying the emotions of narrator and
readers as an authentic lens through which events are viewed. Genette
categorises narrative as homodiegetic (the story of the narrator) or het-
erodiegetic (a story in which the narrator is not involved) and explains
that “the narrator can be in his narrative (like every subject of an enunci-
ating in his enunciated statement) only in the ‘first person’”, since a third-
person narrative implies a narrating first person rather than a distance
between narrator and narrative (1980: 244). Genette notes the possi-
bility, in the genre of the novel, to establish a “variable or floating rela-
tionship” between narrator and characters (ibid.: 246): such instability
has a centrifugal effect on the narrative voice. Wolf ’s narrators maintain
a complex homodiegetic relationship with the experience narrated, in
which their own coming-to-self is explored while, simultaneously, their
oneness with their protagonists is reflected in the permeation of the nar-
rative voice by the “character-zone”, defined by Bakhtin as “a sphere of
influence on the authorial context surrounding [the character], a sphere
that extends—and often quite far—beyond the boundaries of the direct
discourse allotted to him” (1981: 320).
This depth of narrative involvement is central to the internal persua-
siveness of the narrative in Wolf ’s writing, where the permeability of
boundaries between the experiences of characters, narrator, readers and
author enables the text to mediate between personal and institutional
narratives.
[Die Prosa] sollte von dem gefährlichen Handwerk ablassen, Medaillons in

Umlauf zu bringen und Fertigteile zusammenzusetzen. Sie sollte
unbestechlich auf der einmaligen Erfahrung bestehen und sich nicht hin-
reißen lassen zu gewaltsamen Eingriffen in die Erfahrung der anderen, aber
sie sollte anderen Mut machen zu ihren Erfahrungen. (Werke 4: 258)18
In this statement from “Lesen und Schreiben”, Wolf argues for prose
that does not impose fixed, external frameworks of narration (Bakhtin’s
authoritative narrative discourse) but rather encourages the subjective
expression of experience (internally persuasive narrative discourse), in
a way that the set structures and objective narrators of early Socialist
Realism were unable to achieve. Wolf defended subjective authenticity
against the accusation of subjectivism in her later interview with Hans
Kaufmann: “Dies ist eine durchaus ‘eingreifende’ Schreibweise, nicht
‘subjektivistische’” (Werke 4: 409).19 Her argument emphasises her aim
to use the subjectivity of narrative to involve and engage the reader, rather
than simply recounting individual experiences. Where subjectivist writ-
ing reflects internal experience for effect, Wolf ’s prose is persuasive in its
use of the subjective, inviting the reader to enter into dialogue with the
multiple languages of the text.
As Genette explains, whether or not the narrator is recounting events
of her own experience, the act of narration raises the possibility of varia-
tions in focalisation, or the framing of events by a particular subjective
lens. Mieke Bal explains focalisation as “the relation between the vision
and what is ‘seen’, ‘perceived’” (1985: 142). Distinguishing focalisation
from narration, Genette demonstrates how a narrative might commu-
nicate an event from a character’s point of view, even when recounted
heterodiegetically (in the “third person”). He identifies focalisation as
chiefly internal or external: a narrator may focalise events externally in
order to imply emotional detachment and impose her own authoritative
language, or may opt for internal persuasion by offering insight into the
18
“[Prose] should avoid the dangerous practice of bringing Medaillons into circulation and con-
structing set-pieces. It should insist incorruptibly on unique experience and not let itself be drawn
into forcible intervention in the experience of others, but it should give others courage in their
experiences.”
19
“This is a thoroughly ‘engaging’, not ‘subjectivist’, style of writing.”
actions and thoughts of a character.20 A narrative can be both hetero-

diegetic and internally focalised; embedded in the language and idiom
of the characters is the potential for the persuasive “intrusion” of their
experience into the narrative voice, allowing a narrator to vocalise the
languages of varying subject positions. This potential instability in narrat-
ing person is regarded positively by Bakhtin, as a way of exploring hetero-
glossia. He draws attention to the way in which the internally focalised,
heterodiegetic voice can appear to belong to the narrator while simulta-
neously appropriating the narrative into a “character-zone”.
Wolf ’s narrator frequently offers insights beyond those accessible to
a purely heterodiegetic perceiver, such as internal character focalisation.
The narrative voice, then, while ostensibly a heterodiegetic account of
Christa’s life, is in some sense also homodiegetic as the narrator reveals
her own process of coming-to-self. Picking up on this, for example, Susan
Sniader Lanser (1992: 21) has highlighted Nachdenken über Christa T.
as an example of a narrative “in which the narrator is reconstructing
the life of another woman but is also in some sense a protagonist her-
self, not simply an eyewitness or biographer”. In addition, focalisation
frequently shifts between the narrator’s subjectivity (revealing her own
coming-to-self as she remembers her friend) and the subjectivities of
intradiegetic characters. Demonstrating her own immediate engagement
in the narration of the text, the narrator reflects on feelings that are not
“vergangen”, such as a sense of longing that is
…haltbar genug, um es nach dreißig Jahren wieder aus sich hervorzuholen

und niederzuschreiben. (Werke 2: 32)
[…long-lasting enough to fetch it out of oneself and write it down thirty years
later.]
…durable enough to be fetched out and written down thirty years later. (Q: 22)
Wolf’s narrator envisages her memories as stored within herself, an

internalisation of the past. In the translation, however, she externalises
20
Genette’s third type of focalisation, which he describes as “zero” focalisation, is rejected in the
models of other narratologists such as Rimmon-Kenan (1983) and Bal (1985), and will also be
excluded here, since it contradicts literary as well as social theories of narrative as a constantly medi-
ated and subjective construction.
them, omitting the “aus sich” of the German and placing the past at a
distance, rather than reflecting its position as deeply embedded in the iden-
tity of the individual. The translation thus reverses the internalising process
and returns focalisation to the external control of a heterodiegetic narrator.
Such a shift is significant, since the mixing of realities through which the
narrator’s memories are perceived is reflected in the mixed social languages
of Wolf’s narrative voice. In the translation, for example, rather than feeling
that Christa is “in meinem Innern” (Werke 2: 12) [within me], the narrator
describes her as an “image in my mind” (Q: 4). By severing her subjective con-
nection to the past, the narrator is able to frame it as under her control, and
conceals her own homodiegetic participation in the narrative by distinguish-
ing more clearly between her narrating self and the narrated past. She hopes,
having reviewed her own memories and read Christa’s letters and papers:
Denn werde ich sie vielleicht sehen: so, wie sie sein wollte und also war.
(Werke 2: 102)
[Then I will maybe see her: as she wanted to be and thus was.]
Then perhaps I shall see her: see her as she should be and thus as she was.
(Q: 88)
The translated narrator asserts control of the moral framework of the

narrative through the modal “should”, and excludes Christa’s agency
from the narration of the story. The translation takes a similar approach
to Christa’s conflict with institutional narratives, described as follows:
Die Stimmen, die tagsüber nicht mehr stritten—denn der heftige Streit der
früheren Jahre war in Einstimmigkeit übergegangen, Monologe nach dem
immer gleichen Textbuch wurden gehalte—, nachts kamen sie in ihr wie-
der auf. (Werke 2: 69–70)
[The voices, that during the day no longer argued—for the heated arguments of
the earlier years had given way to unanimity, monologues based on always the
same textbook were held—at night they rose up in her again.]
The voices, which no longer argued during the daytime—for the violent
arguments of earlier years had yielded to unanimity, monologues were
delivered, based always on the same textbook—these voices came to life for
her again at night. (Q: 57–58)
Christa’s attempt to reconcile her personal narrative with institutional

narratives of socialism is a constant internal battle; in the translation,
these voices are not internalised. Christa is not the site of conflict between
the voices, but a mere spectator. She does not allow them to intrude in
her own subjectivity, and the heteroglossia of her internal narrative voice
is replaced by a sense that these multiple languages are other to her. This
mirrors the translated narrator’s apparent ability to avoid the intervention
of her own subjectivity in Christa’s personal narrative as she narrates it (or
vice versa). This relationship frames the heterodiegetic translated narra-
tive as the story of Christa, externally focalised by the unitary present-day
narrator, rather than as a reflection on how memory offers a multi-voiced
and unstable account of events. By restoring focal control to a centripetal
narrative voice, the heterodiegetic narrative of the translation conceals
rather than highlights the role of the personal narrative as a frame for the
institutional narratives with which the individual engages, and masks the
subjectivity of the narrative act. This is clearly demonstrated in certain
stylistic strategies of the translation, specifically in the treatment of erlebte
Rede and in the mimetic language of the narrative voice.
Focalisation Through Erlebte Rede
Erlebte Rede, or free indirect speech, merges the perspectives of narrator

and character by combining the grammatical position of the first with
the insight of the second. For Genette, “the narrator takes on the speech
of the character, or, if one prefers, the character speaks through the voice
of the narrator, and the two instances are then merged” (1980: 174). This
is often used to establish irony or what Bakhtin describes as “pseudo-
objectivity” in the literary text (1981: 317–318); Genette recognises that
grammatical markers alone do not indicate whose viewpoint is being
narrated since a character’s perspective may be encoded in the language
of the narrator. In Wolf ’s writing it contributes to heteroglossia by mix-
ing languages in the narrative voice. In Christa T. in particular, erlebte
Rede expresses the narrator’s internalisation of Christa’s perspective and
of voices from the past as seen above, reflecting the multi-voiced nature
and the subjectivity of narration. In the translation, the tendency towards
bounded temporal positioning and standardised expression already seen
in this chapter results in a significant shift towards external focalisation,

as the detached voice of the narrator frames events as “other”. When
Christa falls for Kostja, for example, the narrative reflects the strength of
her attraction using erlebte Rede:
Und wenn es zuerst nur die Augen waren, die nicht mehr loskamen. Wie
er ihr gefiel! (Werke 2: 73)
[Even if at first it was only the eyes that couldn’t tear themselves away. How he
pleased her!]
And even if at first it was only a question of looking. She couldn’t keep her
eyes off him. (Q: 61)
While the German here expresses Christa’s response to Kostja mimeti-

cally through her thoughts, the translation takes a diegetic approach. A
simple graphological feature such as punctuation can signal erlebte Rede
(Leech and Short 1981: 331), and this is shown clearly in the German,
where the intrusion of Christa’s internal focalisation is expressed by an
exclamation mark. This exclamatory force is lost in the translation, and
along with it also the nuanced language of the character in the narrative
voice. Instead, this sentence reads as an external observation, reflecting a
centripetal shift towards a unified and heterodiegetic narrator.
A significant feature of this externalising shift in the translation is the
explicitation of the ambiguous verbal subject of the German through
the use of personal pronouns, a change that frequently occurs as a result
of the translation’s tendency towards grammatical explicitation. In the
following example, the translated narrator’s explicitation of the experienc-
ing subject as “she” distances the voice from the memory being narrated:
Zehn Jahre alt, ausgeschlossen aus der Gesellschaft der anderen wegen
Ungezogenheit, da ist das Büchlein, mit Blümchenseide bezogen. Da ist
der Trost entdeckt: in den geschriebenen Zeilen. Das Staunen vergisst man
nicht mehr, auch nicht die Erleichterung. (Werke 2: 30)
[Ten years old, excluded from the company of the others because of insolence,
there is the book, covered in flower-patterned silk. There, comfort is discovered: in
the written lines. One doesn’t forget the astonishment any more, nor the relief.]
Ten years old she’d been, shut out from other people’s company because of
insolence, and there it is, in her book, with the flowered silk covers. There
she discovers consolation: in the lines she writes. One doesn’t forget the
wonderment any more, or the relief. (Q: 20)
The reader understands from the context that it is Christa’s memory

being narrated, but the lack of a verbal subject and the use of the ambigu-
ous “man” in the German make it unclear whether the voice at this point
belongs to Christa, remembered by the narrator, or to the narrator herself,
who has internalised this memory. Pseudo-objectivity is achieved through
this ambiguity, which allows for the possibility that either the narrator or
the character is vocalising the experience. In the translation, the bound-
ary between a heterodiegetic narrating “I” and the experiencing subject
“she” is made clear by the use of personal pronouns, confirming the exter-
nal focalisation of the passage. The specification of a third-person subject
makes Christa’s experience particular and individual, rather than allowing
multiple voices to narrate the memory or invoking a shared narrative of
post-war Vertriebene (the population of Germans expelled from Germany’s
territories in the East by the arrival of Russian troops) that might invite
corroboration from the (German) reader. Again, the narrator’s centripetal
authority is preserved by her distance from Christa’s subjective narrative
and by the reduced frequency of intrusion from internal voices.
The use of the impersonal third-person pronoun “man” is a central fea-
ture of Wolf ’s style, allowing the intrusion of different focal positions into
the narrative voice. Used commonly in written and spoken German and
able to “merge” or blur the identity of the subject, “man” typically presents
the Anglophone translator with a difficult choice between the formal and
archaic “one” and the more colloquial “you”. This is a particular challenge
where “man” is used in the context of erlebte Rede, and as the gloss transla-
tions show, neither of the two options functions well as a translation. It is
especially problematic in Christa T., where the impersonal status of “man”
is compromised: reading Christa’s thesis, the n arrator comments on the
loaded nature of the ostensibly neutral pronoun, noting that “Kein Ich
kommt auf, natürlich nicht. Jetzt noch nicht. Ein ‘Wir, ein ‘Man’” (Werke
2: 110).21 The narrator exposes the ambivalence of academic discourse, in
“No ‘I’ emerges, of course not. Not yet. A ‘we’, a ‘one’.”

21
which an artificially objective pronoun introduces subjective interpreta-

tion. The non-authoritative nature of the pronoun is revealed: by signal-
ling no particular identity, “man” offers a pseudo-objective frame for the
narrative as it introduces multiple focal identities and is also a foil for the
individual’s not yet complete coming-to-self.
Rather than being a source of objective authority, Wolf reveals, the
anonymity of the pronoun belies its instability and its potential for inter-
nal persuasiveness. In making this observation, the narrator highlights the
problematic status of her own use of “man” to discuss some of Christa’s
more disturbing or difficult experiences, expressing an incongruent sense
of objectivity that masks an unbearable closeness to events. The trans-
lation, however, varies necessarily between the problematic solutions of
“one” and “you” and offers the reader fewer opportunities to hear the
multiple voices of the text (Table 3.3):
It is clear that neither “one” nor “you” is satisfactory, particularly in
the context of Christa T. The former emphasises the already literary-
artistic and controlled style of the heterodiegetic narrative, while the lat-
ter imposes a me/you binary on the fluid categories of identity in the text.
The norms of usage in the source and target languages leave the translator
in a difficult position here: each instance of “man” constitutes a choice
between two problematic alternatives, which has consequences in many
cases for the focalisation of the narrative voice.
The presence of erlebte Rede is also minimised in the translation by the
omission of conversational forms of expression that reflect the orality of the
narrative voice. Implying as their source a visible, speaking narrator rather
than an aloof, writing authority, these linguistic features reveal the narrator’s
presence in the act of narration, acknowledging a shift away from a stable,
centripetal narrating position. Such expressions of attitude are notoriously
difficult to translate from German to English, as their syntactic position-
ing and the attitude expressed in each instance can rarely be mirrored in
the target language. However, they play an essential textual role and their
omission is significant: the translation limits the suggestion of immediacy
and oral narration, for example, by eliding modal particles such as “ja” and
“also” that are common features of spoken German (Table 3.4):
The sustained omission of conversational characteristics establishes
the authorial unity of the narrative voice in the translation, excluding
oral everyday narration and features of characters’ speech. Even in (ii)
Table 3.3 Translation of “man” in The Quest for Christa T.

i Das weiß man nun auch, wie es One knows that now, Now you know how
sich anhört, wenn Knochen too, how it sounds it sounds when
knacken. …Da tritt man when bones crack. … bones crack. …You
zurück, hält auch die Then one steps back, take a step back,
Schwester ab, ans Fenster zu also holds one’s sister even stop your
gehen, wundert sich nicht, back from going to sister from going
dass sie, die Ältere, zum the window, does to the window,
erstenmal gehorcht, fast als not wonder that she, aren’t surprised
fürchte sie sich. Hat auch nie the elder, for the when she, the
erfahren, wo der Kater first time obeys, elder one, for the
geblieben ist. (30) almost as if she were first time obeys
afraid. And never you, almost as if
found out where the she was afraid. She
cat ended up. never did discover
where the cat
went. (20–21)
ii Von einer solchen Eroberung One gains nothing A conquest like that
hat man nichts. (38) from such a doesn’t do
conquest. anything for one.
(27)
iii Daß auch keiner verpflichtet And so that no one is …so that nobody is
ist, mich zu finden, es sei obliged to find me, obliged, either, to
denn, er suchte ausdrücklich. unless he were find one, unless
(43) explicitly searching. he’s making a
special search. (33)
iv Und wenn man den ironischen And even if one at And one can use the
Abstand wenigstens in die least adds ironic quotation marks
Anführungszeichen legt. (99) distance in at least to indicate
quotation marks. your ironic
distance. (86)
v Wie soll man tun, was man How should one do How should one do
wollen muss und nicht wollen what one must want what one should
kann? (172) and cannot want? but can’t do? (155)
and (v), where the emphasis added by the modal particle is to some
extent present in the translation, the English text uses more formal or
less emphatic constructions. This cements the sovereignty and author-
ity of the extradiegetic narrative voice, excluding individualised speaking
voices in favour of a unified, authoritative perspective.
In more extended passages, too, the omission of conversational fea-
tures contributes to a shift away from erlebte Rede:
Table 3.4 Translation of modal particles in The Quest for Christa T.

Nachdenken über
Christa T. (Werke 2, The Quest for Christa T.
my emphasis) Literal translation (Q, my emphasis)
i Womit man ja With which one must One must bargain on
rechnen muss, reckon, of course, when that, if one has only
wenn man nur one only has twice that twice that long to
noch einmal so long to live. live. (11)
lange zu leben
hat. (20)
ii Also gut, sie laufen, So why not, [off] they run, So off they run, and
und das Heu and the hay is fragrant, there’s the fragrance
duftet, das haben you see we’ve got it all in of the hay,
wir ja alles in der hand. everything’s just as it
Hand (50) should be. (39)
iii Solche altklugen Such precocious sayings Suchlike solemnities
Reden führten sie, guided her, for it should guided her, for it
denn ernst sollte certainly not become mustn’t become a
es ja nicht werden. serious. serious affair. (61)
(73)
iv Nun soll sie also den Now, then, she must She must now
Mut zu sich selber strengthen her courage in consolidate her
festigen. (107) herself. courage to be herself.
(93)
v Ein bisschen We did wonder a bit as well. And besides, we were
wunderten wir wondering. (117)
uns ja auch. (132)
Ach, sie traute ja diesen Namen nicht. Sie traute sich ja nicht. Sie zweifelte
ja, inmitten unseres Rauschs der Neubenennungen, sie zweifelte ja an der
Wirklichkeit von Namen, mit denen sie doch umging; sie ahnte ja, dass die
Benennung kaum je gelingt und dass sie dann nur für kurze Zeit mit dem
Ding zusammenfällt, auf das sie gelegt wurde. (Werke 2: 45, my emphasis)
[Ah, she didn’t trust those names, at all. She even didn’t trust herself. She had
serious doubts, in the midst of our intoxication with new names, she had doubts
about the reality of names she nonetheless had to use; she sensed indeed that
naming is rarely successful and that it even then only for a short time coincides
with the thing to which it has been given placed.]22
The gloss translation here shows the pragmatic impact of the particles, rather than their semantic
22
meaning.
She didn’t trust these names, oh no. She didn’t trust herself. She was doubt-
ful, amid our toxic swirl of new name-giving; what she doubted was the
reality of names, though she had to deal with them; she certainly felt that
naming is seldom accurate and that, even if it is accurate, name and thing
coincide only for a short time. (Q: 35, my emphasis)
The high frequency with which “ja” is repeated in the German suggests
erlebte Rede, in other words that these are Christa’s words of explanation,
internalised and vividly remembered by the narrator. By standardising the
language of the narrative and rarely reflecting the impact of the speech-
like repeated “ja”, the translation reduces focal intrusion by the character
and reasserts an externally focalised, heterodiegetic position. As with the
narrator’s childhood memory, the focalisation of the passage shifts back to
the literary-artistic language of the unitary heterodiegetic narrator, consol-
idating her authority rather than offering internal persuasion. This is also
detectable in the translation’s shift from mimetic into diegetic narration.
Focalisation Through Mimetic Language
As well as introducing internal focalisation through erlebte Rede, Wolf

reflects character perspective through the mimetic potential of language,
or its “iconic” quality (Boase-Beier 2006: 101–104). While erlebte Rede
allows character perspective to intervene directly in the narrative through
unmarked shifts into the speech or thoughts of the character, Wolf ’s
narrative voice also introduces character focalisation in constructions
that seem to mirror the experience narrated while still being uttered by
the narrator. This destabilisation of the distinction between telling and
experiencing the events of Christa’s story is a theme Wolf later devel-
ops in Kindheitsmuster, where she comments that “im Idealfall sollen die
Strukturen des Erlebens sich mit den Strukturen des Erzählens decken.
Dies wäre, was angestrebt wird: phantastische Genauigkeit” (Werke 5:
396).23 While Wolf acknowledges the difficulty of fulfilling this aim
within the limiting structures of language, she constantly searches for
“Ideally the structures of experience should correspond to the structures of narration. This would
23
be what is striven for: fantastic exactness.”

Table 3.5 Translation of character-focalised syntax in The Quest for Christa T.

Nachdenken über Christa The Quest for Christa T.
T.(Werke 2) Literal translation (Q)
i Und hat, du wirst es nicht And, you won’t And you won’t believe
glauben, mir zugenickt, believe it, nodded it, she said, but he
als wir uns endlich doch to me, when we gave me a nod when
trennen mussten. (65) eventually did have we finally went our
to separate. separate ways. (54)
ii Wieviel Christa T. in jener How much Christa T. I don’t know how much
Prüfungsstunde gesehen saw in that trial Christa T. saw in that
hat—ich weiß es lesson—I don’t test class. (68)
nicht. (81) know.
iii Am Nachmittag sahen wir In the afternoon we In the afternoon we saw
es zum ersten Mal, das saw it for the first the house for the first
Haus. (177) time, the house. time. (188)
iv Der Staub, das wird mir The dust, I will notice, I shall notice that the
auffallen, der damals über that used to sweep dust which used to
den Platz trieb und uns across the square blow across the square
immer zur Eile zwang, hat and force us to and always made us
sich wirklich gelegt. (56) hurry, has really cross it in a hurry has
settled. now been well and
truly laid. (46)
ways to achieve it. One way in which this is expressed is the variation of
syntax to reflect focalisation (Table 3.5):
Wolf ’s text makes use of marked syntactic structures such as hypotactic
interjections (i, iv), rheme-theme ordering (ii) and cataphora (iii) which
mimic features of spoken language and often mirror the experience nar-
rated, for example, delaying the naming of the house in (iii) to reflect
the delay before the narrator glimpsed it and the interjection in (iv) to
reflect the spontaneity of the narrator’s remembering process. The trans-
lation standardises these, for example, into theme-rheme constructions.
Such shifts make the narrative “transparent” by recounting the story in
unmarked expressions that distance the act of narrating from the events
of the narrative and apply a unifying, centripetal form of expression. In
(i), the addition of “she said” also engineers a shift to externalised direct
speech that clearly distinguishes the voices of character and narrator.
The orality of the narrative voice is lost in the shift away from marked
forms of expression that reflect the immediacy of the act of narration and
frame the narrative as both intradiegetic and internally focalised. Instead,
organised and accessible syntax consolidates the authority of the narrator

by expressing her control of the narrative. This switch to organised reli-
ability from Wolf ’s more deeply involved narrative style contradicts the
basis of her subjective authenticity.
Two examples can help to illustrate how the translation reframes events
by replacing Wolf ’s mimetic narrating structures with forms of expres-
sion that preclude internal focalisation and reposition the narrative voice
in a heterodiegetic relationship to the narrative. Firstly, Christa realises
around the time of her affair that
Sie musste erleben, dass noch Sinn in ihren Sinnen war, dass sie nicht umsonst
immer noch sah und hörte und schmeckte und roch. (Werke 2: 175)
[She had to experience that there was still sense in her senses, that it was not for
nothing that she still saw and heard and tasted and smelled.]
She had to know there was still some sense in her sensations, that it wasn’t
utterly pointless to go on seeing and hearing, tasting and smelling things.
(Q: 157)
Signalling character focalisation in the intensity of the repeated “dass”

clause and the use of “und” rather than conventional commas between
each listed verb, the German text reflects the sense in which Christa
feels overwhelmed by her sensory response to the world around her. The
increasing urgency of the sentence suggests that Christa is compelled to
experience the world in this way, and the lack of a transitive object with
the sensory verbs “sah und hörte und schmeckte und roch” implies that
they are continuous dimensions of her existence, rather than being trig-
gered by external impetus. In the translation, however, while the use of
gerund verbs reflects the continuous of Christa’s sensorial engagement
with the world, the gathering pace of the sentence is dissolved. Here,
there is no repetition of “that”, and the verbs are grouped together in tidy
pairs that suggest a controlled, structured narrative voice, rather than
allowing Christa’s subjectivity to influence the structures of narration.
The more carefully organised language of the narrative voice in the trans-
lation suggests greater control over Christa’s reactions and seems to frame
them as conscious choices. This has implications for the moral framing
of Christa’s life: the internal focalisation in the German text, by reflecting
the vital importance of sensory experience, frames her affair as a release

of tensions between the passionate, emotionally guided Christa and the
repressive social structures she inhabits. The translation, which frames her
subjectivity as more elective than instinctive, reduces the significance of
the affair to a slip in her morality that is incongruous with the invitation
to identify with her. By introducing “things” as the object of these sensory
verbs, the translation also reconfigures Christa’s relationship to the world
by targeting her sensory response at specific events or people, rather than
reflecting her subjectivity as essential to her state of being.
In a second example, the German text expresses character focalisa-
tion by presenting events in the order in which they are perceived by
Christa:
Als sie am nächsten Tag erwachte, hatte sie eine Klausurarbeit verschlafen.
(Werke 2: 70)
[When she woke the next day, she had slept through an exam.]
She overslept, woke up at noon, and had missed the seminar at which she
was due to read a paper. (Q: 58)
The narrator, who has the advantage of retrospect and knows that on
this particular day Christa had overslept, does not reveal that detail of
the story until the character discovers it herself, after waking up. In the
translation, the information is organised differently: Christa’s mistake is
immediately signalled to the reader through the choice of overslept, and
events are presented chronologically, from sleeping to waking. By not
withholding information from the reader, the narrator reveals Christa’s
mistake before the protagonist has realised it herself. Whereas the German
text reflects the character’s perspective, the translation asserts the narra-
tor’s interpretive control, delivering information in an order that cannot
reflect the character’s experience. As in the first example, the organisation
of information increases the focal distance between the experience and its
narration. The external language of the heterodiegetic narrator alienates
the internal languages of subjective reflection, whether her own or those of
the characters. Sustained throughout the narrative, this tendency prevents
the intrusion of internal, subjective-authentic character focalisation and
ensures instead the authoritative unified identity of the narrative voice.
onclusion: From Subjective Authenticity

C
to Authentic Subjectivity?
The shifts in the narrative voice of The Quest for Christa T. reframe sub-
jectivity in the text so that it is no longer an authenticating character-
istic. Instead, the translation aligns the narrator-text relationship with
what Bakhtin and Love describe as a distancing, “Cartesian” paradigm
of authoritative narration. Shifts in the narrative voice move away from
the contemporaneousness, engagement and depth of prose advocated by
Wolf: the narrator’s subjective dimension is selectively excluded from the
textual narrative by means of temporal shifts that reposition the protago-
nist’s personal narrative in a bounded and distant past, and this is con-
solidated by relocation to an extradiegetic level and by the refocalisation
of experience through the person of the present-day narrator. The specific
spatial positioning of Wolf ’s literary narrative in (East) Germany is also
marginalised in the translation, which selectively emphasises the text’s
relevance to abstract narrative categories.
While Wolf seeks the authenticity of her prose in the subjective nature
of its delivery, then, the stylistic detail of the translation encourages an
opposite reading in which the narrative is authenticated by the narrator’s
authoritative control. While some such shifts are inevitable in translation
due to the differing linguistic resources of source and target languages, the
translator’s comments on his translation strategy reveal a conscious effort
to move the narrative voice in this direction. The translation demonstrates
the “accessibility” and “universality” identified by Fries as key features of
Wolf ’s writing, but the crucial dialogic is often missing, both in the lack
of reference to extratextual narratives in which Wolf ’s text was embedded
and in the narrator’s monopoly of voice. Especially in the context of the
comparison Middleton draws with Creeley, an abstract narrative of the
individual has emerged that mutes dialogue and implies the narrator’s
control. This marks a significant move away from a narrative of individual
coming-to-self through engagement with the subjectivity of others.
While some critics praised Middleton’s translation, the shift towards
authoritative authentication of subjectivity and away from subjec-
tive authentication of the narrative was generally reflected in reviewers’
responses. Michael Hulse mourned the loss of the narrator’s s ubjectivity,
claiming that the text “lacks that concretely passionate involvement which
would breathe new life into the cliché [of the quest for identity]” (1982).
Earlier responses reflected the framing of the translation in a particu-
lar narrative of authenticity: Ernst Pawel (1971) noted in the New York
Times that “the ambiguities that lurk just beneath the enigmatic ripples of
its prose turn out to be authentic, earned rather than fashionable”, while
John Coleman (1971) commented in the Observer that “she explains that
her heroine is a fictional character, but several of the quotations from
diaries, sketches and letters come from real-life sources. Certainly there
is a peculiar sense of authenticity about this oblique memorial portrait.”
Pawel contrasts Wolf ’s “authentic” ambiguities with the “fashionable” (in
other words, artificial) varieties of the experimental novel, while Coleman
draws on a more explicit binary of “real life” and “fiction”. Both reviewers
rely to a certain extent on a true/false binary that Wolf seeks to escape.
This reframing of authenticity as an unproblematic narrative quality is
encouraged by the translation, for example, where Christa demands:
Keine Deutung, mein Lieber, die wahre Wirklichkeit, das wirkliche Leben.
(Werke 2: 69)
[No interpretation, my dear, true reality, real life.]
I don’t want your construction of them, my friend, only the facts, only the
true reality, real life. (Q: 57)
For Wolf, truth and reality are closely linked to the subjective and con-
tingent perceptions of each individual. The translation, however, invites
a more targeted and restricted quest. The addition of “facts” limits the
interpretive possibilities of experience for Christa and the narrator, who
must express their subjectivity in ways validated by existing truths, rather
than find new subjective truths of their own. By aligning “authenticity”
with fact, Coleman in particular implies that the text’s authenticity is
derived from the ability of the narrative voice to reflect objective, rather
than subjective truth. Neither Pawel nor Coleman reads the authenticity
of narrative as dependent on the narrator’s subjectivity, thus confirming
the translation’s reframing of the (non-authoritative) authenticity Wolf
seeks in the truth of experience.
The reframing of authenticity in Christa T. has had significant

implications for Wolf ’s Anglophone author-function, as Christa T.
is considered to be the founding text of that narrative. Significantly,
the translation contributed to her author-function by establishing sty-
listic traits and theoretical positions (her treatment of the subjective;
her relationship with socialism, or in this case the marginalisation of
it; the nature of her concern for the individual) in which context later
translations of Wolf ’s writing into English could be understood. The
authoritative voice of the narrator and the revaluation of the “truth”
or “authenticity” of experience in the context of a fact/fiction binary
reframe Wolf ’s writing in translation with an emphasis on the events
of the narrative rather than the narrator’s relationship to them. Wolf ’s
Anglophone author-function has been duly aligned with authoritative
and imaginative story-telling, rather than with the confrontation of ten-
sion between personal and institutional narratives. This became appar-
ent in 1993: while Wolf ’s German author-function came under attack,
her Anglophone author-function was insulated from such criticism by
three main factors. Firstly, as this chapter has shown, the greater dis-
tance established between narrator (as the author’s representative) and
text, and between past and present, moves away from an understanding
of the subjective as the core of the narrative. Secondly, as the next chap-
ter explores in more detail, the framing of Wolf ’s a uthor-function in
binary East/West or Communist/Capitalist narratives has been gradu-
ally replaced by institutional or abstract narratives of identity that claim
to extend beyond geographical boundaries and instead emphasise her
“universal” appeal. And thirdly, as discussed in Chap. 5, institutional
narratives of the GDR author that through their contextual relevance
to Wolf ’s author-function had problematised her authorship in unified
Germany were selectively excluded from much of the discourse sur-
rounding her Anglophone author-function: this contributed to a less
strongly polarised moral framework for the narration of her Anglophone
author-function.
Christa T. is widely regarded as the text that “begründete den Weltruhm
der DDR-Autorin Christa Wolf, die in ihrem eigenen Land als sozialist-
ische Moralistin, im Westen als vermeintliche Dissidentin und bei einem
ihrer Schriftstellerkollegen bereits mit Nachdenken über Christa T. als
‘Interpretin der heroischen Illusion des Sozialismus’ galt” (Hilzinger

1999: 229–230).24 Hilzinger’s reference to Wolf ’s status in the West (she
is including West Germany in this designation) as an alleged dissident is
a significant one. As far as the English translation is concerned, Wolf ’s
resistance to the narratives of socialism seems to be manifest as a rejection
of core socialist values rather than a search for more effective aesthetic
modes, since the translation marks a shift towards a more individual-
ist narrative of the self and does not capture the German text’s complex
resonance with aesthetic and political narratives of socialism that reveal
its attempt to offer criticism in the name of improvement. Those able to
read the German text, then, would have an understanding of Wolf ’s criti-
cal engagement with socialism that differs greatly from the impression
that is to be gained from the English translation. In addition, alongside
this shift in understanding of Wolf ’s dissidence there is also a shift in its
importance, since it is not Christa T.’s challenge to specifically social-
ist narratives that seems to be most prominent in the translation and
its paratexts. Following on from this, the next chapter explores a more
universalisable narrative with which Wolf ’s author-function has been
associated since the publication of Christa T.: her gender.
24
“…established the international fame of the GDR author Christa Wolf, who was seen in her own
country as a socialist moralist, in the West as an alleged dissident and by one of her writer colleagues
already after Nachdenken über Christa T. as an ‘interpreter of the heroic illusion of socialism’.”
4
The Author as Feminist: Kassandra
The previous chapter explored how the writing, narrating and experiencing
subjects of Wolf ’s texts are reframed in translation by a unifying narrative
voice and more clearly defined individual narratives of self. This is a shift
that not only occurs in the texts of the translations but has been echoed
in the presentation of Wolf ’s writing by her publishers and reviewers and
has also had implications for the increasing importance of feminist read-
ings of her writing. Wolf ’s gender began to play a significant role in clas-
sifying her author-function and attracting readers at an early stage in the
development of her international and Anglophone authorial narratives.
Reviewing Christa T., W.L. Webb (1971) wrote for the Guardian that
Christa Wolf was “a sensitive writer of the purest water—an East German
Virginia Woolf ”, a reading of Wolf that has had great influence on the
circulation of her Anglophone author-function. Understood as a demon-
strative of her dissidence in the East German context, Wolf ’s subjective
mode of writing also quickly came to be linked to her interest in female
and feminist experience, particularly in the context of feminist efforts to
denounce nuclear weapons and destabilise a (white, male) “authorial”
voice (Cixous 1976; Miller 1981; Irigaray 1985; Sniader Lanser 1986,
1992). Hilzinger (1999: 231) notes that “Nachdenken über Christa T.

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40183-6_4
wurde in der Rezeption vor allem in den USA immer wieder mit einer
Tradition weiblichen Schreibens in Verbindung gebracht”,1 and it is this
alignment with narratives of a female tradition through the agency of
those other than the translator that is explored here.
Genette (1997a: 7) questions “do we ever read ‘a novel by a woman’
exactly as we read ‘a novel’ plain and simple, that is, a novel by a man?”,
and the arguments of Wolf ’s Anglophone defenders in the wake of her
Stasi revelation suggest a particular interest in the writer’s gender as
part of her authorial identity (see the comment in the “Das Kind mit
dem Bade” letter quoted on Introduction p. 3; Kuhn 1994). With this
in mind, this chapter explores the complex and varied narration of the
author-function in material that reflects this reception, circulating out-
side the physical unit of the book but contributing directly to the inter-
pretive frames in which it is presented. The examination of this epitextual
material such as reviews, letters and academic commentary reveals how
authorship is narrated by agents other than those directly involved in
writing and translating the text, and demonstrates how Wolf ’s subjective
authenticity, her exploration of female experience and her own female
identity have found particular resonance with feminist narratives in the
context of her Anglophone author-function. The example of Kassandra.
Vier Vorlesungen. Eine Erzählung (1983; Cassandra: A Novel and Four
Essays 1984), often cited by academic and journalistic commentators as
the most striking evidence of Wolf ’s feminist ideas, demonstrates how
Wolf ’s Anglophone author-function developed in the 1980s as it was
framed by epitexts that emphasised the writer’s affinity with second-wave
feminism, and permits an exploration of the implications of this strongly
feminist reading of Wolf.
Framing Wolf ’s writing as “feminist” might be regarded as problem-
atic because of the national and chronological variations that embed
the term in the dominant narratives of particular cultural contexts.
Feminism as contextualised by North American or British discourse
presents specific problems of identification for socialist writers, due to
the differing priorities that informed women’s struggles for recognition
“Nachdenken über Christa T. was continually associated by its reception, particularly in the USA,
1
with a tradition of female writing.”

4 The Author as Feminist: Kassandra 115
in the GDR and in the Anglophone context (Hartmann 1981; Kuhn

2015: 155). Writing on feminism as a travelling concept, Dongchao
Min (2007: 177) uses the Chinese example to discuss the difficulties
of translating the term into a language embedded in socialist narratives
and, in her case, which does not offer a translation of “feminism” that
simultaneously encompasses the concepts of legal equality and gen-
dered difference that have historically characterised British and North
American feminist discourse. She discusses the reluctance of Chinese
scholars of Women’s Studies to subscribe to a “bourgeois”, predomi-
nantly “western” concept of feminism; similarly, female intellectuals in
the GDR rejected the term on the grounds of its “bourgeois” connota-
tions (Weedon 1994; Martens 2001: 3).
While second-wave feminists particularly in North America repeat-
edly confronted the political institution and organised into campaign
groups, gaining a political voice, in East Germany from the mid-1970s
onwards the question of equal gender rights was proclaimed by the
Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED) to be “gesellschaftlich
gelöst” [socially resolved]. Gender remained absent from political dis-
course until the early 1980s, making it difficult for a women’s movement
to emerge as a parallel to the organisations established, for example, in
the FRG during the 1970s and 1980s (Rueschemeyer and Schissler 1990;
Lemke 1990; Weedon 1994).2 Legislative measures taken by the SED
to ensure legal equality, such as women’s right to work and the legalisa-
tion of first-trimester abortion in 1972, meant that GDR women in fact
had some of the legal rights that their contemporaries elsewhere were
still fighting to gain. However, gendered stereotypes of the division of
professional and domestic labour endured alongside this permissive leg-
islation, as shown, for example, by Irene Dölling’s study of photographs
in the GDR workplace (1990). As a result, many East German women
found it difficult to assimilate the “double burden” they were expected to
bear, as desexualised, ostensibly equal citizens in public discourse and as
2
An overview of the GDR context and some changes in the legal and social situation of East
German women following 1989 are discussed in Anke Burckhardt and Uta Schlegel, “Frauen an
ostdeutschen Hochschulen—in den gleichstellungspolitischen Koordinaten vor und nach der
‘Wende’”, in Edith Saurer et al. (eds) (2006) Women’s Movements: Networks and Debates in Post-
Communist Countries in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, pp. 79–102.
sexually defined, feminine wives and mothers at home. North American

or British feminism, in which context narratives of protest have often
resisted the alienation of the female through categorisation as other, thus
differed from the concerns of women in the GDR, where a principal
concern was to be socially recognised and integrated precisely as different
from a masculine norm.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Wolf and other female writers in the GDR began
to use literature as a space for aesthetic resistance (Kuhn 2015; Paul 2016)
in which to thematise female experience and critique patriarchal structures,
emancipating the feminine from a position of non-gendered legal equality
with a default male subject and criticising the tension between legal and
social realities for women. Although they were undoubtedly familiar with
the ideas of “bourgeois” western feminists, the arguments of GDR femi-
nists were also deeply rooted in Marxist thought. Lorna Martens describes
the relationship to non-socialist feminisms as follows:
GDR writers’ enthusiasm for matriarchy emerges with so little rupture

from their previous thinking about women, and with such emphasis on the
link with communism (absent in the American treatments), that it seems
plausible to conclude that the explosion of western feminism in the 1970s
mainly gave them the courage to stage their own feminist coup on Marxist
historical materialism, and not their ideas. (Martens 2001: 89)
Cheryl Dueck agrees that “the influence of Western feminism was one
which allowed a new critical perspective in the GDR in the early 1980s,
but by the late 1980s, the emancipatory potential of feminism was being
re-evaluated” (Dueck 2004: 137) and Anna Kuhn also describes Wolf as
one of a number of female East German writers who, while familiar with
some of the key texts of second-wave feminism, “categorically rejected the
term ‘feminism’, which was viewed as a movement born of and applicable
solely to Western capitalist societies” (2015: 155). Georgina Paul (2016)
has also explored in detail how the crucial Marxist “Subjektwerden”
[becoming a subject] at the heart of East German feminism has been lost
in the context of readings that focus on individuality.
Wolf explores specifically female experience, for example, in her
choice of predominantly female protagonists and narratives of female
friendships and everyday life. In “Selbstversuch”, a story first published
4 The Author as Feminist: Kassandra
117
in 1973 about a female scientist who undergoes a sex change, she chal-
lenges gender roles more explicitly. Feeling herself to be disillusioned
with socialism in the aftermath of Stasi reprisals against writers (includ-
ing herself ) who had protested against the expatriation of dissident
singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann from the GDR in 1976, and find-
ing no convincing political alternative with which to ally herself, Wolf
began to turn to the patriarchal as the focus of her critique. Continuing
to work with the subjective, non-authoritarian textual voice she had
introduced in Christa T., she explores women’s narratives of experience
and modes of expression in “Berührung”, her introduction to Maxie
Wander’s 1977 anthology Guten Morgen, du Schöne, and argues, par-
ticularly in Kassandra and its accompanying lectures, that the antidote
to the oppression of the feminine and of the masculine by patriarchal
society is an approach that recognises and accepts the (male or female)
other within the self and as part of a collective. This corresponds to
what Karen Offen (1988) has identified as a “relational” rather than
an “individual” approach to feminism, and might align Wolf ’s writing
more closely with the inclusive concerns of third-wave feminists, rather
than those of the more homogenous group of voices that have been seen
to define second-wave feminism (Kuhn 2015: 162).
As indicated in her essayistic writing on subjective authenticity dis-
cussed in the previous chapter, Wolf ’s advocacy of the subjective and the
feminine is firmly embedded in what has been described as a utopian form
of Marxism (Kuhn 1988), presenting not a replacement but a means of
renewal for Marxist society (see also Fehervary and Lennox 1978: 109).
In other words, Wolf ’s emerging interest in feminine aesthetics and what
could be described as feminist arguments during the 1970s and 1980s
constitutes not a turn away from socialism but a shift in her engagement
with it. Nonetheless, Wolf ’s growing interest in women’s experience and
what could be understood as a feminist poetics also coincided with her
greater engagement with West German and Anglophone institutions: she
accepted her first West German literary honour when she was awarded the
Bremer Literaturpreis in 1977 (she had previously declined other awards
from the FRG), visited the University of Edinburgh in 1978 to give
guest lectures, travelled to the subsequent International PEN congress
as an independent delegate rather than a GDR representative and visited
Frankfurt in 1982 to deliver the lectures on poetics that would become

the text of Kassandra (see Magenau 2002: 304–306). Particular inter-
est from female Germanists in the USA during this period also led to
sustained relationships with the University of Ohio and the Coalition
of Women in German. Alongside the Marxist, then, there is much in
Wolf ’s treatment of women’s experience and women’s writing that seems
to speak out to narratives of feminism beyond East Germany.
Notwithstanding the relevance of Wolf ’s writing for women outside
the GDR and its confrontation of issues central to the second-wave
feminist movement, Myra Love (1979: 43) identifies a danger in assum-
ing Wolf ’s affinity with Anglophone narratives of feminism. She draws
comparisons between Christa T. and the writing of American feminists
Mary Daly and Adrienne Rich, noting that whereas Wolf seeks “the
integration of a certain kind of subjectivity … into [GDR] society as a
means of furthering its larger social development”, Daly and Rich aim
at “furthering the development of an autonomous feminist conscious-
ness and culture in the United States”. Wolf engages less forcefully with
anti-masculine feminism than East German authors such as Irmtraud
Morgner or more explicitly critical writers like Gabriele Stötzer, and her
lack of involvement even after Reunification with organisations such
as the socialist women’s group Unabhängiger Frauenverband (UFV) or
publications such as Alice Schwarzer’s feminist magazine EMMA sug-
gests that she did not seek out an author-function as a feminist—unlike
Morgner, for example, who was interviewed by Schwarzer a few months
before German Reunification (Morgner 1990). However, especially
since the publication of Cassandra in 1984, Wolf ’s author-function
has been framed in the Anglophone world by narratives of feminism,
while other more “feminist” East German authors have remained rela-
tively unknown or totally untranslated.3 Drawing a contrast between
Morgner and Wolf throughout her study of GDR feminist writing,
Lorna Martens suggests that Wolf ’s appeal to western feminist narratives
3
Morgner’s Leben und Abenteuer der Trobadora Beatriz nach Zeugnissen ihrer Spielfrau Laura (1976;
translated by Jeanette Clausen, 2000) and Amanda (1983; not translated), for example, use more
fantasy and humour than do Wolf ’s texts to explore female subjectivity, desire and the tension
between the sexes; however, they have been hardly recognised by the Anglophone or international
literary field.

lies in her depiction of her female protagonists as victims of patriarchy

rather than as strong, economically dependent (and therefore socialist)
characters (Martens 2001: 36). This interpretation offers an easier fit
with narratives that have been powerful in the Anglophone context and
especially in the wake of radical positions of the second wave, narrating
feminism as a confrontation with masculine oppression and with left-
wing chauvinism.4 However, it is limiting to see Wolf ’s female charac-
ters as unambiguous victims in this way: like their author, they often
participate in endorsing the repressive structures that marginalise their
experience, and the mutual influence of narrator, characters and author
on one another is central to Wolf ’s subjective-authentic aesthetic.5 In
translation, however, their complexity is often diminished by their posi-
tioning as victims in an unambiguous narrative of patriarchal repression,
and the resonance Wolf ’s writing has found with feminist audiences in
the Anglophone field has often engendered or even encouraged a read-
ing of her feminism as oppositional to her socialist context.
As suggested by her striving for subjective authenticity in prose,
Wolf ’s writing is preoccupied with the idea of achieving coming-to-
self through mutual acceptance of the experiences of self and other,
without which recognition both men and women suffer under the
weight of patriarchy. Wolf explores balance and wholeness, rather than
conflict and aggression between the sexes, to reveal what is missed if
the considerations of either are excluded. In Kassandra, the protago-
nist muses that “zwischen Töten und Sterben ist ein Drittes: Leben”
(Werke VII: 363)6 and through the conflict between the socially con-
structed categories of Trojans/Greeks and male/female, she discovers
the harm that humans do themselves by seeking to repress the other
rather than encounter it. This recalls the aesthetic in-between-ness dis-
cussed by Wolf as early as “Lesen und Schreiben”, where she claims
4
See, for example, Shulamith Firestone’s 1969 letter to the left in the Guardian, quoted in Marlene
Legates (2001) In Their Time: A History of Feminism in Western Society, New York: Routledge,
pp. 353–354.
5
Brigid Haines and Margaret Littler discuss, for example, how Cassandra realises too late her com-
plicity in the survival of the oppressive regime that brings about Troy’s downfall and her own death
(Haines and Littler 2004: 79).
6
“Between killing and dying there is a third: living.”
that prose must c onstitute an attempt to reconcile different realities:

“Zu schreiben kann erst beginnen, wem die Realität nicht mehr selb-
stverständlich ist” (Werke IV: 270).7 As seen in the previous chapter,
the attempt to identify and explore a space in writing that is between
fact and fiction, self and other, exposes narrative and commemorative
acts as subjective performances and challenges a binary of (masculine)
rationality and (feminine) sentimentality. This “third way” reflects
an aesthetic that is not female-centred but rather female in nature,
and Wolf ’s writing remains motivated by what she sees as a clear link
between her socialist values and her writing. Subjective authenticity
serves a socialist function for Wolf, who sees it as a literary method of
helping reader and writer to a state of social and emotional maturity,
and it is crucial to bear this in mind when considering the resonance
of her texts with feminist arguments.
Kassandra. Vier Vorlesungen. Eine Erzählung (1983) and its English
translation (1984) constitute a key moment in the reframing of Wolf ’s
Anglophone author-function by feminist narratives in the late 1970s and
the 1980s, although the emphasis of the German response to the text
took a different form. Wolf ’s retelling of the story of the fall of Troy
from the perspective of the female seer formed her 1982 contribution to
the annual Frankfurt Lectures on Poetics: a fragment of the first-person
“Kassandra” narrative was preceded by four lectures in unconventional
forms (two travel reports, a working diary and a letter), and the narra-
tive was expanded into its later version for publication in 1983. Wolf
was only the third East German writer to have been invited to give the
lectures since their inception in 1959, reflecting her considerable status
as a voice in the literary discourse of West as well as East Germany. The
lectures reflect on the writing process, revealing an emerging relationship
of mutual influence between protagonist and author that is essential to
the construction of meaning in the text. Wolf remarks on this herself
in the first of the lectures, recalling: “Kassandra. Ich sah sie gleich. Sie,
die Gefangene, nahm mich gefangen, sie, selbst Objekt fremder Zwecke,
“Only those can begin to write for whom reality is no longer self-explanatory.”
7

besetzte mich” (Werke 7: 15).8 For Wolf, the lectures provide much more
than background to Cassandra’s narrative: they illustrate the simultaneity
between Cassandra’s “invention” by the author and Wolf ’s discovery of
a new approach to writing. A relationship of mutual influence, like that
between Christa T. and her narrator, emerges between the personal nar-
ratives of protagonist and author, so that “both [Cassandra and Wolf ] are
now protagonists in parallel Bildungsromane” (McDonald 1990: 273).
The fluid boundary between the personal narratives of protagonist and
author, between abstract narratives of literature and philology, is essen-
tial to the construction of meaning in the text: “Cassandra not only can
speak to us as a narrator, she also speaks to us through her effects on her
creator; the consequences of her life for us are not merely implicative or
allegorical but shown in action” (ibid.: 278).
Cassandra predicts the downfall of her society as a consequence of
aggressive, competitive patriarchal structures that exclude empathy from
rational decision-making, and realises too late her own complicity in
the survival of the oppressive regime that brings about Troy’s fall and
her own death. The story is anything but a simple reconstruction of the
traditional myth, and explores not only questions of gender and power
but also, for example, the rationalisation of war and the contradictions
Wolf felt to be inherent in her position as a socialist writer. While she
saw an affinity between literature and socialism, she was uncomfortable
with the censorship and patriarchal controls to which she was obliged to
conform (represented most explicitly in the book by the sinister character
of Eumelos). Wolf also felt unable to support official policy on nuclear
armament because of her pacifism and her belief in engagement rather
than confrontation with the other: a number of sentences calling for
disarmament and criticising the hijacking of socialist values as excuses
for war were removed from the GDR edition (details in Graves 1986).9
8
“Cassandra. I saw her at once. She, the captive, took me captive, she, herself the object of foreign
intentions, possessed me.”
9
For example, “Die Nachrichten beider Seiten bombardieren uns mit der Notwendigkeit von
Kriegsvorbereitungen, die auf beiden Seiten Verteidigungsvorbereitungen heißen” (Werke VII:
124). [“News reports on both sides bombard us with the necessity of war preparations, which on
both sides are called defence preparations.”]
She commented retrospectively on her concept of the text as an easily

decoded portrait of the GDR:
Ich habe dieses Land geliebt. Dass es am Ende war, wusste ich, weil es die
besten Leute nicht mehr integrieren konnte, weil es Menschenopfer
forderte. Ich habe das in Kassandra beschrieben, die Zensur stocherte in
den “Vorlesungen” herum; ich wartete gespannt, ob sie es wagen würden,
die Botschaft der Erzählung zu verstehen, nämlich, dass Troja untergehen
muss. Sie haben es nicht gewagt und die Erzählung ungekürzt gedruckt.
Die Leser in der DDR verstanden sie. (Wolf 1994: 262–263)10
Kassandra was the only one of Wolf ’s texts to be published in different

states of entirety in East and West Germany, and Wolf persisted in her
attempts through her publisher Aufbau to restore the missing passages to
the GDR edition, which she eventually achieved in the seventh edition
of the text in 1989 (Magenau 2002: 352). Wolf ’s comments suggest,
however, that even without these passages “within the GDR, and for all
those with prior knowledge of Wolf and her country, a further dimension
to the Cassandra theme was immediately apparent, for the novel begged
to be unlocked as a Schlüsselerzählung (roman à clef) about the GDR”
(Haines and Littler 2004: 79).
As well as contributing to pacifist discourse and self-critical social-
ism, Kassandra and the Frankfurt lectures continue the thread of self-
exploration through subjective authenticity that runs through Wolf ’s
prose and essays, beginning with the Christa T. and her concern with “the
difficulty of saying ‘I’”. Cassandra’s narrative, in which the narrator this
time is the protagonist, experiments with perspectives, voices and gen-
dered identities, divided, for example, between reflection on the events
of the Trojan War and thoughts on her imminent death at the hands of
Clytemnestra. This fluidity is embodied in the style of the narrative: as in
Christa T., the narrator interrupts herself to produce irregular and com-
plex syntax; speaking and thinking voices are not clearly distinguished
10
“I loved this country. I knew it was at its end, because it was no longer able to integrate the best
people, because it was demanding human sacrifices. I described that in Kassandra, the censor poked
around in the ‘lectures’; I waited curiously to see if they would dare to understand the message of
the story, namely, that Troy must founder. They did not dare, and printed the story unabridged.
Readers in the GDR understood it.”

from one another; and Wolf makes use of the pronoun “man” to dis-
tance the narrator from her experience while also revealing its unbear-
able immediacy. Jan van Heurck’s translation makes efforts to reproduce
Wolf ’s shifting narrative subjectivity, though as in Middleton’s Christa T.
it is not always possible to maintain the shifting of perspectives through
“man” and there are instances of explicitation and added punctuation
throughout, which stabilise the narrative voice and move away from the
shifting subjectivity of Wolf ’s narrative.11
While Kassandra and the lectures clearly confront patriarchal cul-
ture with a feminine poetics (or anti-poetics, as Wolf presents it in her
opening to the lectures), German commentators were not convinced
by the text as a feminist statement. While Wolf ’s feminist approach
was publicly criticised by East German critic Wilhelm Girnus in his
article for the GDR’s literary and cultural periodical Sinn und Form, in
which he attacked what he identified as her view that “die Geschichte
sei nicht in ihrem tiefsten Grunde der Kampf zwischen Ausbeutern
und Ausgebeuteten, sondern zwischen Männern und Frauen, ja noch
grotesker: zwischen ‘männlichem’ und ‘weiblichem’ Denken” (1983:
442),12 official censorship of the text targeted not gender-focused but
pacifist comments. Meanwhile, in the FRG, an extract was framed by
EMMA (March 1983) as a feminist piece focusing on the gendered con-
flict in the text, but other than this the reviewers did not endorse the idea
that Wolf or her text represented strongly feminist ideas. Referring to
Girnus’s opposition, Manfred Jäger (1983) claimed in his review for the
West German Titel that “der in der DDR gegen Christa Wolf erhobene
Vorwurf, einem bürgerlichen Feminismus anzuhängen, kann sich nicht
auf diese Erzählung berufen”,13 and Frauke Meyer-Gosau in EMMA
was derisive of Wolf ’s apparent attempt to develop a new, feminine
aesthetic: “Wenn das ein Anfang sein soll für eine neu vorzustellende
11
Letters between van Heurck and her editor at FSG, Nancy Meiselas, suggest that some of these
changes (such as punctuation choices) may have been editorial rather than translatorial (NYPL
712/21). It is impossible to trace the genesis of individual decisions in this way, but imperative to
recognise the importance of the editor’s input into the translated text.
12
“History, deep down, is not the struggle between the exploiters and the exploited, but between
men and women, or even more grotesque: between ‘male’ and ‘female’ thought.”
13
“The charge raised against Christa Wolf in the GDR, that she is an adherent of a bourgeois femi-
nism, cannot relate to this narrative.”
Erotik—dann gibt es sie nicht, Schwester” (1984: 46).14 In general, the

text’s feminist potential, apparently derived from its female protago-
nist and anti-patriarchal themes and suggested by Girnus’s response,
was not seen to have been fulfilled or was perhaps overshadowed by
the contextualisation of Wolf ’s author-function in narratives of criti-
cal socialism. However, reviewers of the English translation were much
more strongly attracted to the feminist elements of the text.
The English translation was published simultaneously by FSG
and Virago in 1984, attracting critical acclaim. Unlike the German
commentary, the publication strategies adopted and the response of
the British and North American critics reflect a primary interest in
Wolf ’s feminism, apparently affirming her status as a feminist writer
with international appeal by highlighting the relevance of her work
for narratives circulating in the target culture. Anglophone editions of
Cassandra imitate the one-volume format used for publication in the
GDR; however, the title of the volume, Cassandra: A Novel and Four
Essays, reconfigures the bilateral relationship between the “novel” and
the “essays” by underplaying the role of the latter and foregrounding
the importance of the novel. This is inconsistent with the title used
by Wolf ’s East German publisher, which foregrounds the lectures:
Kassandra. Vier Vorlesungen. Eine Erzählung [Kassandra. Four Lectures.
A Narrative].15 It emphasises the story of the protagonist over Wolf ’s
reflections on literature, and suggests that readings of the translation
focused on plot rather than reflecting on the text’s implications in the
context of relevant narratives such as those of Wolf ’s socio-political
context and position in source-culture literary discourse, or her sub-
jective-authentic aesthetic. This is hardly surprising when seen against
the backdrop of textual and paratextual shifts in the translation of
previous texts such as Christa T. and Kindheitsmuster.
14
“If this is to count as a beginning for a newly imagined eroticism, then there is no such thing,
sister.”
15
Luchterhand in West Germany published Kassandra separately from the Voraussetzungen, selling
90,000 copies of the lectures and 150,000 of the Cassandra narrative itself, which was hugely popu-
lar in the wake of the Frankfurt lectures (Magenau 2002: 338).
125
Fig. 4.1 Front cover design, Cassandra. A Novel and Four Essays, 1984.
Design © Jacqueline Schuman, reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and
Giroux
The shift of attention to the specific tale the protagonist has to tell is
underlined by cover designs such as the image selected by Farrar Straus
Giroux for the first US edition (Fig. 4.1)16:
The front cover shows a female figure whose hair and clothing recall
typical images of Ancient Greek femininity. Her left hand is poised in
a gesture of supplication or proclamation, while the right performs an
appeasing gesture. The cover image contrasts with the design and muted
colours of the East and West German editions, the former showing the
ruins of an ancient temple and the latter bearing only the text of the
title, author and publisher. Here, the emphasis on the protagonist is clear
from the image and is reinforced by the varying font size used for the
elements of the book’s title. Contextualising this, the inside of the dust
16
Other designs focusing on the solitary female figure include the Virago Modern Classics edition
(1989) and the more recent Daunt Books edition (2013).
cover frames Wolf ’s text as “historical fiction” by comparing it to Mary

Renault’s The King Must Die, a 1958 historical novel about the early
years of Theseus. Interestingly, such a comparison, while foregrounded
by FSG, is directly refuted by Margaret Atwood in her foreword to the
1998 translation of Wolf ’s 1996 text Medea, where she comments that it
is not “an anthropological retelling of myth in the style of Mary Renault”,
reframing Wolf ’s text as more than a revision of a familiar story (Atwood
1998: xiii). The cover describes Cassandra’s narrative as “a pressing mono-
logue whose inner focal points are war and patriarchal society”, framing
the protagonist in narratives familiar to target discourse: firstly, a pacifist
binary between peace and war and, secondly, a feminist narrative of patri-
archy as antithetical to female interests.
Meanwhile, Wolf’s subjective-authentic aesthetic is given little attention
and in fact seems to be a potential obstacle to the book’s appeal: the inside
back cover explains that “although Wolf is in a sense possessed by Cassandra,
it is the sanity of her voice which makes us read this book with our own
sense of urgency”. The translator’s note by Jan van Heurck also understates
the interdependence of author and protagonist: the Vorlesungen are demoted
to the status of “companion lectures, which illuminate [the narrative’s]
background and implications”. As Martens suggests, then, the reader is not
invited to view Cassandra as an active participant in the narration or in her
own fate, nor to recognise the implications of the text as a (feminist) aes-
thetic experiment; rather, the focus is on a binary between the story and the
provided commentary. There is also, perhaps not surprisingly, no comment
on the particular relevance of the text to its East German context.
Virago’s British edition from the same year takes a different approach
that is less focused on the individual as protagonist and foregrounds
Wolf ’s treatment of relationships between male and female identities.17
The front cover shows a male sun and a female moon above a city at sun-
set, suggesting the interdependence of the male and the female. The image
illustrates a dream of Cassandra’s, in which she must judge which of the
two heavenly bodies shines more brightly. She chooses the sun (Apollo),
realising belatedly that in doing so she has rejected the moon (Selene).
The Virago 1984 cover design can be viewed at http://flickriver-lb-1710691658.us-east-1.elb.

17
amazonaws.com/photos/ringaringarosa/3669122777/.

The contest reveals the destructiveness of the binary power- struggle

between the sexes, and Cassandra’s forced choice is dismissed by her com-
panion Marpessa as “eine ganz und gar verkehrte Frage” (Werke 7: 327).18
While the inside cover mostly reproduces the text of the American edi-
tion, the binary between “possession” and “sanity” is replaced by the com-
ment that the context of Wolf ’s themes “is contemporary, yet Cassandra’s
voice pervades them all”. Through the presence of familiar contemporary
themes, there is a sense that Wolf is one of “us”, of the same time and
space as the potential reader, but this comment also encourages recogni-
tion that it is in fact Cassandra, a voice from the past, who speaks to
the reader. There is also a more precise awareness of Wolf ’s context as
a socialist which is articulated in the biographical note that features on
the first page and inside back cover and describes her as “a committed
socialist of independent temper”.19 Perhaps led by the context of feminist
links to strong pacifist movements in the UK such as CND and contem-
porary discussions of pan-European security (e.g. the NATO doubletrack
decision of 1979), the Virago covers reflect a sense of shared European-
ness that distinguishes them from the FSG peritexts. The more explicit
“branding” of Wolf as a leftist writer in the UK edition is significant in
the context of a sizeable potential audience of left-leaning readers, with
narratives of other activist communities such as trade unions and Church
groups intersecting with those of pacifists and feminists to produce a cli-
mate of reception quite different from that in the USA.
As shown by the book covers in their inevitably selective framing of
the text, paratexts therefore play a vital role in the narration of author-
ship. This chapter concentrates on the outermost element of the paratexts
described by Genette: the epitext. As noted in Chap. 2, while Genette
defines the paratext as “authorial or more or less legitimated by the author”
(1997a: 2), a Foucauldian understanding of authorship that defines
reviews and scholarship as authorised by the author-function creates a
context in which they can be considered as epitexts. Looking critically
at Genette’s model, Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar discusses how the paratext
can be defined as a “text-specific metadiscourse” not n ecessarily defined
“A totally and utterly perverse question.”
18
See Virago’s editions of The Quest for Christa T. (1970), A Model Childhood (1980), No Place on
19
Earth (1982) and Cassandra (1984).

by authorial intention (2002: 44). Bearing in mind the key role played
by institutional narratives in the construction of the author-function,
then, the writer’s participation in discourse through the author-function
implicitly authorises the circulation of secondary texts (such as reviews).
Particularly in the case of translation, where linguistic, spatial and often
temporal boundaries distance the writer from the target text, the writer’s
enduring presence in target-culture discourse is dependent on endorse-
ment by other agents and institutions, implicating them as narrators of
the author-function where Genette would exclude them.
It is also noteworthy that, although admitting that “every context
serves as paratext” (1997a: 8), Genette delimits his study to paratexts
of a linguistic nature that conform to his criterion of authorial inten-
tion, rather than including pictorial, material or what he describes as
“factual” paratexts. Pictorial and material peritexts will be discussed in
Chap. 5; alongside written epitexts, this chapter addresses the role of the
factual paratext, which is “a fact whose existence alone, if known to the
public, provides some commentary on the text and influences how the
text is received” (1997a: 7). By identifying authorial or contextual “facts”
as paratext, Genette aligns his model with narrative theory: Wolf and
her texts are framed by factual epitexts constituted by unstable narrative
categories of identity (feminist, German, East German) and in relation
to other individual and institutional narratives (through collaborations,
or public and private relationships). Although neglected by Genette, the
factual paratext is highly significant in the context of a discursive and
narrative approach.
The feminist framing of Wolf ’s author-function is explored here in two
stages. First, an examination of three types of epitext demonstrates how
her framing as a feminist and a female writer has shaped the development
of Wolf ’s Anglophone author-function. While the status of the journal-
istic review as a subjective frame for text and author-function may often
be taken for granted, it is also important to recognise the dual role of
academic texts as both observers and vehicles of institutional and abstract
narratives that also occasionally express the explicit intention to be acces-
sible to non-scholarly (and non-German-speaking) readers; attention will
also be paid to the factual epitexts that determine Wolf ’s narrated author-
ship. Particularly given the absence of much of Wolf ’s essayistic writing
129
from the Anglophone field and therefore the English-speaking reader’s

inability to access Wolf ’s own writing about her texts, it is important
to understand how these three types of epitext function as interpretive
frames for Wolf ’s writing and her author-function. The second part of
the analysis focuses in more detail on two specific effects of epitextual
framing: firstly the fictionalisation of Wolf ’s protagonists, which disrupts
the bilateral relationship of influence between the personal narratives of
author and protagonist that is crucial to Wolf ’s subjective authenticity,
and secondly the framing of her pacifism as distinctively feminist.
Framing Wolf as a Feminist

It is important to note that the feminism identified by Anglophone read-
ers of Cassandra was not seen to be without precedent in her previous
writing. Cassandra was seen to consolidate a shift towards the fram-
ing of Wolf ’s writing as feminist that had already been underway since
the establishment of Wolf ’s Anglophone author-function in the early
1970s through the publication of The Quest for Christa T., as shown, for
example, by Webb’s Wolf/Woolf comparison. Describing the author in
a 1984 review of the text, the New York Times claimed that “in those
of her previous books that have been published in the West … she has
evinced strongly feminist views” (Lehmann-Haupt 1984), a comment
that implicitly aligns Wolf ’s previous publications (in English) with
familiar institutional narratives of the receiving culture. This had been
foreshadowed not only by Christa T. but also by No Place on Earth, the
1982 translation of Wolf ’s Kein Ort. Nirgends (1979), in response to
which one reviewer described the character of Karoline von Günderrode
as an “anguished feminist” (Kirkus Reviews 1982). Some implications of
this emphasis on feminist readings were noted by the Wolf scholar Anna
Kuhn in 1983: discussing Marilyn French’s 1982 review of the text she
expressed concerns that
clearly the assumption was that Wolf was a women’s writer and that there-
fore it would be appropriate to have a feminist writer critique her work.
And indeed, French did an adequate job of reviewing the book from that
vantage point. Yet the review was very one-sided. What was missing was a
discussion of German Romanticism and Christa Wolf ’s perspective on this
tradition. (NYPL 712/12)
Kuhn’s letter shows her concern that important contextual narratives of

the source culture are marginalised by reductive framing of Wolf ’s texts
as feminist. This is of course in part an inevitable consequence of the shift
to a new discursive context where, for example, the institutional narra-
tive of a re-established (East) German kulturelles Erbe is not relevant and
therefore not present. As seen in examples from Christa T., the resonance
of Wolf ’s writing with such specific source-culture narratives is perhaps
inevitably lost in translation and replaced with links to more easily iden-
tifiable interpretive frames. Kuhn’s comments also highlight the framing
influence of the reviewer’s identity on the author-function by suggesting
that Wolf ’s feminist significance is emphasised simply by the selection
of French as a reviewer: this is an important observation, since it points
to the identity of commentators on the author-function as important
contextual frames.
There is, of course, plenty in Kassandra to resonate with the
Anglophone feminist reader. The text juxtaposes male and female behav-
iour to illustrate gender inequality, for example, as the war continues
and the soldiers’ behaviour towards women degenerates: “Wenn man es
recht betrachtete—nur traute niemand sich, es so zu sehn—, schienen
die Männer beider Seiten verbündet gegen unsre Frauen” (Werke 7:
346).20 Statements such as this provide common ground between Wolf ’s
text and the concerns of second-wave feminists engaged in pacifist and
environmental movements, helping to bridge a gap between the feminist
narratives of the receiving culture and the writer who eschews the label
“feminist”. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that the Anglophone epitexts to
Cassandra reflected and generated an enthusiasm for feminism in Wolf ’s
writing that was unprecedented by East and West German responses.
Three types of epitext reflect this framing of Wolf ’s a uthor-function in
relation to selected institutional narratives dominant in the target culture.
“If one properly looked at it—only no one dared to see it like that—the men of both sides seemed
20
united against our women.”

131
Journalistic Epitexts and Narratives of “Feminism”
Where German reviewers had been at best cautious about defining Wolf ’s
text as feminist, Anglophone reviews of Cassandra on both sides of the
Atlantic unquestioningly identified Wolf as a feminist author. Newspapers
and literary magazines alike focused on the protagonist’s rejection of the
bloodthirsty means and repressive ends of patriarchy to reveal, as Richard
Eder put it in the Los Angeles Times, “humanity’s tragedies, along with
many of its achievements, as a product of the either-or mentality and
dominating instinct peculiar to men” (Eder 1984). The reviews affirmed
the text as “a telling of the Trojan War from a feminist point of view”
(Walters 1984) or “a thought-provoking and strongly feminist inquiry
into the perpetual human capacity for self-destruction” (Publishers Weekly
1984) and claimed, in the words of the British feminist magazine Spare
Rib, that “Wolf ’s most overtly feminist novel to date” recounted “the
patriarchal order of competitiveness and aggression, in which women are
playthings, procreators, and pawns of war, but never co-equal human
beings” (Schiwy 1985).
Some explicitly framed Cassandra as a successor to No Place on Earth,
tracing the development of a feminist strand in Wolf ’s author-function:
in a review of the German text for World Literature Today, Judith Ryan
(1983) commented that “the feminist concerns latent in the imaginary
dialogue of Christa Wolf ’s No Place on Earth are developed more overtly in
her new novel, Kassandra, and its companion volume of self-explication”.
However, praise for Wolf ’s feminism was not unanimous: the socialist
magazine The New Leader accused her of exploiting “the safety net of
feminism” as a screen for more important political arguments, complain-
ing that “the book is weighed down by its feminism” (Gewen 1984).
For better or for worse, then, Wolf ’s author-function was now strongly
associated with the ideas and narratives of feminism. Later reviews also
demonstrate how Cassandra was seen to bridge the gap between earlier
texts such as No Place on Earth and Wolf ’s later writing such as Medea,
in relation to which Cassandra was mentioned numerous times as a
point of reference for Wolf ’s feminist consciousness: in America, readers
of the Boston Globe were assured that “if you wanted a feminist rewrite
of [Medea], Christa Wolf, an important (formerly East) German writer

whose 1984 volume Cassandra impressively revised Greek myth, would
be among your favourite choices for the job” (Marx 1998) and in the UK
the TLS review opened with the assertion that “Christa Wolf has made
no secret of her feminist sympathies, and they have informed some of her
best work, most notably Kassandra (1983)” (Graves 1996).
The reviews of Cassandra drew (as suggested by Martens) on a nar-
rative of women as victims of patriarchy, in which the complicity of
female characters was not recognised: Eder’s review, for example, encour-
aged a reading of the text as an “exploration of the feminine genius, and
its fateful impotence to break through male limitations” (Eder 1984).
Focusing on a binary of innocence and oppression, the dominant institu-
tional narrative in which these reviews frame Wolf ’s protagonist defines
feminism using tropes of female resistance to aggressive male patriarchy
and of tragic female victimhood. Of all the reviewers, only Ernst Pawel
of the New York Times was cautious about the label “feminist”, warn-
ing that “one hesitates to call it a feminist version simply because Wolf ’s
whole outlook is militantly prohuman and wise enough to discern the
virus of reverse male chauvinism in much of what passes for feminist
militancy” (Pawel 1984). Contrasting the lack of concern shown in other
reviews for the risk of reading target-culture interests into Wolf ’s advo-
cacy of the feminine, Pawel’s comment exposes the non-universality of an
Anglophone feminist narrative, and suggests the shift in relative meaning
that occurs when the term is transferred from a GDR to an Anglophone
receiving context.
The journalistic epitexts to Cassandra situated feminism at the heart of
both positive and negative responses to the text, opening up a discourse
about Wolf that was centred on her feminist credentials. In a New York
Times review, classical scholar Mary Lefkowitz accused Wolf of perpetuat-
ing “the myth of an egalitarian matriarchy usurped by a male hierarchy—
a utopian fantasy without historical basis” (Lefkowitz 1984). Situating
the text in a binary between patriarchal male and anti-patriarchal female
identities, Lefkowitz affirmed Cassandra as an allegory for female victim-
hood by complaining that “to the East German novelist Christa Wolf,
Cassandra is the symbolic representation of women in the Western world,
whose talents and intelligence have been suppressed in order to serve the
133
interests of men, power and destruction”. She viewed with dismay Wolf ’s
subjective approach to her historical material, commenting that “Wolf
has selected only those facts about the ancient world that suit her politi-
cal purposes”. However, Lefkowitz’s accusations did not go unchallenged.
Eva Kollisch, lecturer in German, comparative literature and women’s
literature at Sarah Lawrence College (New York) wrote to the New York
Times three days later:
Reading Mary Lefkowitz’s attack on Christa Wolf ’s Cassandra, one comes

away with the impression that the Trojan prophetess might have had quite
a nice life if she had only consented to play ball with Apollo, and that
Christa Wolf, East Germany’s foremost writer, is an addle-brained feminist
and soft-headed communist for thinking otherwise. …Wolf brilliantly
shows how under patriarchy all women are the victims and spoils of war.
…She boldly reinterprets the old Cassandra myth in light of new feminist
theory and insight and sees the Trojan War as emblematic of all male vio-
lence and power everywhere. (Kollisch 1984)
Kollisch’s letter appeared alongside another from literary scholar Lise

Weil, who asked “since when do we demand scientific method from our
fiction writers?” and criticised Lefkowitz for prioritising historical accu-
racy over the “imaginative power and poetic beauty” of the book (Weil
1984). These responses to Lefkowitz show that both positive and negative
approaches to Wolf ’s writing framed Cassandra as a crucially fictional
text, a feminist allegory for contemporary political and social reality, in
which women are positioned as innocent victims. They echo readings
of Christa T. as a primarily imaginative, fictional tale and suggest the
same binary between factual accuracy and literary creativity that was to
be significant in the Anglophone response to the Literaturstreit. Although
challenging Lefkowitz, like her they framed Wolf ’s text primarily in the
context of narratives of female victimhood and literature as fiction.
The Lefkowitz/Kollisch/Weil exchange demonstrates the fluidity of
boundaries between academic and commercial institutions in their nar-
ration of the author, as academic voices comment via journalistic media.
Another example of this is Anna Kuhn’s review from the Philadelphia
Inquirer, in which she commented that the text “carries a fruitful avenue
of feminist inquiry—the redefinition of the literary canon—to its logical

conclusions, calling into question aspects of the mythological and literary
tradition of the West” and concludes that “Conditions of a Narrative doc-
uments the rise of Wolf ’s feminist consciousness” (Kuhn 1984b). Kuhn’s
review reveals some of the concerns (redefinition of the canon, question-
ing literary and mythological traditions) that have drawn academics to
Wolf ’s writing and have attracted interest in her anti-patriarchal argu-
ments, beyond the fact of her engagement with female lives and expe-
rience. Like the Lefkowitz/Kollisch/Weil exchange, it demonstrates the
manner in which academic agents enact a double discursive function, as
both scholars and reviewers. More importantly, it raises questions about
the extent to which the narratives of academic and commercial institu-
tions truly overlap in their narration of Wolf as a feminist. This invites
a closer examination of the role played by scholarly epitexts in framing
Wolf ’s translated writing as feminist.
Scholarly Epitexts: A Narrative of Female Germanistik
While Cassandra is commonly described as Wolf ’s most feminist text,

Wolf ’s positioning as a feminist began much earlier than this in scholarly
epitexts. In November 1978, FSG received a letter from Helen Fehervary,
a German Studies scholar at Oberlin College Ohio (where Wolf had been
writer-in-residence in 1974), expressing concern that The Quest for Christa
T. was going out of print and urging the publisher to reprint the book.
Fehervary’s letter explained the frequent and successful inclusion of Wolf ’s
text in university courses on German women writers in translation, twen-
tieth-century German literary studies and Women’s Studies, and high-
lighted the fluid boundary between commercial and academic narratives
of Wolf ’s authorship by commenting that “the feminist questions raised
in this novel in particular have made Wolf a familiar name among women
readers both inside and outside academic communities” (NYPL 712/22).
Fehervary included a petition supporting her letter, signed by 31 academ-
ics at the third annual meeting of Women in German in September 1978,
and her letter was corroborated by a number of others received by FSG
around the same time. She received a prompt reply from Wolf ’s editor,
135
Nancy Meiselas, informing her of FSG’s existing plans to reissue Christa

T. in paperback and to publish a translation of Wolf ’s recently published
Kindheitsmuster (eventually published in 1980): the considerable interest
in the text expressed by this group of Anglophone academics demonstrates
their efforts, alongside those of Roger Straus, to nurture Wolf ’s author-
function in the context of target-culture narratives.
Like Lefkowitz’s, Kollisch’s and Weil’s letters and Kuhn’s review,
Fehervary’s intervention constitutes an intersection between the aca-
demic and commercial discourses in which Wolf ’s author-function cir-
culated. In the interests of exploring this relationship of influence, it is
worth mentioning two academic studies in particular that have played
an important part in framing Wolf ’s Anglophone author-function and
are demonstrative of the narratives dominant in Wolf discourse immedi-
ately prior to the watershed of German Reunification and her Stasi scan-
dal. These are Anna Kuhn’s 1988 volume, Christa Wolf ’s Utopian Vision:
from Marxism to Feminism, and the 1989 collection Responses to Christa
Wolf edited by Marilyn Sibley Fries. Kuhn’s book (advised by Fehervary,
amongst others) continues to be considered a seminal English-language
work on Wolf, and Fries’s volume is highly significant as a reflection of
Wolf scholarship in the 1980s, collecting together responses to a session
on Wolf at the 1982 MLA convention. The two volumes demonstrate
narratives salient in American scholarship on Wolf that contextualised
the publication of Cassandra in English in the 1980s, and reflect Wolf ’s
identification as a feminist author at its most emphatic before the sub-
sequent reframing of her authorship by the debates of the early 1990s.
Kuhn has been criticised for implying in her title a false narrative of
progression, framing Wolf as a writer who has grown “out” of social-
ism and “into” an ostensibly more universal narrative of feminist inter-
ests (Sayer and Löwy 1995: 107). However, as her letter about the No
Place on Earth review suggests, Kuhn’s perspective is much more nuanced
than this and her introduction confronts the problematic labels imposed
upon Wolf as an “East German woman writer”. She warns against reduc-
tive feminist interpretations, noting that “to the extent that it focuses on
the subjective experience of the female individual to the exclusion of the
broader socio-historical and cultural context, this feminist scholarship is
also reductionist” (Kuhn 1988: 3). The dichotomy implied in her title,
then, perhaps suggests some tension between academic narratives and the
commercial imperatives of publishers. In a letter to Angela Drescher, an
editor at Wolf ’s East German publisher Aufbau, Kuhn noted her disap-
pointment that her open letter to Christa Wolf (in which she discusses
being dissuaded from working on Wolf by a well-meaning colleague)
would not be included as a preface to the book alongside its explanatory
introduction, on the grounds that the letter was “vermutlich nicht ‘wissen-
schaftlich’ genug un [sic] in einer akademischen Untersuchung aufgenom-
men zu werden”. She explains that “damit war mein Anliegen natürlich
verfehlt, das gerade das Dialogische verlangte” (AAV 2731/S045).21 Kuhn’s
comments reveal a discrepancy between her own priorities and those of
her publisher and suggest that her account of Wolf has been reframed in
part by an institutional narrative of what literary criticism is (or, perhaps,
what will sell). Her experience also reveals an institutional and perhaps
more broadly societal desire to separate “fictional”, imaginative narratives
from the “factual”, analytical narratives that contextualise her writing, and
to narrate literature and philology as discrete categories. The translated
author is thus subject to framing predominantly within existing narratives
of the target culture, since those who advocate her work are also obliged
to operate within these normative discursive categories.
While Kuhn feels some tension with the institutional norms of aca-
demic publishing, Fries declares her intention “to provide to readers
whose acquaintance with Wolf is limited mainly to the English transla-
tions of her works a spectrum of critical opinions and approaches”, reach-
ing out to a readership beyond the academic institution (Fries 1989: 8).
Her collection, nonetheless academically focused, brings together Wolf
scholars such as Joyce Crick, Sara Lennox, Karin McPherson, Helen
Fehervary, Myra Love and Anne Hermann, and three articles originally
written in German (all translated for the volume by Fries), including
Wolf ’s interview with Hans Kaufmann on subjective authenticity, a sig-
nificant statement of intent for her aesthetic approach. Fries’s introduc-
tion provides a detailed account of Wolf ’s cultural and political context
and promises a “spectrum” of opinions and approaches; meanwhile,
the selection of articles reflects a strong emphasis on female experience:
“Presumably not ‘academic’ enough to be included in a scholarly study. …With that of course my
21
own concerns, demanding precisely this dialogic approach, were neglected.”

137
the titles of contributions by Crick, Zehl Romero, Lennox, McPherson,

Herrmann and Gilpin all position Wolf in a narrative of female expe-
rience and “women writers”. The timing of the study is significant:
although Störfall (1987) had been published and was being translated
by the time the collection appeared, the emphasis in the volume is on
feminine aesthetics and a female tradition, rather than the anti-nuclear
or environmentalist narratives that were central to Wolf ’s concerns in
the late 1980s. With four of the nineteen essays dedicated to Christa T.
and another four to Cassandra, the volume reinforces the importance
of both texts as defining features of Wolf ’s author-function throughout
the 1980s and into the 1990s.
Also demonstrating the temporal contingency of the collection and
the extent to which scholarship reflects dominant commercial and aca-
demic narratives of the author’s identity, it is significant that, although
the volume was published in 1989, several contributions date from 1982,
before the publication of Kassandra. In her “Acknowledgments”, written
for the 1989 publication, Fries comments on colleagues’ initial reserva-
tions about the Wolf panel at the MLA convention, reflecting a lull in
Wolf ’s popularity: “this was an East German author, the translation of
whose Quest for Christa T., published in 1970, had been out of print for
several intervening years” (1989: 7). However, she goes on to note, firstly,
the success of the session at the conference and secondly the subsequent
growth in Wolf ’s popularity to the status of a “cult figure”. This swell in
popularity coincides with the publication of Kassandra and its transla-
tion and with Wolf ’s popularity amongst feminist and female readers,
reaching out beyond the “initiated few” of German literary studies to
new readers. The volume is representative of Anglophone (and particu-
larly American) Wolf scholarship in the 1980s, not just because it reflects
the increase in interest in the perceived feminism of Wolf ’s writing but
because Fries explicitly frames Cassandra as a moment of shift in aca-
demic and non-academic interest in the author.
It is worth reflecting at this point on the impact of intersecting aca-
demic and non-academic interests in Wolf ’s writing. Edith Waldstein
interprets the involvement of female and feminist academics and critics
in the construction of Wolf ’s author-function as evidence of her primarily
female readership. Commenting on Fehervary’s petition, she remarks that
this fact, combined with the many dissertations, articles and books about
Christa Wolf by feminist literary critics, should provide enough evidence
for the claim that the primary readership of her works in the US is one
which concerns itself with women’s issues. (Waldstein 1983)
A further observation on Wolf ’s predominantly female readership is that

the involvement of so many female agents is not simply evidence of but
instrumental in the sustained framing of her as a feminist author. Acting as
advocates of Wolf ’s author-function, individuals such as Fehervary, Kuhn
and Fries are embedded in the social narratives of the institutions they
serve: their endorsement of the author contextualises the author-function
in these narratives by association and instrumentalises it in the discourses
in which they are themselves embedded. Wolf ’s relationship with the
University of Ohio was particularly significant in this respect. Having first
visited Ohio in 1974 as the university’s Max Kade writer-in-residence, a
position open to all German-speaking writers and held, amongst others,
by Ulrich Plenzdorf in 1975 and Jurek Becker in 1978 (Oberlin College
Ohio 2016), Wolf returned in 1983, a year before the Anglophone publi-
cation of Cassandra, with the intention of remaining for the spring quarter
and taking part in a conference entitled “Women, Fascism, Everyday Life
in Germany” organised jointly by the departments of German Studies
and Women’s Studies. Plans for her visit also included a colloquium on
“Women and Peace”, in which Wolf gave a paper entitled “Literatur heute
muss Friedensforschung sein” [Literature today must be peace research]
(Coalition of Women in German 1983a: 10, 1983b: 3), a significant title
because the statement was a quote from her own acceptance speech for the
West German Büchner Prize in 1980. Wolf used the speech to speak out
against scientific rationality and patriarchal reasoning, and to highlight the
role of literature in reflecting the reality and the concerns of readers. The
connection between Wolf ’s pacifism and her search for a different mode of
expression, then, was at the foreground of her activity at this time.
Wolf ’s openness to the relationship with Ohio and her active involve-
ment with the plans for the conference had done much to align her with
narratives of interest to both German Studies and Women’s Studies. In
1986, in an article for Mother Jones, pacifist activist and Wolf advocate
Grace Paley highlighted the (potentially limiting) significance of this
relationship for Wolf ’s author-function:
139
Christa Wolf is an East German writer not well enough known in this
country except among feminists, and then mostly at the University of Ohio
where the German department and the women’s studies department seem
to be close enough to have invited her to teach last year. (Paley et al. 1986)
Paley’s article identifies the vulnerability and limited discursive mobil-

ity of Wolf ’s translated author-function and suggests that the endorse-
ment of her writing by feminist and female voices had pigeonholed her
as a feminist. Her remarks confirm the particular vulnerability of the
translated author to reframing by discursive agents and institutions in
the target culture, on whom she relies for the circulation of her author-
function. Wolf ’s residency and collaboration with the two departments at
Ohio, framed, for example, by the feminist narratives associated with the
discipline of Women’s Studies and by the research interests of members
of the Coalition of Women in German (whose newsletters demonstrate
a sustained interest in Wolf and her writing), act as a factual paratext: in
Genette’s terms, the “existence alone” of this connection positions her
as a contributor to narratives of women’s interests and of Germanistik.
Through the interaction of academic narratives with reviews and pub-
lishing institutions, the selective framing of Wolf as a feminist and as
an author defined by her gender contributed to the discursive context
in which Cassandra was received in 1984. Turning finally to the factual
paratext itself, we might consider in more detail how, beyond scholarly
outputs, Wolf ’s association with Ohio implicitly framed her as a feminist
writer or a figurehead for women’s studies, a discipline that often shares
common ground with feminist interests.
F actual Epitexts: Wolf and a Dissident Narrative

of “Women Writers”
Genette defines the factual epitext as a known fact about the author or
text that adds some meaning for the reader, and suggests that the sex of a
female author plays a significant framing role by positioning her writing
in narratives of a gendered tradition (as opposed to a non-gendered tradi-
tion implicitly dominated by male identities). Emphasis on the sex of a
translated writer as a factual epitext is widespread: Mohja Kahf (2010)

describes how the memoirs of the Egyptian women’s rights activist Huda
Sha’rawi have been “haremised” in the American translation, which frames
the narrator as a victim or heroic rebel in gendered binaries of power and
selectively marginalises her subscription to narratives of class difference
or her constructive relationships with men. Kahf ’s discussion shows how
Harvey’s target-culture “horizons of expectation” (2003: 48) mask the
personal and societal narratives invoked in the source text: in her example
and in Wolf ’s case, seemingly universal categories of identity are selected
as the main factual epitexts for the translation in favour of narratives
reflected more strongly in the source-culture context of publication.
Wolf herself invokes a tradition of “weibliches Schreiben” [female
writing] in her references to Bachmann, Woolf and Fleißer in the third
and fourth Cassandra lectures, advocating a new mode of narration and
memory that does not marginalise individual consciousness:
Für die letzten Jahre ist mir wichtig geworden die Traditionslinie weibli-
chen Schreibens. Dies auszuführen wäre ein Thema für sich, in den
Vorlesungen zu “Kassandra” steht manches darüber. Ich nenne hier nur
einige Namen: Ingeborg Bachmann. Virginia Woolf. Marie-Luise Fleißer.
(Werke VIII: 373)22
However, while Wolf sees Bachmann’s creative talent in the fact “dass
sie die Erfahrung der Frau, die sie ist, nicht in ‘Kunst’ ertöten kann”
(Werke VII: 191),23 we have seen in the previous chapter how the per-
sonal narratives of writer and narrator can be marginalised in the text of
Wolf ’s translated writing in favour of a focus on a linear plot. By reading
Wolf emphatically as a female writer but ignoring “the woman she is”
(an East German, politically committed socialist), journalistic epitexts
to Cassandra have aligned her Anglophone author-function with narra-
tives of female experience and women’s writing that presuppose a close
relationship to target-culture narratives of feminism. These assumptions
22
“In recent years, the tradition of female writing has become important to me. To expand on this
would be a theme in itself, there is some discussion of it in the lectures for Cassandra. Here, I will
just name a few names: Ingeborg Bachmann. Virginia Woolf. Marie-Luise Fleißer.”
23
“That, in ‘art’, she cannot kill the experience of the woman she is.”

underlie selective emphasis in the author-function on certain factual epi-

texts to Wolf ’s translated writing, for example, her association from 1982
onwards with the feminist publisher Virago in the UK and her alignment
with a narrative of a female or feminist literary tradition epitomised by
Virginia Woolf.
Framed by the narratives informing the Anglophone literary field, in
the early 1980s Wolf was positioned implicitly by her connection with
UK publisher Virago in an institutional narrative of writing by women,
for women. Virago had been recommended to Roger Straus in 1980 as
a UK publisher for Wolf by the London-based literary agent Deborah
Rogers (NYPL 712/24), whose letter to Straus suggests that FSG might
already have had a particular interest in allying with a feminist publisher
in the UK as a strategy for framing Wolf ’s writing and therefore that,
even before Cassandra, Straus considered Wolf ’s gender to be a significant
(and appealing) feature of her authorial identity. Founded in 1973, by the
1980s Virago was known for publishing major feminist thinkers includ-
ing Kate Millett, Adrienne Rich, Angela Carter, Sheila Rowbotham and
Elaine Showalter. The company had established itself as a feminist pub-
lisher, engaging with female writing and experience and introducing the
Virago Modern Classics series in 1978 to explore a narrative of a female
literary tradition. Wolf ’s publication by Virago, beginning in 1982 with
Christa T. and A Model Childhood, is a factual epitext that has also mani-
fested itself in peritexts through the appearance of the distinctive apple
logo on the British translations and in epitexts, for example, in several
of the British reviews which noted Virago as publisher in their appraisal
of the text (Webb 1971; Rogers 1982) or referred to the translation of
Cassandra as “Virago’s edition” (Schiwy 1985). Michael Hulse com-
mented on the implications of this in his review of Christa T. and A
Model Childhood: “Virago have created an image for themselves, so one
couldn’t take it amiss if a British reader assumed that these two important
novels deal with the problems of women” (Hulse 1982). As she gained
recognition in English not only as a female author but also as a Virago
author, Wolf was therefore framed in the narratives of feminist writers
and literature that are central to the publisher’s own discursive function.24
24
Christa T. had been published in Britain in 1971 by Hutchinson, who subsequently opted out of
their partnership with FSG.
Noting the paradox of co-opting Wolf into feminist narratives in

the absence of a women’s movement in the GDR, Waldstein (1983)
attributes her popularity with women’s movements and feminists to
her examination of common themes: she identifies these firstly as the
questioning of the canon, referring to Wolf ’s selection of a marginalised
female writer as the protagonist for No Place on Earth, and secondly as
the quest for “a language that would not only allow the expression of
women’s experience, but also go beyond this to the point of influenc-
ing our perceptions in such a way as to make possible new, androgy-
nous modes of personal, literary and social interaction”. This reading of
androgyny in Wolf recalls W.L. Webb’s comparison of her to Virginia
Woolf, which continued to resound in Wolf ’s Anglophone authorial nar-
rative: it appeared on the back cover of Virago’s Christa T. in 1982 and,
more implicitly, The Times described No Place on Earth as an evocation of
“young Bloomsbury” (Ratcliffe 1983), replacing Wolf ’s contextual nar-
rative of German Romanticism with one taken from the literary history
of the target culture. Webb’s comment also resurfaced in some Cassandra
reviews: readers were warned that
Christa Wolf is generally considered to be the East German Virginia

Woolf, so don’t expect an easy read. If, on the other hand, you have a
taste for Greek mythology and take an intelligent interest in feminism,
you’ll be rewarded by persevering with this translation by Jan van Heruch
[sic]. (JF 1985)
Webb is also quoted by Barbara Einhorn in her introduction to an extract

from Wolf ’s text in an issue of the Journal of European Disarmament enti-
tled “Women and Peace” (Einhorn 1985) and one South African reviewer
notes that “she has been described by the Guardian as ‘an East German
Virginia Woolf ’—and deservedly so” (Gibson 1985). These later journal-
istic epitexts reference Webb’s early comparison as a fact of Wolf ’s author-
function, suggesting an inherent affinity between Wolf and Woolf. The
implied parallel works to Wolf ’s advantage by suggesting an affinity with
Woolf, whose work experienced a surge in popularity during the 1980s
because of its appeal to feminist narratives. The inference of a relation-
ship in this way recalls what Bruner describes as accrued “coherence by

contemporaneity”, or the assumption that events are linked because they

occur simultaneously (1991: 19). The “fact” of their similarity frames
Wolf author-function as coherent with Woolf ’s, in other words suggest-
ing a feminist approach, a modernist aesthetic and canonical status as
a notably female author. Academic studies exploit and perpetuate this
in their titles, for example, W.E. McDonald’s article “Who’s Afraid of
Wolf ’s Cassandra—or Cassandra’s Wolf?: Male Tradition and Women’s
Knowledge in Cassandra” (1990). Anne Herrmann’s study The Dialogic
and Difference: An/Other Woman in Virginia Woolf and Christa Wolf
(1989) examines the approaches of the two writers to the concept of the
“other” woman as subject and object; Herrmann does not argue similar-
ity between Wolf and Woolf, instead discussing their opposite approaches
to subjectivity.
However, while there is some basis for a comparison between Wolf
and Woolf, the interaction of academic and commercial agents of narra-
tion has resulted in the framing of commentary on this relationship to
encourage a simple equation of the two writers. Reviews that refer to this
parallelism or imply it through direct comparison encourage a reading
of Wolf ’s work as “Woolfian”, and there has been very little attempt to
probe the implications of this parallel. Woolf ’s theory of the androgynous
mind, for example, differs from Wolf ’s understanding of experience as
recognisably male and female, in which context her female narrators seek
not to merge with the male but to be acknowledged as equal and essential
contributors to a definition of what it is to be human.25 Similarly, while
Woolf was one of a number of artists who explored socialist aesthetics and
ideas in the wake of late Victorian Bloomsbury set, her engagement with
socialism itself, so crucial in Wolf ’s writing, was secondary to her pur-
suit of individuality (Livesey 2007). The comparison with Woolf, while
broadly inviting, is therefore also a potentially misleading lens through
which to view Wolf ’s treatment of gendered experience.
Comparison with other female writers is not restricted to Woolf: in a
review of A Model Childhood, The Times described Wolf as “Germany’s
most eminent woman of letters”, explaining that “the equivalent in
See, for example, Woolf ’s discussion of the male and female brain in A Room of One’s Own (2008:
25
126).
Britain, where women of letters are not thick upon the ground, is a kind
of Iris Murdoch/Margaret Drabble mélange: though this mighty com-
bination still comes out a bit too lightweight” (MacCarthy 1982). This
frames Wolf as a proponent of a tradition of female writing by draw-
ing on Murdoch and Drabble, themselves operating as discursive func-
tions, perhaps to highlight Wolf ’s earnest concern for the ethical role of
writing and her interest in female experience. Other reviews corroborate
this narrative of an alternative female tradition by invoking the author-
functions of Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing, Susan Sontag and Grace
Paley, describing Wolf even after her Stasi revelation as “a Jane Austen
heroine yanked to noble ideals” (Benn 1993), and presenting her as a
more internationally successful counterpart to other “German women
writers” (a group including East and West German authors) such as
Anna Seghers and Gabriele Wohmann (Hulse 1982). It is also worth not-
ing that Margaret Atwood’s foreword to the 1998 translation of Wolf ’s
Medea, though principally a peritext, is accessible as an “author essay” on
the website of the publisher (Random House website 1998), giving it an
alternative position as an epitext. Although Atwood does not explicitly
frame Wolf ’s text as feminist, as in the Marilyn French review of No
Place on Earth the typical framing of her own author-function as feminist
interacts with Wolf ’s authorial narrative to suggest affinity between the
two writers. Male authors also feature as comparisons, specifically Nobel
Prize laureate Heinrich Böll and (not yet Nobel laureate) Günter Grass
whose Das Treffen in Telgte was published around the same time as Wolf ’s
Kein Ort. Nirgends, providing a basis for parallel reviews. Wolf ’s com-
parison with these stars of West German post-war literature suggests that
her readers and reviewers saw her as belonging to a recognisable world of
“German” literature, again pointing to the marginalisation of her specific
East German context as a basis for her writing.
Brought together, the epitexts show how the “facts” of Wolf ’s gender
and her concern with female experience have been framed discursively
as affirmation of her feminist credentials. The implications of this fram-
ing have been significant, as Grace Paley discusses when she notes that
“if [Wolf ] were a male East European using love affairs as metaphors
for alienation and oppression (whose?) she’d be wildly famous in this
country” (Paley et al. 1986). Paley implies that Anglophone responses to
145
Wolf have focused on her gender rather than the true subject matter of
her texts, and that Wolf is consequently less popular than she might be
if she were a man. She may be right: in 1993, D.J. Enright claimed of
What Remains and Other Stories that the writing was “distinctly female”
and as such was “exhausting, claustrophobic, at least for a male reader”,
and Andrew Marr (1982) had also suggested this when he referred to “a
kind of hysterical intelligence” in Christa T. More positive reviews also
show that Wolf ’s writing style has been contextualised by a narrative of
female writing, praising her ability to “almost make up for all the sloppy
thinking, bigoted anti-Communism and uncritical celebrations of wom-
anhood that can sometimes be found in less politically committed or
intellectually brave feminist writing” (Stanley 1989). Looking back to
Wolf ’s own source culture, Anna Kuhn implicates the factual epitexts of
Wolf ’s gender and the female tradition as potential disadvantages when
she remarks on German responses to the Stasi controversy that “Wolf ’s
violation of traditional regulative aesthetic norms, norms governing ‘sub-
jectivity’ and ‘objectivity’, norms formulated and perpetuated by men,
has made her writings vulnerable to misunderstanding and misrepresen-
tation by male critics” (Kuhn 1994). Not everyone agrees with Kuhn
(Graves 1994), but her article shows how important Wolf ’s gender has
been in Anglophone attempts to frame her texts and responses to her
writing.
It is not only in the commercial context, then, that Wolf ’s writing has
been framed by feminist narratives. Paley frames readership, translation
and scholarship of Wolf as acts of resistance to a dominant narrative of
patriarchy in the literary field, conditioned in their turn by the identi-
ties of the agents who perform them. Recalling Kuhn’s frustrations with
the preface to her Wolf study, it is possible to see how this argument
extends beyond the commercial literary field and into the scholarly field.
In Kuhn’s acknowledgements to her volume, she comments:
the study of German language and literature (Germanistik) is a very male

discipline. This may well account for the fact that during my years of
study the only woman writer I encountered was Annette von Droste-
Hülshoff, the one “accepted” female writer in the German academic
canon. (1988: x–xi)
For Kuhn, her study of Wolf represents an act of resistance to the

dominant narrative of “the canon”. Her experience supports Paley’s
suspicion of patriarchal tendencies in academic institutional narra-
tives, and corroborates Waldstein’s and Martens’s comments on the
feminist appeal of the figure of the marginalised female [writer]. It is
easy to see, then, how academic epitexts are also embedded in feminist
discourses and draw Wolf ’s author-function into an academic institu-
tional narrative of the female tradition as dissident or subversive. In
other words, the scholarly readings of Wolf show how target-culture
discourse guides the emergence of the author-function and how the
social narratives represented by those who seek to advocate Wolf ’s
writing are inevitably prone to selectively reframe the author-function
in favour of their own interests rather than those of the author they
seek to promote.
Kuhn’s description of her attempt to challenge the exclusively mascu-
line narratives of the canon in German literature brings the discussion
back to the differing principles at the heart of East German and British
or North American feminisms. Whereas Wolf ’s GDR author-function
was not primarily defined by her femininity because of the reduced
visibility of gender as a category in public discourse, in Anglophone
narratives of her authorship her female identity became increasingly
important during the 1980s as she was adopted by a feminist pub-
lisher in the UK, and by feminist Germanists in the USA, and was
reframed by the social narratives of these new discursive gatekeepers.
The explicit and implicit relationships established by this development
in her Anglophone author-function have framed her as a representa-
tive of resistance to male-dominated narratives of the canon and of
Germanistik. Consequently, journalistic, academic and factual epitexts
have reframed Wolf in the context of dissident feminist narratives in
the academy and in the publishing industry. This raises the not insig-
nificant question of the implications of a primarily feminist reading of
Wolf: the rest of the chapter explores two areas in which the feminist
interpretation of Wolf ’s writing has been particularly significant to her
Anglophone author-function.

L osing the Third Way? Consequences

of Framing Wolf as a Feminist
The emphatically feminist framing of Wolf ’s Anglophone author-
function as seen above has implications for the interpretation of her
writing in two key areas: firstly, in the consolidation of boundaries
between the “real” and “fictional” worlds in which the personal narratives
of Wolf ’s protagonists, narrators and authorial self are embedded and,
secondly, in the exclusion of socialist narratives from Wolf ’s author-
function, leaving her pacifist and environmentalist arguments open to
appropriation by target-culture feminist narratives. In order to explore
this, the focus here is on journalistic epitexts since these are the most
widely circulated of the three types already discussed and can be seen
to interact closely with the covers of the book. The back cover of the
1990 FSG paperback edition of Cassandra, for example, acts as a site of
contact between peritext and epitext where selected reviews occupy half
the space.26 These are quoted as follows:
With knowledge, insight, and foreboding, Christa Wolf has brilliantly

rewritten history, and in viewing the past through the eyes of the doomed
seer, she traces its link to our own imminent future.—Ernst Pawel, The
Nation
An East German woman writer, caught in the civil wars of politics and
gender, has meditated upon the primordial civic strife sung by Homer and
produced a piercing and beautiful novel.—Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times
Feminists should hail Wolf ’s accomplishment as nothing less than a revi-
sion of one of the cornerstones of Western civilization.—Kenneth Harper,
The Christian Science Monitor
With Cassandra, Wolf has moved on from her experiments in contem-
porary fictional biography and autobiography, to an allegory of corruption
and war from the beginnings of Western culture.—Joyce Crick, The Times
Literary Supplement
26
The front cover design for the FSG 1990 edition is identical to that of the 1984 edition.
The quotations indicate some of the key strands in Wolf ’s writing, with
Pawel (1984) tracing a link between past and present and Crick (1985)
indicating the importance of both biography and autobiography in Wolf.
The quoted reviews also establish a causal relationship between Wolf ’s
text and particular social narratives: Crick and Eder (1984) position
Cassandra as a figure of pacifist opposition in social narratives of East/
West political conflict and nuclear arms, and Harper (1984) frames the
story as a feminist revision of tradition. Both Pawel and Crick attribute
allegorical value to the text, and it is important to note Pawel’s empha-
sis on agency in the narrative: it is Wolf, and not her protagonist, who
“traces [history’s] link to our own imminent future”. In his interpretation,
Cassandra remains a fictional cipher under the control of the authorial
subject, and the distinction is preserved between the author’s narrative
and that of her character. In addition, Pawel, Harper and Crick all posi-
tion Wolf ’s text as a comment on “our” or “western” culture, emphasising
the relevance of the text for its intended readership and thus marginalising
the source-culture context. Together, these fragments give an indication
of how the reviews frame Wolf as a feminist pacifist and her protagonist
as a fictional allegory.
Framing Wolf’s Protagonists as Fictional Figures
Wolf had presented her writing as offering an alternative to rigid

Socialist Realist poetics since the publication of Christa T. and “Lesen
und Schreiben”, and in the lectures she frames Cassandra in this same
narrative: “Meine übergreifende Frage richtet sich auf, genauer: gegen
das unheimliche Wirken von Entfremdungserscheinungen auch in
der Ästhetik, auch in der Kunst” (Werke 7: 13).27 Academic responses
have commented extensively on the relationship Wolf explores between
the realities of protagonist and author. W.E. McDonald has described
Kassandra as “a complex text in which the permeable lines between fiction
and autobiography are both insisted upon and insistently undermined”
(1990: 268), explaining the unusual form of the lectures as a deliberate
strategy employed by Wolf “in order to reveal her deepest subject, one
27
“My overarching question aims at, that is: works against the sinister effects of alienation in aes-
thetics and art.”

that undergirds (but is not separate from) her convictions: the quest for a
woman’s mode of writing” (ibid.: 270). This “woman’s mode of writing”
is Wolf ’s aesthetic “third way”, an intermediary space between killing and
dying, fact and fiction, true and false, where subjective experience and
possibility can be expressed. It is the basis of her “model for a feminist
approach to history based on women’s experience” (Bridge 2004) as first
seen fully in Christa T. which reveals history as a narrative and imagina-
tive act rather than a factual enterprise: Cassandra reflects explicitly on
the power of stories to shape identity when she comments that “nicht
durch Geburt, ach was, durch die Erzählungen in den Innenhöfen bin
ich Troerin geworden” (Werke 7: 263).28 This demonstrates Wolf ’s histor-
ical materialist approach: just as her protagonists’ experience as women in
the world shapes their sense of who they are, so the author’s experience of
her own and her characters’ lives shapes her ability to narrate.
However, as shown here and in the previous chapter, the texts and
paratexts of Wolf ’s writing in translation have tended to consolidate the
boundaries between writing, narrating and narrated subjects. The shift in
the title of Cassandra to emphasise the “novel” over the “essays” suggests
a distinction between the “fictional” novel as the main component of the
book and the “factual” essays as secondary material, and this disjunction
between the two was echoed in the reviews. Reviewers were divided over
the relative merits of narrative and essays: Michael Hulse (1985) in the
London Magazine felt the latter “though clear-thinking and beautifully
readable, have little new to say”, whereas the Guardian experienced the
novel “like a dry appendix” to the essays (Redgrove 1985). Whichever
half of the volume they preferred, very few contextualised the essays and
narrative in terms of their significance to one another or to narratives
of poetics.29 Rather, there was a tendency to see the essays as subordi-
nate to the narrative. Richard Eder (1984) commented that “published
separately in West Germany, these have been gathered together for the
American reader”, echoing the translator’s note by suggesting that bring-
ing the essays together with the Cassandra narrative in translation is an
innovation. Dissolving the relationship of bilateral influence between
28
“[It was] not through birth, oh no, through the narratives in the inner courts [that] I became a
Trojan.”
29
Exceptions to this are Lehmann-Haupt (1984) and Crick (1985).
the essays and Cassandra’s narrative, the reviews presented the Cassandra
“novel” as an allegorical narrative, occasioned by the author’s feminist val-
ues and researched during a trip to Greece. This might remind us of the
reframing of the narrator’s subjective and uncertain reflections in Christa
T. as an objective, affirmative “quest”.
Having identified differences in male and female perspectives and
experience, Wolf ’s Kassandra explores the potential for a balanced middle
ground where both might come together. However, in the epitexts to the
translation, this central aesthetic principle has been excluded, or at best
marginalised, by emphasis on the text’s resonance with target-culture fem-
inist narratives. Framing Cassandra as a feminist revision of a Homeric
figure and as an allegory for contemporary events, some reviews did com-
ment on Wolf ’s engagement with the specific (patriarchal) tradition of
classical mythology in her search for a female poetics: she is described
as “looking for the lost trails of a female thought that would connect
us to the landscape and each other” (Bernstein 1984), and Cassandra
is understood to “represent the residue of a feminist ‘Poetics’ that was
suppressed and abandoned” (Lehmann-Haupt 1984). This echoes Joyce
Crick’s 1980 comments on Wolf ’s writing as an attempt “to establish a
feminine literary tradition and to place her own writings in that perspec-
tive” (Crick 1980). However, while Cassandra is seen as a voice of alter-
native experience, the author’s exposure to influence from her protagonist
is hardly noted. Rather than recognise the flexible approach to interpreta-
tion and meaning encouraged by Wolf ’s mimetic narrative, the reviews
exchange the rigid, masculine, Homeric view of Cassandra for an equally
uncompromising view of her story as a diegetic allegory for feminist and
pacifist narratives circulating in the target culture. Cassandra’s own voice
remains muted, as her “effects on her creator” are marginalised by the
epitext that employs her as a literary heroine confined to the bounds of
the text. Her narrative is framed as “an urgent metaphor for our time”
(Bernstein 1984), preserving a hierarchical author/character binary of
creator/creation or reality/fiction.
A similar tendency towards the fictionalisation of Wolf ’s protagonists
is noticeable in the epitexts to the English translation of Medea: Stimmen
(1996; translated 1998). The text was criticised in Germany, in the wake of
Wolf ’s still recent Stasi scandal, for revising the Medea story to depict the

eponymous protagonist as a misunderstood victim. Reviewers were criti-

cal of Wolf for (as they saw it) crassly exploiting the narrative of the title
character as an opportunity for self-apology. Meanwhile, Medea was also
rejected by FSG: Straus wrote in January 1996 to Dietrich von Boetticher
at Luchterhand that “it would not resound in America at least to the repu-
tation of Christa” (NYPL 712/8). An undated reader’s report criticised the
text for its historical focus, seeing this as undermining Medea’s quality as a
work of fiction (NYPL 712/8). This perhaps indicates the emphasis placed
by FSG on the fictional as a feature of Wolf ’s author-function, position-
ing her in a binary abstract narrative of “fact” and “fiction”; the value of
this as a factual epitext is underlined by the fact that only a relatively small
number of her essays, interviews and speeches have been translated.30 The
translation was ultimately published by Nan A. Talese (a subsidiary of
Doubleday) in the USA and by Virago in the UK. Atwood’s accompany-
ing foreword in both editions, as mentioned above, makes no mention of
the specific relevance of Medea’s story to Wolf ’s individual narrative but
also does not explicitly address the text as feminist, highlighting instead
the broader reflections on power politics invited by the text’s exploration
of the clash of Corinthian and Colchian societies.
The autobiographical relevance of the Medea narrative, strongly criti-
cised in the German reviews, was noted by a few Anglophone reviewers
who either enjoyed the autobiographical dimension of the text as a roman
à clef or saw Wolf ’s exploitation of Medea as a flaw in the text that had led
her to overemphasise the victimhood of the protagonist. There are echoes
in the criticism, here, of the desire for a clear distinction between expe-
rienced fact and written fiction, as seen already in the narrative voice of
Christopher Middleton’s Christa T. The Boston Globe, briefly noting Wolf ’s
then recent controversial revelation and its aftermath, commented that “per-
sonal trauma and ideological defensiveness may explain why Medea is an
unsatisfying novel that transforms Euripides’s demon lover and child killer
into a bewildered, innocent, and misunderstood victim besieged by politi-
cal enemies on all sides” (Marx 1998). However, while German reviewers
30
Straus, Wolf ’s personal advocate at FSG, surrendered control of the company in 1994 to the
German conglomerate Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. While still active at FSG follow-
ing this change, Straus’s loss of executive control would have reduced his power to take decisions
and actions that would promote the interests of Wolf as a translated author.
were affronted by Wolf’s attempt to exculpate herself with reference to par-

ticular social narratives of innocence and guilt circulating in German pub-
lic discourse, negative responses from Anglophone critics mostly attacked
the interference of the autobiographical with the fictional on a less specific
level, drawing on a rupture with a fact/fiction binary. Echoing protestations
of signatories of the “Das Kind mit dem Bade” article against blurring the
boundary between Wolf’s life and her literary output, Anglophone epitexts
continued to circulate an author-function characterised by focus on the
narratives of fictional protagonists. The attention paid to the autobiograph-
ical relevance of Medea’s narrative was limited, and the text was framed
as a post-Reunification allegory for the clash of cultures, rather than as a
response to more specific narratives of recent history. Reviews advised that
“it is a tale of intrigue which finds sinister resonance in the recent history
of Wolf ’s own nation: in the difficult unification of Germany” (Campbell-
Johnston 1998) and that “Wolf’s interpretation may be read as a com-
ment not only on Western society, but more specifically on present-day
Germany” (Rotella 1998), pointing to the supra-individual rather than the
personal narratives with which the text resounded, and treating the text as
allegory rather than real or specific experience.
While Wolf ’s protagonists undoubtedly embody supra-individual
themes, like Christa T. they are “as examples, not exemplary”. However,
in translation they take on idealised, fictionalised status and are presented
as allegories at the mercy of the writer, with no power over their own
identity. They are distanced from the narrative act as they are prevented
from maintaining the interaction with the subjectivity of the author that
enables them to exist on the precarious border between fact and fiction.
The journalistic epitexts to Cassandra and Medea frame these texts as fic-
tional corollaries to broader, apparently universal narratives: instead of
drawing attention to the spatial and temporal coexistence of protago-
nist and author, the Anglophone epitexts frame Cassandra as an allegory
for familiar social narratives in the target culture. In the interpretation
of the translated text, the contextual relevance of abstract narratives of
poetics (and, in the case of Medea, of the author’s biography), is far out-
weighed by this framing of the female protagonists as fictional allego-
ries for feminism. Paradoxically, then, the emphatic framing of Wolf ’s
writing as feminist mutes the feminine aesthetic she tries to explore, by
153
consolidating a division between the worlds of author and protagonist.

Her author-function is aligned with target-culture narratives of politi-
cal and cultural feminism, and this strong link to feminist narratives,
in particular to feminist pacifism, is an effect of but also contributes
to the ongoing exclusion of social narratives of the GDR from Wolf ’s
Anglophone author-function. The last section of the chapter explores
how this has shaped a reading of Wolf ’s pacifism.
“ East or West Makes Little Difference Here”:

From Socialist Humanism to Feminist Pacifism
Written, delivered and published in the early 1980s, the Kassandra nar-
rative and lectures reflect Wolf ’s immediate fears as a European living in
an area that would find itself at the epicentre of any nuclear war between
the Soviet Union and the USA. As noted above, Cassandra’s narrative and
the lectures were richly suggestive to readers in the GDR (and, as the
West German reviews suggest, in the FRG) of narratives circulated by and
about a specifically East German regime. In addition, within the broader
context of a critique of patriarchal systems and of nuclear armament as a
defence strategy, by condemning nuclear armament on both sides of the
Cold War the text engages with an apparently supra-national, abstract
narrative of peace and in particular with protest narratives of opposition to
the nuclear deterrent. However, as Anna Kuhn (2015: 156–157) explains,
Wolf ’s hopes for humanity and understanding of the role of literature
were founded specifically in a human socialism drawing on the concept
of non-alienated social relations found in Marx’s early writings. While los-
ing faith in East German socialism and developing a more feminist lens
through which to offer criticism of society in both East and West, Wolf
did not lose sight of her belief that a socialist society had the potential to
create and sustain humane social relations. It is important to remember
this when discussing her pacifism and its appeal to anti-nuclear and paci-
fist narratives associated with feminism in the target culture.
Alongside its publication by FSG, Cassandra appeared in extract
form in a number of contexts that embedded the author and her text in
Anglophone narratives of pacifism. It was recorded as a starting point for
discussion at the March 1988 meeting of the PEN Women’s Committee

to mark International PEN Day of Writers for Peace, because “it so aptly
illustrates the theme chosen for this day by International PEN: ‘War
and Peace: Male and Female Perspectives’” (Schwartz 1988). An extract
from the third lecture was also printed in the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament magazine Sanity in July 1987 on the merit of its relevance to
the theme “What Europe, What World?”. As shown by the Virago cover
material in particular, the parallels between Wolf ’s situation as a German
in the Cold War arms race and Cassandra’s foreboding at the mounting
war-mongering in Troy were not overlooked by her Anglophone pub-
licists and commentators, who affirmed the allegorical status of Wolf ’s
protagonist: “Cassandra’s Troy is very much like Christa Wolf ’s Europe
today: threatened with total destruction in circumstances over which
nobody seems to have any control and which make no sense anyway”
(Walters 1984). As these epitexts show, Wolf ’s pacifism presented an
opportunity for emphasising shared interest between the East German
writer and her Anglophone readership; as far as feminist narratives were
concerned, it also represented valuable common ground between East
German Wolf and western second-wave feminism (Kuhn 2015: 165),
locking feminist and pacifist contextual narratives closely together in her
Anglophone author-function.
Myra Love addresses the differing relevance of socialist narratives in
source and target cultures in her introduction to a 1979 article on Wolf ’s
feminism:
The point of departure for my discussion is the appeal of Christa Wolf ’s

writings for Americans, specifically for Americans whose concern with
socialism in the GDR is less pressing than their experience of patriarchy in
their own lives. (Love 1979: 31)
Love identifies “patriarchy” as a more familiar contextual frame for

the Anglophone reader than the social narratives of GDR socialism.
Correspondingly, in the epitexts to Cassandra, Anglophone critics almost
unanimously ignored Wolf ’s invocation of contemporary GDR narra-
tives, drawing instead on the relevance of Cassandra’s narrative as a chal-
lenge to patriarchy. Rather than highlighting the censorship as some West
155
German reviewers had (Baum 1984), US and UK critics emphasised

Wolf ’s corroboration of her (female) readers’ individual narratives and
of accessible institutional narratives that were not specific to the GDR,
focusing on the relevance of Wolf ’s text to European pacifist movements
and the feminist narratives associated with them.
Very few reviews referred directly to the censorship of Wolf ’s text: Nina
Bernstein (1984) noted that Kassandra was “partly censored in its German
edition”, and Joyce Crick in the TLS (1985) mentioned the “delay, con-
troversy and visible signs of censorship” that blighted the text’s East
German publication. These references, though explicit, are brief, suggest-
ing either that Wolf ’s troubles with the state had become commonplace
in her Anglophone author-function as a dissident writer or that the East
German narratives in which she was embedded were not considered sig-
nificant to the framing of the text. Elsewhere, reviewers commented more
generally on Wolf ’s problems with censorship, mentioning East German
objections to her pacifist “wishful thinking” (Smith 1984), describing
her as having “attacked and been partly silenced by the Communists”
(Eder 1984), and noting criticism and blocks to the publication of previ-
ous texts, specifically Christa T. Not only ignoring the censorship of the
German text but offering an explicitly positive view of Cassandra’s previ-
ous history, the Irish Press related that “Cassandra has been a great success
in the GDR and after eighteen months and 200,000 hardback sales it is
still in the bestseller lists” (“Cassandra by Christa Wolf ” 1985).
Crucially, the lack of attention paid by the reviewers to the link between
Wolf ’s writing and the socialist discourse of the GDR was reinforced
by the way in which Cassandra was appropriated into seemingly supra-
national narratives of pacifism. For the reviewers, Wolf ’s appeal to a nar-
rative of “the threat of apocalypse hanging over us” (Bardsley 1985, my
emphasis) meant that “as a German—East or West makes little difference
here—she is on the front lines of an atomic stalemate that is not peace,
but ‘non-war’, and the super-powers are rattling their missiles” (Bernstein
1984). Bardsley’s use of an inclusive “we”, to include both Wolf and the
reader, isolated Wolf's writing from the shared social narratives of the
GDR that revealed the controversial status of her criticism directed at
both West and East. Additionally, in English translation Wolf ’s state-
ments against armament took on a more emphatically “female” quality as
she was aligned with specifically female peace movements not bounded
by nationality. Barbara Einhorn’s article (1985), quoted above, appeared
in the END Journal of Nuclear Disarmament in an issue on “Women and
Peace”, positioning women as the powerless victims of men’s patriarchal
aggression: “women today realise that they will not be ‘spared’ by this
exclusion: they too will be the victims, along with men, of a war ostensi-
bly being prepared in the name of their ‘protection’ but in reality leading
to humanity’s self-destruction.” Here again, Cassandra is interpreted as
an allegory for female victimhood, reinforcing a binary of humanity as
perpetrator and victim.
With Wolf ’s critical socialism featuring little in Anglophone readings of
the text, the reviews framed Cassandra’s resistance to war in such a way that
she (and through her, Wolf ) was affiliated to a specifically second-wave
feminist pacifism. Joyce Crick (1985) noted that “Wolf has moved very
close to the peace movement and its feminine supporters” and Barbara
Einhorn commented on the role of “women as seers, as tellers of the truth
they perceive and as unwelcome voices in this role: this theme of Christa
Wolf ’s has obvious relevance for women in the peace movement today”
(Einhorn 1985: 16). Julie Rolston elaborated on the integral connection
between Wolf ’s pacifism and an anti-patriarchal feminist narrative:
The central thesis informing both the content and form of the work is
Wolf ’s concern that authoritative points of view, be they historical, literary
or political, are dictated from a patriarchal power structure that fails to
admit an alternative perspective, which Wolf chooses to associate with
feminine values. Thus feminism and nuclear war become inter-related
issues for Wolf, as the advance of the one would introduce a new dynamic
of policy options for the other. (Rolston 1984)
Rolston interpreted the feminine as Wolf ’s chosen representative of a

repressed alternative, framing the pacifist argument of the text as coherent
with this and assuming a connection in Wolf ’s writing between feminine
values and feminism. A causal relationship is identified between Wolf ’s
pacifism and her already distinctive feminism that seems unilateral, with
her pacifism shaped to fit existing feminist tendencies of her Anglophone
author-function. The chronological emergence of the two aspects of her
157
authorship, with feminist readings of Wolf predating pacifist narratives

in the construction of the author-function, may well have suggested to
readers and reviewers alike that this was the case.
Thus Wolf ’s “anti-poetics” and engagement with critical socialism
through a narrative of global nuclear disarmament, which in the GDR
was considered controversial and led to the censorship of the lectures,
are reframed in English translation by their resonance with popular
target-culture pacifist and feminist movements. The significance of the
pacifist narrative shifts when it is no longer contextualised by the nar-
ratives of socialism that frame as significant Wolf ’s “failure” to endorse
the government’s framing of rearmament as a defence strategy. Instead,
her concerns about war and specifically the oppressive consequences of
patriarchy establish coherence between her author-function and a widely
circulating target-culture narrative of (often specifically female) pacifism
that also affirms her status as a feminist. These narratives mask a more
ambiguous perspective on Cassandra’s narrative that reveals her complic-
ity in her own downfall, simplifying her into an allegory for a female
pacifist voice repressed by war-mongering male patriarchy. The frame of
a shared nuclear threat and the selective emphasis on “universal” themes
such as the arms race and the conflict between male and female per-
spectives, excluding the nationally specific narratives that contextual-
ise Wolf ’s writing, presents her as a writer with international concerns
and experiences shared by her non-German readers. Offered to readers
as a fictional text and open to interpretation as allegory, it is perhaps
no surprise that Cassandra quickly found resonance with feminist narra-
tives in an Anglophone cultural context that then came to dominate her
author-function.
F eminist Poetics and the Hypertext: Karen

Malpede’s Cassandra
While the analysis in this chapter has mostly demonstrated a shift of
focus away from Wolf ’s aesthetic project and socialist values in the fram-
ing of her author-function by Anglophone feminist narratives, some
interpretations of Cassandra do engage specifically with Wolf ’s theories

of literature. With Wolf ’s permission, Cassandra was adapted by the
American playwright Karen Malpede for a 1993 performance by drama
students at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts, directed
by the Greek actress Lydia Koniordou. Malpede’s play is what Genette
would term a hypertext, imitative or transformative material that exists
in relation to an earlier text (the hypotext) “in a manner that is not that
of commentary” though it may also act as commentary (Genette 1997b:
5). Malpede’s hypertext is significant because it demonstrates both a con-
tinuation of the re-narrativising trends seen in the paratexts so far and
a greater sensitivity to the (East) German discursive contexts of Wolf ’s
writing. Malpede’s plays typically explore themes that relate to women,
witness and conflict, and she describes Cassandra as a response to requests
from students for “plays in which female characters are seen as the active
agents of their destinies instead of as passive victims” and “in which wom-
en’s age-old wisdom is honoured and in which male and female energies
find a new productive balance out in the world and inside each character”
(performance programme from Malpede’s Cassandra, ADK A362). These
comments, identifying women as “active agents” and searching for a “new
productive balance”, echo Wolf ’s engagement with a narrative of women
as complicit in their own fates.
Malpede worked from the English text, often using the exact wording
of van Heurck’s translation, and added some explicitation of the plot
and themes of the play, either through interjections from the chorus or
through dialogue between the characters. Experimenting with classical
dramatic form, she describes her chorus as “a human pool of individuals
from which characters emerge and into which they return”: this shift-
ing dynamic between the individual and the collective is central to her
attempt to reflect “the concerns of contemporary young people who want
to move in unison, who want to move collectively” (quoted in Rosenthal
1994: 168). Departing from van Heurck’s translation, Malpede’s female
characters are more sexualised than Wolf ’s and talk more explicitly about
their desires. Polyxena, for example, tells her sister that “all of our beauti-
ful brothers excite me, Cassandra” and urges her “Ask! I dare you. Ask the
King for one night with Paris” (Malpede 1993: 15–16). The increased
assertiveness and physicality of Malpede’s characters perhaps repositions
159
Cassandra closer to the bodily female poetics demanded by Frauke Meyer-

Gosau in her critique of Wolf ’s text (see this chapter p. 123). Although
less subtle than Wolf in her exposition of a female voice, and at times
going to what seem like incongruous extremes (the Furies intervene at
one point to challenge Cassandra’s tolerance of “all that dutiful daugh-
ter crap”; see Malpede 1993: 27), Malpede uses staging and dialogue to
contextualise her play in narratives of female agency that are absent from
many of the Anglophone epitexts.
A symposium held to celebrate the play’s performances included con-
tributions from Grace Paley and Wolf scholar Katharina von Ankum,
and a discussion with Malpede and Koniordou, focusing on the concept
of “pacifist-feminist collective theatre” (Rosenthal 1994: 164). Malpede
described her search for a “Third Way”, which she defines as a “politi-
cal system, which combines maximum personal liberty with maximum
collective consciousness” (quoted in Rosenthal 1994: 165). Here again,
unlike the reviews, Malpede echoes Wolf ’s attempt to break free from
binary male/female identities and to explore a balanced alternative that
is not exclusively one or the other. While continuing a trend of omitting
GDR narratives relevant to the interpretation of the text and emphasis-
ing the text’s resonance with feminist narratives, Malpede’s dramatisation
and notes on her work show up readings selectively excluded from Wolf ’s
Anglophone author-function by the more widely influential epitexts. By
engaging with levels of meaning in the text that are mostly marginalised
by the commercial epitexts, the play reveals what the reviews do not:
in this hypertext, Wolf ’s writing is framed not in static definitions of
feminism and pacifism but by the crucial narrative of an alternative, third
mode of experience and a sense of the poetic practices she explores in her
writing.
The framing of Wolf ’s author-function in reviews, scholarship and
factual epitexts by feminist discourse is characterised in general terms
by narratives of anti-male resistance and in the academy as a challenge
to a masculine-dominated canon. By focusing on the universal implica-
tions of Wolf ’s pacifism and her anti-patriarchal message, epitexts to the
translations frame her authorship in international narratives rather than
reflecting on the immediate context of her writing in the GDR. This
approach has selectively emphasised dominant target-culture narratives
of female victimhood and their shared arguments with female pacifist

movements, and has marginalised the shifting subjectivities that are at
the heart of Wolf ’s feminine aesthetic and its response to the narratives
of socialism. Her Anglophone author-function is strongly characterised
by culturally specific narratives of feminism and the female writer that,
while maximising the universal relevance of the writing, in fact restrict its
interpretation by framing it in specific target-culture narratives of femi-
nism or feminist pacifism that draw attention away from Wolf ’s socialist
humanism and her search for a feminine aesthetic. Wolf ’s resistance to
patriarchal structures has thus often been framed as an anti-male affirma-
tion of the feminine rather than, as Malpede recognises, an attempt to
explore a symbiotic alternative that will benefit both men and women.
The dominance of (emphatically fictional) personal narratives as a
focus in Wolf ’s Anglophone author-function has led to the interpretation
of her protagonists, in both positive and negative responses to the texts,
as stable allegories for allegedly universal feminist and pacifist narratives
that have been shown here as embedded in target-culture social narra-
tives. The affinity between the author and her protagonists is weakened in
particular by the journalistic epitexts, which mostly do not recognise the
bilateral relationship between the narratives of author and character that
is explored in the lectures. This clear distinction between the “real” author
and her “fictional” protagonist, seen in the textual shifts in Christa T.
and here in the appropriation of Cassandra by feminist narratives, has had
significant implications for the framing of Wolf ’s authorship in the wake
of the debates surrounding German Reunification, to which the next
chapter turns its attention.
5
Politics, Morality and Aesthetics: Two
Translations of Was bleibt
As the previous two chapters have shown, the development of Wolf ’s

Anglophone author-function has been fundamentally guided by the
agency of individuals in the translation process, specifically through the
shift away from her subjective-authentic aesthetic towards a more indi-
vidualist, Cartesian narrator and the alignment of the author and her
writing with target-culture feminist narratives. Integral to both these
shifts has been the distancing of Wolf and her writing from the narratives
of socialism that informed the author’s East German literary context.
While it is clear that Wolf ’s author-function has emerged through fram-
ing by political and non-political narratives in Anglophone culture just as
much as in German-speaking discourse, then, responses to the events of
1990–1993 in the context of her authorial narrative demonstrate a cru-
cial difference in Anglophone and German assumptions about her autho-
rial identity. This final chapter of analysis explores the implications of
the Anglophone shift away from the frame of “political-moral example”,
described by Marilyn Fries, as the key to this difference:
Es ist möglich, dass viele von uns [Amerikanern] unsere in den siebziger
Jahren steckengebliebenen politischen Hoffnungen unbewusst auf diese
Autorin übertragen wollten; ist dies der Fall, dann hat Wolf bei uns eine

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40183-6_5
ähnliche Rolle gespielt wie in der DDR. Trotzdem ist sie hierzulande nie zu
der politisch-moralischen Instanz geworden, für die sie anscheinend dort
gehalten wurde—daher unsere Verblüffung bei der vehementen Diskussion
zu ihrem “Fall”. (Fries 1992: 178)1
For Fries, the key to the divergence between American and German
understandings of Wolf is the unconscious reframing of the author by her
Anglophone readers as emblematic of target-culture narratives, as seen
particularly in the previous chapter. In this sense, Fries recognises, Wolf ’s
author-function has operated in a similar way in English and German,
but to very different effect, since Wolf has not become a “political-moral
authority” for her American readers in the sense that proved so problem-
atic for her in Germany in the early 1990s. While the previous chapters
have largely concentrated on the impact of individual agents such as the
translator or reviewer, the analysis in this final chapter, focusing on the
peritext, explores how institutional rather than individual agency has
contributed to this authorial construction.
The publication of Was bleibt (1990) is associated with a period of cri-
sis in Wolf ’s German authorship. Written in 1979 and with an 11-year
gap between its writing and publication, the text narrates a day in the
life of a female writer under observation by Stasi agents. Details about
the narrator’s life suggest very strongly that the writer is Wolf herself,
and the narrative explores the psychological strain brought about by the
experience of being observed, in particular its inhibiting impact on her
writing. Was bleibt reflects more directly on the oppressive measures of
the East German government than Wolf ’s other texts of the time, and it
was this more explicit critique of East German society and exposure of
individual suffering that provoked German criticism of Wolf in the wake
of the text’s publication: some felt the writer had strategically waited
until after Reunification to publish her text without fear of repercus-
sions, and accused her of having been a “Staatsdichter”, or state poet,
1
“It is possible that many of us [Americans] unconsciously wanted to project our anachronistic
political hopes from the 1970s onto this author; if that is the case, then Wolf played a similar role
for us to the one she performed in the GDR. Nonetheless, she never became the political-moral
authority here that she was apparently considered to be over there—hence our amazement at the
vehement debates surrounding her ‘fall’.”

5 Politics, Morality and Aesthetics: Two Translations of Was bleibt 163
levelling the charge that she was now trying to align herself with the
victims of East German socialism (Greiner 1990; Schirrmacher 1990).
Others defended Wolf and argued that she had not sought out the posi-
tion of moral authority that had now been assigned to her by the (West)
German media but had rather tried to use her writing to mitigate the
suffering of those in the GDR (see, e.g. Biermann 1990). The com-
plex position of the East German writer, reflected in the Literaturstreit
debate, is also a theme of Wolf ’s text, which gives the reader insight into
the narrator’s feelings about her own privileged position and desire to
help younger writers, and about how her own behaviour mirrors and
even facilitates that of her observers and oppressors. She wryly engages
in conversation with her own inner censor and admits her conflicting
instincts for self-preservation and resistance, reflecting on the ambiva-
lence of her position:
Ich selbst. Über die zwei Worte kam ich lange nicht hinweg, Ich selbst. Wer
war das. Welches der multiplen Wesen, aus denen “ich selbst” mich zusam-
mensetzte. Das, das sich kennen wollte? Das, das sich schonen wollte?
Oder jenes dritte, das immer noch versucht war, nach derselben Pfeife zu
tanzen wie die jungen Herren da draußen vor meiner Tür? He, Freundchen:
Mit welchem von den dreien hältst du es? (Werke 10: 255–256)2
Was bleibt thus resents the writer’s confrontation of her own position as
much as it offers a critique of the GDR, and this is reflected in the heated
German debate that focused on Wolf and her text.
While provoking a divided response in Germany, Was bleibt also con-
stitutes a moment of substantial divergence between Wolf ’s German and
Anglophone author-functions; while the hostile debates amongst East
and West German intellectuals did not go unnoticed by the Anglophone
press, American and British commentators generally resisted the temp-
tation to pass judgment on East German writers for their cooperation
2
“I myself. Those two words, for a long time I could not get past them. I myself. Who was that.
Which of the multiple beings from which ‘I myself ’ was put together. The one that wanted to know
itself? The one that wanted to preserve itself? Or that third, that was still tempted to dance to the
same pipe as the young men out there in front of my door? Hey, friend: which of the three are you
siding with?”
with the SED.3 Particularly in non-academic Anglophone contexts, a

common institutional narrative of the GDR writer as “loyal commu-
nist” (Binder 1990) invoked an archetype of the utopian intellectual
engaged in idealistic rather than practical politics, a more forgiving
interpretive frame than the moral binaries dominating German dis-
course at the time. The abstract narrative binary between dissidence
and loyalty—rather than dissidence and complicity, in which guilt and
wrongdoing are implied—situated authors such as Wolf in a “win-win”
binary, with positive connotations of either stance contributing to the
retrospective legitimisation of Wolf ’s cooperation with (or lack of resis-
tance to) the SED.
In 1993 Wolf survived her Stasi scandal relatively unscathed by the
press in America and the UK. Only days before her revelation, the New
York Times had published an article on the alienation of East German
intellectuals since Reunification, framing them sympathetically (and
unhelpfully) as having been “the Oprah Winfreys and Phil Donahues of
the nation” (Hafner 1993). Hafner described Wolf as “East Germany’s
most famous writer, … a kind of Mother Confessor”. The article
noted her following amongst American feminists and her residence in
California, where “she is re-emerging as an intellectual voice”, measur-
ing this intellectual re-emergence in terms of readings and book releases
in the USA. As far as the German response to Wolf was concerned,
Hafner explained that “no one has doubted her talent; it’s her politics
they question” (notably marking criticism of Wolf as other by her use of
the third-person pronoun). In the New York Times, another sympathetic
article included quotes from an interview with Wolf about her Stasi file,
alongside details of her conflicts with political and cultural institutions
in the GDR (Gitlin 1993). In the UK, the Guardian echoed some of
3
These sentiments were echoed, for example, in France, where the Nouvel Observateur noted that
“certains intellectuels—ceux-mêmes qui avaient dans le passé porté Christa Wolf aux nues—com-
mencèrent à s’acharner contre cette femme qui avait collectionné les plus grands prix littéraires et
dont les livres atteignaient un triage important depuis vingt ans”. [Certain intellectuals—those
same ones who in the past had praised Christa Wolf to the skies—have begun to attack this woman,
who has been awarded the greatest literary prizes and whose books have been accorded particular
importance for twenty years.] (Valentini 1990: 111)

Wolf ’s defenders in the German debate and reflected a reluctance to

condemn her:
Did she say much? No. Was anybody seriously hurt by it? Probably not.
When was it? From 1959 to 1962. Does it matter what she did all those
years ago, when she believed she was helping to build a new, truly socialist
society? Does it matter that she may only have owned up because the news
was going to break at any moment? (Christy 1993)
The article cautioned that “we should hesitate before passing judgment”.
Referring to Wolf as a “literary heroine of the cold war”, it aligned her
author-function with Euro-communism, which operated as seen in the
previous chapter as a validating narrative of compatibility with European
narratives of self and a nod to a left-leaning readership in the UK.
Beyond the timing of its publication, Was bleibt is particularly inter-
esting in translation from a peritextual perspective. The text’s different
status in Anglophone and German contexts is illustrated by the fact that
the two published translations (one abridged, one full) are both included
as pieces in collected volumes, rather than being produced as stand-alone
publications. In German, other than in Luchterhand’s complete edition
of Wolf ’s Werke, Was bleibt is only published as a solo piece, a reflection
of the significance of this controversial text as a marker in German dis-
course.4 The mode of publication of the translations, then, reflects a shift
in the representative value of the text as it moves between literary con-
texts, with important implications for the author-function. Both publica-
tions show how the difficult questions raised by the text for the German
reader are pre-empted and often concealed at the physical thresholds
to the translation. In particular, the two translations show how peri-
textual mediation can result in “ideological closure” (Kovala 1996), or
what Foucault describes as the rarefaction of meaning, by target-culture
institutions on which the translated author relies for circulation. Firstly,
Martin Chalmers’s translation of an extract from the story for the literary
magazine Granta in 1990 is framed by a thematic narrative that brings
4
Roswitha Skare’s study of the German text (2007) includes an analysis of the peritexts to the vari-
ous German editions and their negotiation of the book’s fiercely debated content. She also briefly
mentions the English and Swedish translations (2007: 95–101).
together items from various contributors in a volume entitled What Went

Wrong?. The second translation, completed by Heike Schwarzbauer and
Rick Takvorian for a collection of Wolf ’s translated stories published by
FSG, appeared very shortly after her Stasi revelation in 1993 in a vol-
ume framed as an introduction to her writing. While the time difference
between the two translations is highly significant in view of the shift in
Wolf ’s popularity in Germany during the early 1990s, her recent expo-
sure to scandal and criticism hardly plays a role in either contextualisa-
tion of the translated text.
Comparison between a periodical and a single-author volume presents
a challenge to Genette’s paratextual model, which excludes periodicals
on the basis that they do not claim a single authorial identity. However,
the peritextual structures he identifies can nonetheless be used to identify
strategies for the management of authorship in multi-author volumes.
Physical framing of the articles occurs not only via the cover material,
which forms an outer threshold to the magazine, but also through mate-
rial included alongside the listed contents of the volume, such as adver-
tisements. These act as vehicles of the ideology (or social narratives) in
which a publication is embedded (Ledbetter 2004: 252–253), and con-
tribute to the operation of the magazine as a multi-voiced space (Brake
2001: 209). As filler material that does not “belong” in any particular
section of the magazine, advertising has traditionally been assigned to
a space that was on the threshold of the represented world of the title and
the wider world beyond it. Often at the ends of columns, it filled the white
space before the beginning of the next department, preventing the reader
from realizing the conceptual limits of both organizing structures and the
journalistic practices that sustained them. (Mussell 2009: 100)
Here, the Genettean term “threshold” is used to describe the role of

advertising and similar material; a more explicitly Genettean approach
has been adopted by Claes (2010), who examines the supplements of
periodicals as paratexts and therefore treats the periodical itself as a text.
He echoes Stanitzek’s arguments for an expansion of Genette’s defini-
tion of “text” to include other examples of book format and non-literary
media (Claes 2010: 201).
5 Politics, Morality and Aesthetics: Two Translations of Was bleibt
167
Lyn Pykett (1989: 105) suggests that the periodical “text” might refer
to a volume or series of volumes or may be represented by a unit as small
as the individual article. The same multiple possibilities apply to items
collected in book form, such as the collection in which the second Was
bleibt translation appeared. By framing one individual contribution as
the text, analysis inevitably redefines the others as thresholds to the object
of study, or peritexts. In this way, the inclusion of the articles together
in a volume implies and encourages a comparative and critical reading
of each in dialogue with the others (Brake 2001: 224–225). Ledbetter
agrees that items in such a volume assume paratextual status:
In a periodical, paratext may include such elements as editorial opinion,

letters to the editor, advertising, adjacent feature articles, other authors and
their previous contributions, and reportage of news events. (2007: 101)
Thus, there is no stable definition of the periodical “text”, which is defined

for each reading by the selective and varying focus of the reader.
In the multi-voiced space of the periodical, a key centripetal force is
provided by what Bandish (2001: 214) identifies as the unifying narrative
of the volume, balancing out the heteroglot positioning of the individual
contribution. This can be seen in both translations of Was bleibt, where
the interpretation of Wolf ’s text and author-function is led by the identi-
fied themes of the volumes in which they are included. Following Bruner’s
identification of “accrual” (1991: 18) as a feature of narrative behaviour
by which coherence is inferred from narratives that are grouped together,
these volume-specific narratives will be referred to as accrued narratives.
More than the sum of its parts, the accrued narrative mediates between
the discursive function of the publication or publisher, and the individual
author-functions of each contributor. The specific accrued narrative is
reflected by the title of a volume, often selected by the publisher, which
pre-empts the reader’s encounter with the individual contributions so
that each piece in the volume is read in the context of this unifying nar-
rative. Genette recognises the obvious importance of the title as peritext
when he argues that “if the text is an object to be read, the title (like,
moreover, the name of the author) is an object to be circulated—or, if
you prefer, a subject of conversation” (1997a: 75): as we will see, the
accrued narrative established in peritexts such as the volume title imposes

on individual contributions such as Wolf ’s text the potentially “bogus”
(Bruner 1991: 19) reading of authors and their writing as coherent with
the accrued narrative and the volume’s contents.
Whether publisher or periodical, the host institution for the trans-
lated text exercises most control in the peritext, where neither author nor
reviewers control the content. Indeed, Genette categorises many peritex-
tual elements as the “publisher’s peritexts”:
I give the name publisher’s peritexts to the whole zone of the peritext that is
the direct and principal (but not exclusive) responsibility of the publisher
… —that is, the zone that exists merely by the fact that a book is published
and possibly republished and offered to the public in one or several more
or less varied presentations. (Genette 1997a: 16)
Genette also acknowledges the discursive contest for dominance in the fram-
ing of the text when he observes that the publisher’s peritext “encroaches on
the prerogatives of an author” (ibid.: 23). This is seen in both the published
translations, where the author’s personal narrative competes with the nar-
ratives of publishing institutions for control of the author-function. While
the second of the two publications in particular makes use of only a few of
the peritextual elements identified by Genette, as we will see, the “invisible”
framing of a text through the narrative strategies of selection and implicit
temporal or causal framing might be just as effective as more explicit meth-
ods of contextualisation. Comparison of two types of peritextual framing
of Was bleibt in translation reveals the discursive functions of periodical and
publisher as “editorial gateways” (Brake 2001: 224) for translated author-
ship. First, the overt reframing of Wolf’s author-function in the magazine
format of Granta displays the mechanisms of control over narrated author-
ship that can operate in the peritextual space.
The Periodical as Overt Author(ity): Granta

The London-based literary magazine Granta purchased pre-publication
rights to Was bleibt in English translation, which duly appeared in the
Summer 1990 edition of the magazine. Was bleibt was translated for
169
Granta by Martin Chalmers, who had previously worked for the maga-
zine on pieces by Hans Magnus Enzensberger and by Wolf Biermann,
and whose translation of Enzensberger’s foreword to his book Europa in
Trümmern [Europe in Ruins] (1990, later retitled Europa in Ruinen) also
appeared in the same issue. Having only been published in Germany in
early June, Wolf ’s text thus reached Anglophone readers in translation
more quickly than any of her previous writing. While this perhaps sug-
gests the significance of Wolf ’s author-function as a representative (East)
German writer, the strongly contested discursive space of the magazine is
characterised by tension and negotiation between three elements: the indi-
vidual authorship of contributors, a powerful identity narrative associated
with the host publication, and the accrued narrative of each individual
issue. Significantly, too, since Granta is a magazine the length of each
contribution to the magazine is limited, meaning that Wolf ’s text was
represented by an extracted section chosen to best fit the narrative of the
volume. Emerging from the discourses of institutions with the power to
narrate it, Wolf ’s translated author-function relies for its circulation on
these overlapping frames and narrative strategies that simultaneously mar-
ginalise the particularities of her authorship and recontextualise her text.
Granta’s institutional narrative enjoys a strong authorial presence in
each of its volumes, and the magazine disrupts expectations of the peri-
odical with its book-like appearance. Each 250-page volume appears in
bound paperback form, emulating the durability of the book rather than
the expediency and economy of the magazine. As Beetham notes, “the
material characteristics of the periodical … have consistently been cen-
tral, not just to its economics, but also to its meaning” (1989: 98): Granta
makes a claim to what Beetham calls the “closed”, authoritative format
of the book rather than the “open” and temporary discursive space char-
acteristic of the periodical. The price of a volume, for example, is compa-
rable to that of a book (£5.99 in 1990: the Virago paperback edition of
Wolf ’s Accident was priced at £5.99 in 1989), and is printed on the back
cover near the barcode. The publication details for the volume also sug-
gest book status with the inclusion of the ISBN (as opposed to the ISSN
normally carried by an issue of a magazine). Granta is also embedded
in dominant institutional narratives of Anglophone literary discourse: it
was refounded by Bill Buford in 1979 as a magazine for new writing and
its own press, Granta Books, was founded in 1989 in collaboration with
Penguin as distributor and promoter. For the first time in 1983, Granta
announced its “Best of Young British Novelists”5: this claim for author-
ity over the literary canon embeds the magazine in the institutional dis-
courses also circulated by Wolf ’s main Anglophone publishers, FSG and
Virago.
Each Granta volume brings together a mixture of fiction, reportage
and documentary photography within the accrued narrative of a unifying
theme or question, drawing associative links between the “fictional” nar-
ratives of the literary contributions and the social narratives that inform
the journalistic writing and photographic elements. On the front cover
of each issue, the logos of Granta and Penguin feature prominently, and
on the back cover the logos appear again with the issue number and the
tagline, “A Paperback Magazine of New Writing”.6 The juxtaposition of
“paperback” and “magazine” claims both the privileged discursive author-
ity of the book and the immediacy of the periodical, framing “new” writ-
ing as representative of the categories of high quality and contemporary
relevance to which the institutional narrative of the magazine aspires.
The contemporary focus on new writing reflects not just an interest in
recent literature relating to current events but also (and this is supported
by the issues on “best young” authors) the suggestion that the writers
included may not be established names: the magazine gives itself the brief
of introducing the reader to unheard voices as well as canonised writers.
This, then, is the author-function of the magazine itself, in which Wolf ’s
own authorial narrative is contextualised by her inclusion in the volume.
Thanks to its predominantly “closed” format (e.g. with no section for
readers’ letters) and in the absence of a dominant authorial presence from
individual contributors, Granta itself assumes the authoritative status of
5
The 1983 list included Martin Amis and Julian Barnes; in 1993, Will Self and Jeanette Winterson
were listed and the 2003 listings included David Mitchell and Zadie Smith while 2013 featured
Kamila Shamsie and Adam Thirlwell. Granta announced the “Best of Young American Novelists”
in 1996 and 2007, issued a “New Fiction Special” in 2009, and has also listed new writers in the
Spanish language (2010), from Brazil (2012) and from Ireland (2016).
6
These details change over time: observations here relate to standard formatting at the time of
Wolf ’s publication. Changes to the front cover design since 1990 include the omission of the
Penguin logo (inconsistently, from Granta 54 [1996]), and the addition of the altered Granta sub-
title, “The Magazine of New Writing” beneath the logo (from Granta 62 [1998]).
171
author. This is affirmed on the back cover, where a summary of each

volume’s contents is commonly followed by a quotation affirming the
quality of the publication, for example:
The quality and variety of Granta’s contributors is stunning … none of its

rivals comes close to matching it. (Granta 33: back cover)
Granta is, quite simply, the most impressive literary magazine of its time.
(Granta 42: back cover)
Featuring quotations from reviews just as they might be seen on the cover
of a published book, Granta’s back cover makes a claim for the authorial
status of the magazine by framing the texts in terms of their collective
value as contributions to a highly valued publication. Inside, only brief
notes on the contributors are included, and the contributions themselves
are presented in a standardised typographical format, interspersed with
photography. In this way, Granta’s unifying institutional narrative con-
trols and contextualises the individual authorial narratives included in
each issue.7 Together with the accrued narrative or title theme of the
issue, this claim for authorial sovereignty constitutes an editorial gateway
with which the author-function must compete for discursive authority
over the text, and as we will see, it is the visibility of this tension between
individual and supra-individual narratives that distinguishes the periodi-
cal from the publishing house.
External Peritexts: Front and Back Covers
The reader’s first encounter with the text is often through the cover design:
the front cover of Granta 33 frames the contributions unmistakeably in the
accrued title narrative of “What Went Wrong?” and in the magazine’s insti-
tutional narrative made present through its recognisable formatting and
logos.8 A large image, taken from a photograph by Tom Stoddart (Fig. 5.1),
7
A Bourdieusian account of the relationship between publication and authors shows how editors
select a mixture of well-known and unknown contributors, and some that specifically reflect the
“ideological” aims of the issue and its accrued narrative (Parker and Philpotts 2009).
8
The front cover can be viewed at http://granta.com/issues/granta-33-what-went-wrong/.
Fig. 5.1 “Marital Aid”, 1990. Photograph © Tom Stoddart, reprinted by

permission of Getty Images
illustrates and dwarfs the title of the volume, above and below which
the logos of Granta and Penguin also appear. The subtitle, “William
McPherson in Romania”, appears beneath the title in a smaller, italicised
font and draws attention to McPherson’s contribution as the most signifi-
cant of the included items. The photograph shows an elegantly dressed
woman holding up an admonishing, bloodied finger in a gesture of defi-
ance, or perhaps fear. She is speaking, either angrily or anxiously, to some-
one beyond the frame of the photograph, and her gaze is directed past
the camera. The blood on her hand and clothing is a shock to the eye,
especially considering its position on her left breast above the heart, and
on her hand where it has also covered her gold ring. The formality of her
appearance also contrasts with the more casual clothing of the men in the
background of the photograph, documenting the involvement of multiple
social groups in the narrative of revolution. The faces behind her suggest
that she is part of a crowd; no one is smiling, and her proximity to the
crowd and to the camera gives a claustrophobic feeling to the scene. A
hand, also spotted with blood, touches her sleeve at the elbow. Speaking
out beyond the limits of the photograph through the woman’s gaze, the
image is a powerful interpretive frame for the question posed by the title
of the volume: “What Went Wrong?”
173
In the context of the volume’s year of publication, the title question

is framed by institutional narratives of the Eastern European revolutions
of 1989/1990. The subtitle confirms this, identifying the title piece as
an account by the journalist William McPherson of his visit to Romania
in 1989. The title and cover image thus embed Wolf ’s writing and her
(East) German identity in discourse that reaches beyond national speci-
ficities to explore a late twentieth-century account of revolution. In
aspiring to transcend nationality, however, this narrative to a large extent
excludes the specificities of the contexts that frame the contributions,
drawing them together into a generic, supra-national (and target-culture-
informed) narrative of revolution as a turbulent stage in the progres-
sion from (repressive) socialism to (aspirational) democracy, a context in
which events in countries such as Romania are presented as a situation
gone “wrong”. Like the other nationally specific narratives of revolution
in Granta 33, then, Wolf ’s text is framed in the accrued narrative of the
volume and in the target-culture institutional narratives that validate it.
The relevance of German and East German discourse as context for her
writing is significantly lessened, while the author is paradoxically treated
as an emblem of her own national experience, integrated into a more
general narrative of revolution.
On the back cover, the reader finds a continuation of the narratives
established in text and image on the front: the same photograph extends
across the spine of the book. Here, a second figure is seen: a man with
a bloodied face and shoulder, staring straight ahead and being held (or
held back) by a man behind him. The bright red of the man’s shirt draws
the eye, and emphasis is placed on the victimhood of the visible figure,
while his perceived oppressor occupies a marginal position. The direction
of the man’s gaze and the position of his hand, which stretches across the
spine of the volume to become the hand on the woman’s elbow and unite
the two halves of the photograph, draws the reader’s attention back to the
image on the front. The reader is encouraged to assume that the voices
granted a discursive space in this volume, amongst them Wolf ’s, are those
of victims. The split halves of the photograph work together to frame the
contributions to the volume in an abstract narrative of victimhood, and
in an institutional narrative of failed socialism.
Turning to the specific contents of the issue, the blurb on the back
cover reads as follows9:
At the end of last year, William McPherson went to Europe to celebrate the
revolutions of 1989. He passed through the Berlin Wall on New Year’s Eve
and had plans for visiting the great capitals of the east: Prague, Budapest,
Belgrade. And then a friend suggested spending three days in Romania. It
was, after all, the last of the big European revolutions—and the most
dramatic.
Why not?
But, when he got there, McPherson was unprepared for what he discov-
ered. He was puzzled and moved and engaged. He couldn’t leave. He
wouldn’t be able to leave for another six months: until the thirteenth of
June, and the arrival of the miners of the Jiu Valley.
This repeats the emphasis of the volume’s subtitle on McPherson’s account

of the Romanian revolution: the leading position of McPherson’s contri-
bution frames it as a response to the questioning title of the volume. Wolf
and the authors of the remaining contributions are drawn into an associa-
tion with McPherson’s piece by their listing on the back cover. However,
all revolutions are not created equal: the naming of Berlin and the “great
capitals of the East” frames McPherson’s visit to Romania in a broader nar-
rative of Eastern European revolution and post-revolutionary adjustment,
with the Berlin Wall (and by implication Germany) framed as the gateway
to change. By presenting the Romanian revolution as a contrast to this nar-
rative, the summary frames it as a less successful alternative to the implied
post-socialist success story of Berlin. This binary categorisation is at the heart
of the volume’s accrued narrative: the selection of Berlin as opposition to the
violence of Romania identifies Wolf’s text with a narrative of ultimately suc-
cessful change, or revolution “gone right”. Wolf’s author-function is there-
fore implicitly aligned, by her German-ness, with the “now” and the self of
democracy rather than the “then” and the other of repression and revolution.
Similarly, socialism is associated unambiguously with the “wrong” past.
9
Genette identifies the blurb as the “please-insert”, that is, a printed text containing information
about the work, designed to be included in its publication (1997a: 104–105). The term comes
from typical usage in the early twentieth century, when the please-insert was typically printed sepa-
rately and inserted; Genette observes that this is no longer the case and that this text often appears
on the back cover of a book (ibid.: 25).
175
The outer peritexts reveal two key strands in the framing of Wolf ’s
authorship by her inclusion in the Granta volume. Firstly, in the context
of the theme “What Went Wrong”, the marginalisation of the antagonist
on the cover design (the man seen on the left in Fig. 5.1 is barely visible
in the cropped version used for the Granta cover) invites a focus on the
victimhood of the textual narrators in the volume. Framed by this image
and in the context of contemporary events, the title of the volume invites
the reader to identify its contents with target-culture institutional nar-
ratives of the failure and corruption of socialist governments, position-
ing them against their citizens who are seen as representatives of abstract
narrative values (such as freedom), and affirming a binary of victims and
perpetrators. Secondly, the framing of Berlin as a representative of suc-
cessful change results in an understanding of Wolf as a victim whose
story has ultimately found an unambiguously happy ending. The front
and back covers demonstrate the dominance of the Granta-function and
of the volume’s accrued narrative, with which Wolf ’s author-function is
in constant contention for control over the discursive space in which
her text is positioned. However, the covers only present part of the peri-
textual frame: as Mussell suggests (2009: 100), the material designed
to “fill the white space” of the periodical also functions as a powerful
interpretive guide. Looking now inside the volume, the internal peritexts
also reveal the emblematic status assigned to Wolf ’s translated author-
function through her text’s inclusion as a contribution to the narratives
of the magazine.
Internal Peritexts
Genette distinguishes between the “producer” and the “sender” of the

paratext, where the latter is “defined by a putative attribution and an
acceptance of responsibility” (Genette 1997a: 8). Based on this d
istinction,
the Granta peritexts can be roughly divided into three types: 15 various
advertisements, 18 photographs dispersed within and amongst the con-
tributions and 16 peritexts that maintain the cohesion of the volume as
a whole (see Table 5.1). While Granta is identifiable as both producer
and sender of these latter peritexts, the advertisements and photographs
Table 5.1 Publisher’s peritexts inside Granta 33

Page Type of peritext
Cover 2 Advertisement: Welsh National Opera, autumn tour 1990
1 Advertisement: Don McCullin, Unreasonable Behaviour
2 Advertisement: Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
3 Title page for volume
4 Publication details
5 Advertisement: Cardinal Fiction launch
6 Advertisement: Lorrie Moore, Like Life
7 Contents
8 Advertisement: Vintage publishing launch
9 Title page: William McPherson, “In Romania” (pp. 9–58)
29 Photograph: Coal-washing plant at Vulcan (James Nubile)
32–33 Photograph: Traditional miners’ funeral procession (James Nubile)
34–35 Photograph: Petrila Mine (James Nubile)
36–37 Photograph: Shift-change at Petrila Mine in the Jiu Valley (James
Nubile)
49 Photograph: University Square, Bucharest, June 15 1990 (Srdjan Ilic)
52–53 Photograph: Miners’ victim, Bucharest, June 14 1990 (James Nubile)
55 Photograph: Miners in Bucharest, June 15, 1990 (Chip Hires)
59 Title page: Isabel Ellsen, “Children’s Section, Gradinari House”
(pp. 59–72)
73 Advertisement: Timothy Garton Ash, We the People (Granta Books)
74 Advertisement: Martha Gellhorn, The View from the Ground (Granta
Books)
75 Title page: Viktoria Tokareva, “Dry Run” (pp. 75–111)
76 Photograph (untitled, Chris Steele-Perkins)
112 Advertisement: Ryszard Kapuściński, The Soccer War (Granta Books)
113 Title page: Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Europe in Ruins”
(pp. 113–139)
114 Photograph: German troops surrendering, 1944 (Popperfoto)
118 Photograph: Berlin, 1945 (Hulton-Deutsch Collection)
122 Photograph: Aachen, 1945 (Hulton-Deutsch Collection)
124 Photograph: Essen, 1946 (Popperfoto)
126 Photograph: Berlin, 1947 (Popperfoto)
128 Photograph: Frankfurt, 1947 (Popperfoto)
132 Photograph: Berlin, 1949 (Popperfoto)
136 Photograph: East Germany, 1949 (Popperfoto)
139 Advertisement: Poetry International at the South Bank Centre
140 Advertisement: John Berger, Once in Europa (Granta Books)
141 Title page: Christa Wolf, “What Remains” (pp. 141–158)
142 Photograph (untitled, Peter Marlow)
159 Title page: Ryszard Kapuściński, “Bolivia, 1970” (pp. 159–166)
167 Title page: Ferdinando Scianna, “Bolivia, 1990” (pp. 167–182)
(continued)
177
Table 5.1 (continued)
Page Type of peritext
183 Title page: Isabel Allende, “Gift for a Sweetheart” (pp. 183–194)
195 Title page: Bill Roorbach, “Summers with Juliet” (pp. 195–219)
219 Advertisement: London School of Publishing, evening classes
220 “A Letter for our Subscribers”
221 Title page: Romesh Gunesekera, “A House in the Country”
(pp. 221–234)
222 Photograph (untitled, Greg Girard)
235 Title page: Martin Amis “Time’s Arrow” (pp. 235–252)
253 Author Promotion: Ryszard Kapuściński’s previous Granta
contributions
254–255 Advertisement: Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars (both
editions)
256 Notes on Contributors
Cover 3 Advertisement: Martin Amis, London Fields
are produced by other discursive agents (the promotions for new Granta
Books releases establish a discursive function affiliated with but not iden-
tical to the Granta-function under which the volume is published).
Dispersed throughout the volume, the advertisements included in
Granta not only “fill the white space” between contributions but also
consolidate the magazine’s discursive control by corroborating Granta’s
institutional narrative and the theme of the volume. In Granta 33, the
promotions comprise two advertisements for the launch of a new pub-
lisher, nine for new literary publications, three for upcoming literary or
musical events and one for Ryszard Kapuściński’s contributions to other
issues of Granta. No page is left blank: even Covers 2 and 3 and the fly-
leaf are drawn into a constant flow of advertisements, contributions and
title pages.10 The advertisements serve a triple purpose: they invite read-
ers to draw favourable conclusions about the contributions by endorsing
the institutional narrative of the magazine as a publisher of high-quality
writing (and a proponent of “high” culture); they also flatter the reader
by assuming a high level of education and a taste for literature, opera
or poetry (as suggested by Cronin 1996: 153); finally, they endorse the
selection of contributors, or the narrative of the magazine’s “canon”, by
10
Following Genette’s classification, the covers are designated here as 1 (front cover), 2 (internal
face of the front cover), 3 (internal face of the back cover) and 4 (back cover).
reflecting the high standard of their output. These three commercial

objectives seek to establish common ground with the personal narra-
tives of readers as well as with the institutionally maintained narratives of
authors and publishers.
Like the advertisements, the black-and-white photographs included
in Granta can be allocated the double status of text and paratext. Their
ambivalent status is emphasised by the fact that photography makes up
a proportion of the content in every issue of the magazine: in Granta
33, two of the eleven contributions are collections of photographs. Aside
from these, photography in each issue plays a vital peritextual role in
guiding interpretation and adding a thread of uniformity to the contri-
butions. Dispersed amongst and within the prose contributions, the size
of the Granta photographs, which are always allocated a full-page or a
double-page spread, visibly encodes them as an important complement
to the contributions and as frames that locate them within the accrued
narrative of each volume. The frequent interjection of photographs into
contributions by William McPherson and Hans Magnus Enzensberger
not only adds emphasis in the context of the volume by adding to their
(literal) weight; the frequency with which the photographs appear and
their thematic relevance to the texts they accompany also embed the two
reports in the real by drawing a parallel between photographic and lin-
guistic modes of witness. The almost exclusive use of photographs of peo-
ple (only one of the eighteen unlisted photographs in the issue does not
show a human being) adds to the emotive force of the volume’s accrued
narrative by framing all the contributions in human terms.
Wolf ’s piece is one of three to be preceded by a photograph on the
verso of its title page (the other two are the stories by Victoria Tokareva
and Romesh Gunesekera). The photograph by Peter Marlow (Fig. 5.2)
shows a paved street, lined by buildings and streetlamps on the left and,
on the right, close to the buildings, a high concrete wall. Taken in Berlin,
it is an image that evokes powerful narratives as a frame for Wolf ’s text.
Out of focus in the background at the end of the street is a junction
with another road lined by high-rise buildings, and a car is parked in
front of a tree, facing towards the camera. In focus, the figure of a small
girl wearing a headscarf and holding a package can be seen walking or
running away from the camera. Building on the narrative of victimhood
179
Fig. 5.2 “Living in the Shadow of the Wall”, 1980. Photograph ©

Peter
Marlow, reprinted by permission of Magnum Photos
that runs through the volume, the photograph frames Wolf ’s narrative as
a story of the vulnerable: the girl, apparently unaware of being watched,
is observed not only by the “face” of the car at the end of the street but by
the lens of the camera behind her back. The visual impact of the photo-
graph pre-empts Wolf ’s narrative of Stasi observation by framing the nar-
rator as the victim of oppression rather than reflecting the ambivalence
of her position.11
Thus, the visual frame of the photographs in Granta places emphasis
on the ordinary citizen as victim, a narrative into which Wolf is drawn
as a representative voice for those who have lived through oppression.
This reading of Wolf is a far cry from the German-language controversy
surrounding Was bleibt and is not especially consistent with the narrative
framing of Wolf ’s Anglophone author-function seen in the previous two
chapters. Where previous readings of Wolf in English sought consistency
with an existing account of her authorship by referring to previous texts,
11
The specific image also recalls (and thus adds emphasis to) an anecdote Wolf ’s narrator hears from
the woman in the off-licence, about her Jewish friend Elfi and how she was almost caught by the
Gestapo officers waiting for her in her boyfriend’s car (GR 150).
here, included as a representative fragment of an ostensibly universal

narrative and in isolation from the discourse that makes it representative,
the translated author-function is subject to influential framing by the
accrued narrative of the collected volume.
It is worth mentioning briefly the cuts to the text that have been made
for the Granta abridgement. Only the first part of Wolf ’s text is pub-
lished, and this itself has been cut in places to fit the desired length of
contribution to the magazine. It is possible to see two significant trends
in the cuts made, which have implications for an interpretation of Wolf ’s
writing. Firstly, the selection of material focuses attention on the “plot”
of the extract, identifiable as the oppression of the narrator demonstrated
by events in her day, rather than on the narrator’s own reflections on the
ambivalence of her position. This is reflected, for example, in the omis-
sion of selected sentences in the following:
Wann? Als hinter den Sätzen mehr Ausrufezeichen als Fragezeichen

standen? Aber mit simplen Selbstbesichtigungen würde ich diesmal nicht
davonkommen. Ich setzte Wasser auf. Das mea culpa überlassen wir mal
den Katholiken. Wie auch das pater noster. Lossprechungen sind nicht in
Sicht. Weiß, warum in den letzten Tagen ausgerechnet weiß? (Werke 10:
226, my emphasis)
[When? When more exclamation marks than question marks stood at the
end of sentences? But I wouldn’t get away with simple self-incriminations now.
I put water on [to boil]. Let’s leave the mea culpa to the Catholics. And the
pater noster. No sign of absolution . White, why in recent days white of all
colours?]
When? When there were more exclamation marks than question marks
after sentences? I put on water. White, why on earth white? (GR 144)
The example shows how the translation has been intricately edited to omit
references to the narrator’s ambivalent position: this selective focus on the
narrator’s suffering rather than her self-criticism makes it more likely that
she (and therefore her author) will be positioned as a victim by the read-
er.12 A second significant tendency in the cuts is that much of the n
arrator’s
12
It is interesting that the Granta extract does in fact end with a passage that more clearly demon-
strates the narrator’s ambivalent position: “The young gentlemen who sat outside my door—they

reflection on the “new language” she requires in order to talk about her
experience (and on the expressive ambiguities or insufficiency of the lan-
guage available to her) is also omitted. Wolf ’s narrator regularly criticises
the inadequacy of the language available to her to describe her experience,
or reflects on the implications of particular words and their meaning. This
critique of language in Wolf is familiar to any reader acquainted with her
search for a new poetics and a subjective-authentic aesthetic as seen in
earlier texts such as Christa T. and Cassandra. However, this dimension of
the writing, its focus on the text’s ability to offer sincere engagement with
human experience, is masked by the omission of the narrator’s reflections.
This means, again, that the reader is encouraged less to focus on how the
narrator is able or forced to communicate, and more on what she is com-
municating, in other words the narrative of her oppression.
The remaining publisher-produced peritexts reflect clearly the ten-
sion between the individual author-function and the narratives of the
magazine in the framing of the text. These features of publication, while
they may seem incidental or at best perfunctory navigational structures,
function as powerful interpretive frames for each contribution and for
the collection as a whole by consolidating the cohesion of the volume.
As Jerome McGann (1991) has argued, the bibliographic features of the
text are a powerful semiotic system that operates alongside and together
with the linguistic. The title page of the volume, for example, shows a
large Granta logo, and beneath it in the vertical centre of the page the
title of the volume (“What Went Wrong?”), followed at the bottom by
the issue number and a large Penguin logo. The title is emphasised by
its central position, the bold typeface and the empty space around it.
The prominence given to the name of the magazine and the title of the
volume is distributed much in the same way as it might be to the name
of a single author and the title of the book: the eye is drawn first to the
strong, dark box of the Granta logo and then to the title. The names
of individual contributors do not appear here, as the periodical asserts
control through its distinctive branding. The uniform typography of the
would simply walk through his: that was the difference between the two of us—a decisive differ-
ence. A ditch. Did I have to jump over it?” (Granta 33: 158). This question, positioned at the end
of the narrative of oppression, seems to lead the reader towards an understanding of how revolution
can begin.
contributions also contributes to a sense of cohesive style and perspective:

in Wolf ’s case, standardised punctuation (such as speech marks and ques-
tion marks, where none are present in Wolf ’s German text) emphasises
the thematic unity of her text with the voice of the volume, rather than its
social and autobiographical specificity, as the criterion for its inclusion.
Drop caps at the start of some paragraphs also fit the style of the volume
and divide Wolf ’s text into clearly marked sections. Throughout the vol-
ume, each individual contribution is preceded by its own intertitle that
echoes the main title page, bearing a smaller Granta logo at the top, with
the name of the author and title of the contribution at the bottom. The
dominant Granta logo ensures that Wolf ’s text is marked by the edito-
rial gateway of Granta as the authorial voice. This presentational strategy
can be seen elsewhere, for example, on the page promoting Kapuściński’s
previous Granta contributions, which advertises older issues of the maga-
zine (“these issues are now available in bookshops”) at least as much as it
endorses the work of the writer (Granta 33: 253).13
The lack of a continuous plot between issues of the magazine ensures
that the author-functions of individual writers, while subordinated to the
identity of the periodical itself and contextualised by the accrued narra-
tive of the volume, do also play a role in attracting readership.14 This is
reflected, for example, in their naming on the cover, and on the contents
page, where the contributions are identified first by author (emboldened)
and then by title (not emboldened). This pattern is repeated in a left-to-
right reading pattern across page headers throughout the volume, where
the contributor’s name (verso, top left) and the title of the contribution
(recto, top right) appear. Individual author-functions are framed as the
origins of the articles in the same way as Granta seems to adopt the posi-
tion of origin for the volume, suggesting that each contributing author
is seen to represent a particular dimension of the volume’s theme. As a
narrative of an already well-known author whose persecution by her own
13
For Wolf ’s second Granta appearance (Granta 42), the Contributor’s Note reflects her admittance
into the institutional narrative of the Granta canon, finding it necessary to say only that “Christa
Wolf ’s previous contribution to Granta, ‘What Remains’, appeared in issue 33” (Granta 1992:
256).
14
In rare cases a contribution may be serialised over several issues: Amis’s “Time’s Arrow”, seen in Granta
33, is the first of a three-part serialisation which is completed in issues 34 and 36 of the magazine.
183
government is detailed in her contribution to the volume, Wolf ’s author-

function seems to fit well as a response to the overarching question of
“What Went Wrong?”.
Significantly, the contents page shows that, while the sovereignty of
authors is challenged by the authorship of the magazine, the status of
the translator is even less certain, and with it the visibility of transla-
tion in the composition of the volume. Five of the nine prose contribu-
tions are translated, but the names of the translators are not shown in the
contents, featuring only at the end of each contribution. The secondary
status of the translator is emphasised by the way in which the appearance
of regular or prolific translators such as Martin Chalmers or Margaret
Sayers Peden is not foregrounded in the same way as the narrative of
regular Granta contributors seen in the advertisements. The invisibility of
translators on the contents page seems to focus the reader’s attention on
the strength of the volume’s accrued narrative rather than on the diverse
focal points of the contributions. Wolf ’s (East) German identity is not
explicitly foregrounded in this overview of the contents which unifies
the contributors in the internationally accessible accrued narrative of the
volume, while elsewhere in the peritexts individual nationality is used to
position contributors at various points in this narrative of development
from socialism to democracy.
The “Notes on Contributors” section, in which each author is explicitly
identified, affirms the magazine’s authoritative position through the cre-
dentials of the contributors. While each author is individually acknowl-
edged here, this contextual information is limited to a few sentences per
writer, positioned at the back of the volume and presented as one con-
tinuous paragraph. Wolf ’s biographical entry is as follows:
Christa Wolf is a member of the Central Committee of the East German

Writers’ Union. Her novels include A Model Childhood, No Place on Earth
and Cassandra. She won the National Prize in 1978 and was runner-up for
the Nobel Prize in 1988. (Granta 33: 256)
These three sentences provide no literary or biographical context for

the fragment of Was bleibt and draw no attention to the ambiguities of
Wolf ’s position in German discourse as both a victim of the Stasi and
a state-endorsed writer. The focus on Wolf ’s literary credentials omits any

mention of the controversy surrounding her in Germany at the time of
publication, noting instead selected literary honours in the GDR and on
the world stage. The omission of The Quest for Christa T. (1970), Wolf ’s
first international success, and Accident: A Day’s News (1989), her most
recently translated text, is also notable. One reason for this might be that
Accident, having been published in English only the year before, had not
yet acquired a prominent enough profile to draw interest, and Christa
T. was perhaps now considered to have been replaced by Cassandra as
Wolf ’s landmark translated text. Whatever the reasons, the selection of
detail frames Wolf ’s author-function in line with the Granta-function and
its emphasis on literary quality, rather than with the specific narratives of
moral ambivalence and authorial engagement with political institutions
that contextualised her text and authorship as problematic in German
post-Reunification discourse.
Throughout Granta 33, the publisher’s peritexts frame the contributions
and the author-functions of contributors in an apparently supra-national
narrative of the human cost of oppression and revolution. In general,
while individual author-functions do create a frame for each contribution,
they are themselves framed by the magazine’s assumed authorial status, in
which context the emphasis is cohesion between contributions and their
relevance to a unifying theme. Especially, the (mostly) narrated and (occa-
sionally) narrating voices of figures from eastern Europe are positioned as
victims in abstract binaries of “innocent” and “guilty”, or “success” and
“failure”, that do not accommodate the complexities of the source culture
and Wolf ’s individual narrative and instead frame the translated text in
comparative terms against the other pieces in the volume. Following on
from this observation, the relative positioning of the contributions within
the volume as peritexts to one another is also significant.
Periodical Contributions as Peritexts
As suggested explicitly by Ledbetter (2007: 101) and indirectly by Brake

(2001: 224–225), the texts in a collected volume act as peritexts to one
another as well as being texts in their own right. The authorial function
185
of the volume itself draws them together and their selection for inclu-
sion invites the reader to read critically and comparatively, identifying
the temporal, causal and relational links to other contributions that act as
interpretive frames. Each individual writer’s author-function is reframed
by inclusion in such a volume. As we have seen, in the case of Granta 33,
each piece is framed by the accrued narrative of “What Went Wrong?”
that frames the issue as a cohesive text of international perspectives on
revolutions of the period 1989–1990.
Within this framework, the contributions contextualise one another
through their spatial arrangement within the volume. The extract from
Wolf ’s story is the fifth of the eleven contributions:
William McPherson: In Romania

Isabel Ellsen: Children’s Section, Gradinari House
Victoria Tokareva: Dry Run
Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Europe in Ruins
Christa Wolf: What Remains
Ryszard Kapuściński: Bolivia, 1970
Ferdinando Scianna: Bolivia, 1990
Isabel Allende: Gift for a Sweetheart
Bill Roorbach: Summers with Juliet
Romesh Gunesekera: A House in the Country
Martin Amis: Time’s Arrow
While the magazine format typically invites readers to read contribu-

tions in any order, the organisation of the Granta contributions sug-
gests an instinctively linear reading order in which some texts function
more strongly than others as frames: McPherson’s headline article sets
the tone for the volume, while Enzensberger’s piece is weighted with
photos, Kapuściński’s and Scianna’s Bolivian articles form a central pair,
and Amis has the emphatic final word. This ordering, which coexists
with the “What Went Wrong” narrative progressing from oppression
through to revolution, selectively emphasises material within the vol-
ume and enables the texts to frame one another by contrast. Following
the arrangement of the contributions as a suggested reading order, it
is worth considering the peritextual frame established especially by the

pieces that precede Wolf ’s text.
The first half of the volume begins with McPherson’s narrative of the
events he observed in Romania between January and June 1990, acting
most powerfully of all the individual contributions as a frame for other
items because of the emphasis granted to it on the covers of the maga-
zine. McPherson recalls border controls, uncertainty, dereliction, secrecy
and mistrust, all of which are contextualised at the end of his narrative
by the timeline of events that consolidates the “factual” nature of his
report. He italicises lexemes such as Securist, Frontul Salvării Naţionale
and Securitate (Granta 33: 16, 18, 19), marking them as linguistically
other and reflecting his alienation from the situation in which he finds
himself. While sympathetic in various individual cases to the Romanians
he meets, McPherson allies himself with British journalists at moments
of crisis such as the march at the climax of the narrative, positioning
himself outside the institutional narratives of the Romanian conflict and
perpetuating an East/West binary in which the observing journalist (and
reader) is not embedded in the shocking narratives of the failed post-
socialist revolution.
McPherson’s piece is followed by Ellsen’s photographs from a Romanian
children’s home: the consecutive placing of these contributions in the
volume emphasises their shared location. Such a national pairing con-
solidates the coherence of the journal and foregrounds particular themes
by juxtaposing “natural thematic partners”, linguistic pairs or contrasting
articles (Parker and Philpotts 2009: 282).15 The children in Ellsen’s images
are small and thin, their hair has been cut short, they are not smiling and
their clothes are dirty or ill-fitting. They sit together in enclosures or on
the ground. The first and last photographs are particularly striking: both
feature the same young boy wearing an oversized shirt, sitting inside a
railed enclosure. In the first photograph, he looks straight ahead into the
camera, frowning slightly, his hands resting in front of him; another boy
in the background is also looking up into the camera. In the last image,
the camera angle has moved to the other side of the railings, and shows
the boy looking out through the bars. One hand grips a railing while the
For a detailed discussion of how this can work, see Parker and Philpotts (2009: 282–291).
15
187
other is clenched under his chin and rests on top of his legs, which he
has drawn up to his chest underneath his large shirt. This image demands
recognition of the abuse and neglect of the children, closing the set as it
opened: with a gaze straight out into the eye of the viewer that echoes
the image on the front cover. A conventional text/paratext relationship
between text and image is inverted here too: the emotional impact of
Ellsen’s photographs is contextualised by a short paragraph noting the
numbers of deaths in Gradinari House and of similar houses in Romania
and explaining that the cages seen in the photographs serve as daytime
enclosures for the children as well as sleeping areas in the summer.
Together, the specific personal and institutional narratives of
McPherson’s report and Ellsen’s photographs open the volume with a
powerful statement of the human cost of political intervention. In the
context of what is presented as an international narrative of failed social-
ism and its violent end that is implied as the unifying background to
the articles, the bleak narrative of inhumane treatment they articulate
represents what can go “wrong” in the progression from repressive social-
ism to liberated democracy. The comparative reading encouraged by the
format of the periodical reflects a contrast between the peaceful progres-
sion towards change in East Germany and the more violent course of
events elsewhere. Rather than foregrounding the complexities of Wolf ’s
position as an East German writer (which were central to German read-
ings of the text and as a result placed her at the centre of a heated debate
in Germany), it also focuses attention on Wolf ’s victimhood as a frame
for her text.
This opening to the magazine is followed by Viktoria Tokareva’s story,
in which the chaotic life of the engaging and frustrating protagonist
is reminiscent of Wolf ’s Christa T.: the narrator reflects on her friend’s
struggle to reconcile a volatile individual narrative with the seemingly
inflexible narratives of the (socialist) institution. Tokareva’s story is fol-
lowed by Enzensberger’s essay, warning against a Europe that does not
learn from its destructive past. He reminds his reader that “a Europe
in renewal will do well to remind itself of Europe in ruins, from which
it is separated by only a few decades” (Granta 1990: 139), a statement
emphasised by the photographs of surrender and of post-war destruction
that accompany his article. Enzensberger’s arguments implicitly endorse
an institutional narrative of the writer as the mouthpiece for victimhood

and silenced truth, a frame for Wolf ’s narrative and her author-function
as the next in the volume. Individually too, his exploration of the after-
math of Nazism sets up an important frame for Wolf ’s text, since like
the two Romanian narratives and the two Bolivian narratives, the two
“German” narratives in the volume have been positioned adjacent to one
another. The two writers, born in the same year, had established them-
selves in different discursive contexts: while Wolf was a prominent figure
in the East German literary institution, Enzensberger was a vocal West
German public figure and was involved with the politicised literary group
Gruppe 47. Their author-functions, each differently shaped by its posi-
tion in East or West German discourse surrounding the regeneration of
German literature after the Second World War, are brought together here
to form a coherent German pair. This strengthens an implied continuity
between the totalitarian regimes of the Third Reich and the GDR, draw-
ing a misleading parallel, for example, between the risks taken by writers
opposing the regime.16 The narrator’s inability to ignore her observers
and her plagued attempts to carry on with life as normal seem to affirm
Enzensberger’s prophecy that, if ignored, the legacy of a violent his-
tory will ultimately result in human cost, perhaps like that reflected in
McPherson’s narrative or Ellsen’s photographs. The positioning of Wolf ’s
text after Enzensberger’s essay suggests that the tensions in her narrative
signal the underlying potential for an outbreak of violence that could lead
things to go “wrong”.
Following Wolf ’s text, the central section of Granta 33 returns to
narratives of revolution and pathos with another set of two contribu-
tions; this time, the pairing is made explicit by their titles. Ryszard
Kapuściński’s account of the disorganised military coup and struggle for
power in dictatorship-threatened Bolivia in 1970 is followed immedi-
ately by Ferdinando Scianna’s photography of a mining settlement in the
16
Wolf ’s biographer Magenau (2002: 408) comments on the German “totalitarianism debate”
sparked by the Literaturstreit and notes that “[m]anche Vergangenheitsbewältigungsexegeten
schienen nun an der DDR nachholen zu wollen, was die Bundesrepublik gegenüber dem Dritten
Reich versäumt hatte”. [“Some exegetes focused on confronting the German past now seemed to
want to use the GDR to make up for the FRG’s failure to deal with (the legacy of ) the Third
Reich.”] Magenau’s comment suggests that in the German debate too, though for different reasons,
the two states were sometimes conflated by critics of the GDR’s writers.
189
ountains, 20 years later (the figure of the miner sets up another inter-
m
textual link, to MacPherson’s lead contribution). The simplicity and isola-
tion of the settlement shown in the photographs is framed by an opening
paragraph that links the falling price of tungsten to the increasing vulner-
ability of this lifestyle, and to the fear of the miners for the continuation
of their livelihood. Following immediately on from Kapuściński’s narra-
tive, this economic instability is framed as a consequence of the military
junta. The life-or-death situation of the miners in the photographs, and
of the rebels whose uprising and its violent end are noted at the end
of Kapuściński’s piece, retrospectively emphasise the relative comfort in
which Wolf ’s narrator finds herself: she plays games with herself, waves
at her observers and jokingly pretends to talk in code on the telephone.
This contrast with the violence depicted by other narratives in the vol-
ume establishes Wolf ’s story as one of domesticated victimhood, closer to
home and not as threatening as that seen elsewhere.
The next two items in the volume, Isabel Allende’s and Bill Roorbach’s
narratives, do not explicitly confront the question of “What Went
Wrong”. Allende’s name is heavy with political implication, particu-
larly in the context of the post-socialist violence that frames the vol-
ume, but her story is a light-hearted narrative of how the exuberant
circus owner Horacio Fortunato courts and eventually wins the heart
of Patricia Zimmerman, a haughty aristocrat. Roorbach’s nostalgic
memories of his summers with his lover Juliet follow on from Allende’s
imaginative escapism, and the two pieces offer an idyllic contrast to
the desolation and anxiety of earlier narratives. Gunesekera’s piece, the
penultimate item, reasserts the violence and foreboding of earlier con-
tributions with its depiction of an uneasy master/servant relationship
in the context of the Sri Lankan civil war, framed at the opening by a
photograph of a boy holding a machine gun; however, it remains one
degree removed from explicit reportage and continues the tendency
towards (auto)fiction in this second half of the magazine. Martin Amis
brings the volume to a close with a fictional narrative that aptly ques-
tions the inherent link between the temporal organisation and the cau-
sality of events, showing how they may take on new meaning when
arranged in a different order. In Amis’s story, reality is manipulated
by perspective, revisiting Enzensberger’s theme of renarrating the past
and suggesting a cycle of suffering and victimhood.17 This ending to

the volume focuses the linear narrative of “What Went Wrong?” on the
circularity of events, linking the various accounts together as manifes-
tations of a universal narrative.
The “Granta Effect” on Wolf’s Anglophone

Author-Function
While Granta’s magazine format and the variety of personal and insti-
tutional narratives articulated in the issue suggest openness by inviting
the reader to infer from them an answer to the question of “What Went
Wrong?”, the strong authorial function of the magazine favours a closed
format in which the ordering of contributions lends them relative impor-
tance and foregrounds particular thematic connections. The author is
also repositioned as a collaborator and a commodity:
When an author publishes a poem in a periodical, its pertinence relates less

to the “author and his allies” than to the author's integration with the peri-
odical as cooperative cultural commodities. (Ledbetter 2007: 101)
Thus, the dominant institutional narratives of Granta’s discursive func-

tion and the accrued narrative of “What Went Wrong?” marginalise
Wolf ’s author-function in the framing of her text as she is integrated
into a cooperative relationship with the periodical. For Wolf in particular
as a translated author, the loss of resonance with the language or narra-
tives of source-culture discourse brings about a “reaccentuation” (Bakhtin
1981: 421, see Chap. 3, p. 64) of her author-function. The narrative of
“What Went Wrong?” circulates throughout the volume in a recurring
binary of oppressor and oppressed, framing Wolf ’s text as a narrative of
individual victimhood. “What Remains” is appropriated into a target-
culture institutional narrative of repression and consequent revolution
in Eastern Europe, in which the oppressive individual narrative of Wolf ’s
Amis develops this theme in the complete published version of Time’s Arrow (or The Nature of the
17
Offence, 1991).
191
narrator is positioned as a prelude to the kind of violence and suffering

foregrounded at the start of the volume.
Whereas Wolf ’s status as a victim was framed in Germany as problem-
atic by a particular contextual narrative of the participation of the author
in German public and private discourse (and especially following the shift
to a new German literary context in which Was bleibt was published),
in Granta it was framed in a more generalised, supra-national narrative
of victims and oppressors, marginalising the specificities of post-Reunifi-
cation discourse that problematised Wolf ’s German author-function and
divided responses to Was bleibt. The contextual absence of post-Reunifi-
cation institutional narratives specific to the source culture that reveal the
specific complexity of categories such as Opfer [victim] and Täter [perpe-
trator], as well as the abridgement of the text, enabled her author-function
to be framed in the context of the magazine as a narrative of victimhood.
Meanwhile, the celebratory framing of the revolution in Berlin implied
the ultimate success and peaceful resolution of the German example. Wolf
is simultaneously framed as a victim and embedded in an institutional nar-
rative of a particular socialist revolution that has already reached a peace-
ful, democratic conclusion. Notably, she speaks for herself and is granted
a voice in the discourse of the volume, albeit through the almost invisible
translator, unlike the “other” narratives of Romanian and Bolivian victims
that are presented through the mouths and lenses of onlookers: Wolf ’s
access to a voice positions her as “one of us”. However, the marginalisation
of her author-function by the format of the magazine ensures that this
voice is conditional on conformity with an “editorial gateway”.
This discursive dominance of the magazine is upheld in the later peri-
texts to “Liberation Day”, a translated extract from Wolf ’s “Blickwechsel”,
in Granta 42 (1992). Taken from Schwarzbauer and Takvorian’s transla-
tion that was soon to appear in the collection published by FSG, the story
was also renamed (it is called “Exchanging Glances” in the FSG edition).
The accrued narrative of the volume, with the provocative title “Krauts!”,
frames its contents as an attempt to define and understand modern
German culture and identity since 1945. Wolf ’s text appears in an early
section called “Losing the War”; other sections focus on elements of
German identity as other, for example, exploring “the German character”
versus “the East German character”. Beyond Granta, “June Afternoon”,

also taken from Schwarzbauer and Takvorian’s FSG translation, was
published in Grand Street 43 (1992): the individual volume has no pro-
claimed theme but features feminist art by Sue Williams on the cover and
inside and contains stories about abortion and mother-daughter relation-
ships, poetry expressing female experience and images of female nudes. A
number of translated Wolf texts also appeared in issues of the academic
journal New German Critique during the late 1970s and early 1980s:
one example is “Selbstversuch”, translated by the academic Jeanette
Clausen and appearing in the “Fiction” section of a special feminist issue
of NGC in 1978—“Self-experiment: Appendix to a Report” was framed
for its predominantly academic readership by Helen Fehervary’s and Sara
Lennox’s introduction, which contextualised the story and its focus on
female experience in the discourse of a socialist state that claimed equal
rights as a prerequisite.18 These instances of periodical publication sug-
gest that Granta 33 is typical of how Wolf ’s translated author-function
has been reframed by the functions of various periodicals and the accrued
narratives of individual volumes.
As a translated author, Wolf has been more strongly affected by this
reframing than Anglophone authors who maintain a more consistent
discursive presence through public visibility and informal statements of
authorship (such as factual epitexts that ally them with particular narra-
tives or institutions), and who are therefore not so strongly dependent
on editorial gateways for the circulation of their author-functions. The
peritextual framing in Granta 33 shows in detail how the dominance of
an institutional function can lead to the marginalisation of individual
author-functions in the periodical, as abstract narratives are applied to
unify diverse voices under a common theme. In Wolf ’s case here, Was
bleibt is contextualised not by the source-culture narratives and author-
function that made it controversial in Germany by its relevance to an
abstract narrative and its contrast with the other collected items in the vol-
ume. The power to narrate the translated author-function in this instance
18
Other Wolf translations published by NGC during this period are her 1980 Büchner Prize accep-
tance speech “Shall I Garnish a Metaphor with an Almond Blossom?” (translated by Henry
J. Schmidt, NGC 23, 1981) and her 1982 interview “Culture is What You Experience” (translated
by Jeanette Clausen, NGC 27, 1982).
193
lies very much with the magazine, and not with the author or transla-
tor. Providing in some ways a contrast to this Granta example, authorial
narration through book publication assures the nominal dominance of
the author-function as the author and sender of the text. The peritexts
to Schwarzbauer and Takvorian’s translation for FSG, published shortly
after Wolf ’s 1993 Stasi revelations, do not so decisively marginalise her
author-function in favour of thematic or institutional unity. However, as
the following section will show, What Remains and Other Stories (WROS)
nonetheless reveals the peritextual management of the author-function
by the publisher.
he Publisher as Covert Author(ity): Farrar

T
Straus Giroux and Virago
With a history of publishing Wolf ’s texts in translation since The Quest
for Christa T., FSG and Virago continued to represent her after the
fall of the Wall and her Stasi scandal. A translation of Was bleibt duly
appeared in 1993, published simultaneously by Virago and FSG, in a
collection entitled WROS; the volume was republished in 1995 by FSG
in collaboration with the University of Chicago Press (UCP). The trans-
lations for the volume were completed by Heike Schwarzbauer and Rick
Takvorian, who had previously translated Wolf ’s Störfall (1987; trans-
lated 1989). Their version included Wolf ’s text without abridgements
and stays close to the syntactic structures of the German, replicating
the complex thought processes of the narrator; however, this sometimes
results in high-register or unmanageable English, which is avoided in the
Chalmers translation either through restructuring of the syntax or by the
omission of the more complex reflective material. The 1993 translation
also shows signs of struggle with some of the same challenges that have
faced other Wolf translators, such as the difficulty of translating “man”
(the Chalmers translation also falls victim to this in places). This sense
that the English text is not as powerfully expressive as the German is
also reflected in the epitexts: the writing was found by some reviewers
to be “clumpy” (Annan 1993) and “cumbersome” (Eder 1993) and the

translation “often wordy and unnecessarily dense” (Weil 1993).
The text of WROS is identical in the three editions but the peritexts
reveal interesting differences, both between the versions and in contrast
with Granta 33. As in the Granta version, the translation is framed by
the accrued narrative of the volume and by the institutional narratives
of publisher and author. However, in this case the publisher’s identity
does not itself visibly dominate the author-function. The peritexts to
the FSG and Virago editions frame the text primarily as a product of
its author, rather than as a contribution to a supra-authorial narrative
of publisher identity or thematic unity, as seen in the Granta series.
The collected texts are unified in this case under the accrued narrative
of Wolf ’s author-function, which meanwhile is carefully curated by
the publisher.
External Peritexts: Front and Back Covers
As shown by Granta, Genette’s observation about the peritextual role of

titles is particularly significant in the case of a collected volume, since the
title that draws together the items is not always identical to the title of
any one of the stories included. The title What Remains and Other Stories
achieves two framing effects: Firstly, it frames “What Remains” as the
centrepiece of the book, so that the title story remains the distinguishing
contribution to the collection even in the event of “titular drift” (Genette
1997a: 70), in other words the abbreviation of the title for ease of refer-
ence. Secondly, whereas Granta explores a link between literature and
documentary by framing fictional contributions in a combined narra-
tive with photography and reportage, the title of the published collection
clearly frames Wolf ’s writing as a “story”, that is, fiction. This echoes
observations made in the two previous chapters about the translations of
Christa T. and Cassandra reflecting an Anglophone author-function not
positioned in a relationship of truth with the writer’s personal narrative
that would frame her texts as revelation, and thus not so vulnerable to
criticism in 1993 following Wolf ’s revelation.
195
Fig. 5.3 Front cover design, What Remains and Other Stories, 1993. Design ©
Cynthia Krupat, reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Comparison with other Wolf translations published by FSG and

Virago shows that the cover designs of WROS were not prescribed by
series restrictions like those dominating the f ormat of the Granta covers.19
All designs show the title and author of the volume and an accompanying
illustration, but the positioning and size of these elements varies almost
as widely as the images used. The FSG and FSG/UCP cover designs
(Figs 5.3 and 5.4) foreground “What Remains”, using a smaller font for
the second half of the title. In both cases, the author-function is clearly
invoked on the front cover in connection with the title: in Fig. 5.3, the
large font size used for the title is repeated for Wolf ’s name, and in Fig. 5.4
the eye follows a Z-shaped path from the title in the top right-hand
A standardised Virago Modern Classics format, applied to editions of texts from the late 1980s
19
onwards including Christa T. (e.g. the 1989 edition), did not extend to What Remains.
Fig. 5.4 Front cover design, What Remains and Other Stories, 1995. Design ©
Toni Ellis and illustration © Adam McCauley, reprinted by permission of
University of Chicago Press
corner to the name of the author in the bottom left-hand corner. This
emphasis on Wolf ’s author-function is affirmed by the lack of a publisher
logo on the front threshold to the text. The publisher’s name appears in a
small font size on the spine and the back cover, deferring to the author as
the unifying origin of the volume.
The Virago cover also assigns the largest font size to Wolf ’s name, fol-
lowed in decreasing size order by the first and second parts of the title.20
Again, the author-function is clearly identified as a frame for the text,
although in this case the publisher’s identity narrative is also invoked on
the front cover, by the labelling in the top right-hand corner; the back
cover is free from marks of publisher identity. The relative discretion of
The Virago cover can be viewed at https://www.amazon.co.uk/What-Remains-Other-Stories-

20
VMC/dp/1853814172/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1462364732&sr=1-1&keywords=
what+remains+and+other+stories+vmc.

the publisher’s institutional narratives in all three editions is a contrast to

Granta, where the magazine’s authorial identity is ubiquitous and domi-
nates individual author-functions.
Apart from their shared emphasis on “What Remains” and on the author-
ship of Wolf herself as a unifying narrative, the three covers are very different,
although the US editions implicitly foreground details of “What Remains”.
Food and drink is a cohesive motif for the collection, and the comfortingly
familiar image of the teapot in Fig. 5.3 recalls the narrator’s breakfast:
Der Kaffee mußte stark und heiß sein, gefiltert, das Ei nicht zu weich,
selbsteingekochte Konfitüre war erwünscht, Schwarzbrot. Luxus! Luxus!
dachte ich wie jeden Morgen, als ich das alles beieinanderstehen sah—ein
nie sich abnutzendes Schuldgefühl, das uns, die wir den Mangel kennen,
einen jeden Genuß durchdringt und erhöht.21 (Werke 10: 227)
Food also appears at moments of crisis or climax in the other stories: the
moment in “Exchanging Glances”, for example, when the narrator’s joy
at finding an abandoned supply truck is haunted by the appearance of the
concentration camp prisoners, and the tense supper at the end of “Self-
experiment” when Anders tacitly challenges the professor to recognise
her new identity.
The FSG/UCP design in Fig. 5.4, the most striking of the three, depicts
a solitary female figure walking down a street lined with the watchful
faces of the houses. The dark brown and red colouring is gloomy and
oppressive; the size of the figure and the narrowing of the street as it
tapers away from her, where no sky can be seen, are claustrophobic.22 The
image of the street is reminiscent not only of Was bleibt, in which the nar-
rator describes the observation of her home and speculates about being
followed on a walk to the shops, but also of other stories in the collection.
Images of the street appear elsewhere:
21
“The coffee had to be strong and hot, filtered, the egg not too soft, home-made jam was desired,
rye bread. Luxury! Luxury! I thought just like every morning, as I saw it all standing together—a
never-fading feeling of guilt that, for those of us who know deprivation, pervades and increases
every pleasure.”
22
Skare (2007: 97–98) draws a comparison between the 1995 edition and the 1990 Aufbau front
cover, though the Aufbau design does not feature a human figure.
Die ersten Übergänge in die Bilder vor dem Einschlafen kann ich noch
beobachten, eine Straße taucht auf, die zu jener Landschaft führt, die ich
so gut kenne, ohne sie je gesehen zu haben.23 (“Dienstag, der 27.
September”, Werke 3: 382)
In meiner bitteren Schande trat ich auf die Straße. Ich spottete ihrer:
Schnurgerade Straße, höhnte ich. Straße ans Herz der Dinge …
Zufallsstraße, beschimpfte ich sie. Zeitungsstraße.24 (“Unter den Linden”,
Werke 3: 432)
While emphasising “What Remains”, the cover motif thus ties the con-
tents of the book together within a framing narrative of observation
and claustrophobia. While the image of the teapot on the 1993 edition
encourages identification with the author’s personal narrative as embed-
ded in a familiar context, this later design seems instead to invite sympa-
thy by offering a share in the author’s fear and anxiety. It is more difficult
to distinguish images on the Virago cover, but a background of jumbled
images and maps can be identified, overlapping with one another and
partly obscured by a translucent whitewash that gives the effect of a
scrapbook. A map of Germany in the bottom right-hand corner and the
measuring frame to the left of it stand out particularly, invoking an insti-
tutional narrative of German Reunification rather than the specific vic-
timhood of an individual figure, although the photograph of the woman
draws attention to the female author and her experience.
Moving from the front to the back cover, the 1995 version is an appro-
priate focus for analysis since it offers the most extensive blurb of the
three editions, rearranging and elaborating slightly on the prose from the
inside folds of the 1993 FSG dustcover. The back cover continues the
brown colouring of the front and is almost entirely covered with white text
that stands out against the dark background. In the top left-hand corner,
the category “fiction” is printed in orange: like the genre indication of
“stories” in the title, categorisation as “fiction” frames Wolf ’s writing as a
creative, if not completely imaginary, engagement with social narratives,
23
“I can still observe the first crossings-over into images before falling asleep, a street emerges that
leads to that landscape which I know so well without having ever seen it.”
24
“In my bitter shame I stepped onto the street. I scorned it: straight-laced street, I scoffed. Street
to the heart of the matter … Coincidence street, I berated it. Phoney street.”

ascribing less importance to the autobiographical element of the texts by

distancing the institutionally narrated author-function from the writer’s
individual narrative.25 This reframes the autobiographical parallels of the
stories, since their categorisation as “fiction” makes Wolf ’s exploration
of identity and selfhood a diegetic rather than a mimetic act: the narra-
tor is recounting rather than undergoing a process of self-discovery. This
shift in framing to emphasise the fictional rather than the visibility of the
authorial self is significant in the context of the Anglophone response to
the Stasi revelation, which did not reflect the sense of reader betrayal felt
by Wolf ’s German critics.
The blurb is preceded in the 1995 edition by a quote from “Exchanging
Glances”. In context, the quotation frames the narrator’s personal narra-
tive in an institutional account of post-war German guilt mixed with
victimhood, as the narrator’s sense of complicity in the plight of the con-
centration camp survivors (“the ragged”) manifests itself and disappears.
In isolation on the back cover, the extracted quotation invokes less spe-
cific narratives of deprivation and guilt:
Now the ragged would put on our clothes and stick their bloody feet in our
shoes, now the starved would seize hold of the flour and the sausage we had
just snatched. And to my horror I felt it was just, and I was horrified to feel
that it was just, and knew for a fraction of a second that we were guilty. I
forgot it again.
This frames the book in recognisable categories (“guilt”, “horror”) that

convey the strength of the narrator’s reaction but do not identify her
experience as specifically German. This apparent universality is contin-
ued in the blurb, which explains that the book “collects Christa Wolf ’s
short fiction, from early work of the sixties to the widely debated title
story, first published in Germany in 1990. These short stories shed light
on her work as an artist and political figure, and as a woman.” The cat-
egories of “artist”, “political figure” and “woman” in this latter sentence
continue the universalising narratives of the framing quotation from
25
Interestingly, Kovala (1996: 136–137) finds the opposite is true of the early twentieth-century
Finnish paratexts studied: these demonstrate an emphasis on biographical and social context, rather
than on the literary context of the writing.
“Exchanging Glances”. The reference to Wolf as a “political figure” per-

haps implies an Anglophone awareness of her public activity around the
time of Reunification: as well as WROS, 1993 saw the publication of The
Author’s Dimension, which contained some of her speeches and essayistic
writing in translation and included reflections on Reunification. A short
excerpt of Wolf ’s landmark speech from the Alexanderplatz demonstra-
tion on 4 November 1989, in which she encouraged East Germans to
demand change, had also been published in translation one month after
Reunification in the New York Review of Books (“A Speech in East Berlin”
1989), framing her as a figure at the heart of the German Reunification
process. Wolf ’s status as a political figure in this recent context frames her
as a voice of the people, rather than exploring the complex position of her
author-function between the narratives of subjective, everyday experience
and the institutional narratives of the socialist state. Again, this framing
of the author and her relationship to politics, detaching her from the
complex narratives of art and the state that were characterising German
discourse at the time, can be seen as both an effect of and a contributing
factor to the Anglophone response to her change in status in Germany in
the early 1990s.
The blurb implies that the book contains a comprehensive collection of
Wolf ’s short fiction over 30 years, concealing the inevitable selectiveness
of the volume. The vague reference to “What Remains” as the “widely
debated title story” is the only suggestion of the debates that surrounded
its delayed publication in Germany, and there is no acknowledgement of
the significance of such a narrative in connection with Wolf ’s German
author-function or at the particular moment at which it was published.26
The blurb goes on to mention three stories individually. Opening with a
summary of “What Remains”, the blurb affirms the emphasis of the col-
lection on its title story and thus on the statement of victimhood the story
is seen to represent. It recalls the images on both the FSG and the FSG/
UCP cover designs in its description of the writer’s ruined normalcy (the
teapot) and her self-consciousness (the street). This also recalls Granta 33,
It is relevant to note that the blurb for the cover of the 1993 edition was most probably written
26
before Wolf ’s Stasi revelation and therefore might not be expected to include reference to it; how-
ever, the FSG/Chicago edition was first published in 1995, making the ongoing use of this euphe-
mistic reference to the scandal significant.
201
positioning the author-narrator of the stories in relation to an abstract

binary of persecutor and victim and framing an “other” as perpetrator
in the narrator’s personal narrative. While in “What Remains” the Stasi
destroy the writer’s normalcy, in “Exchanging Glances”, the second text
selected by the blurb, the Russian Army pursues the young narrator and
her family. The earlier quotation is now contextualised, but again, there
is no indication of the contested status of Wolf ’s victim narrative. Finally,
highlighting “The New Life and Opinions of a Tomcat”, the blurb draws
for interpretation on a narrative of totalitarianism that elides differences
between the Third Reich and the GDR, as seen in some of the framing of
the Granta translation. This generalised framing of Wolf ’s satirical story
not only disregards the particularity of the GDR context but invokes a
narrative of totalitarian states in which the persecuted or dissident writer
is framed as a heroic victim.
The blurb offers a selective overview of the stories within the volume
in terms of the abstract concepts with which they engage, accessible to
the target-language reader because these frames of reference seem to
reach beyond the national specificity of (East) German institutional
narratives. As the title story and as a constantly foregrounded focus of
the collection, “What Remains” is framed as emblematic of these. The
instability of the translated author-function embodied in WROS and
particularly its title story is visible in the concluding sentence, which
assures the reader that “encounters with topics ranging from sexual
politics to the nature of memory, these unpretentious, and sometimes
chilling, stories are a fascinating introduction to Wolf ’s work”. Again,
framing by selected recognisable institutional and abstract narratives
such as “sexual politics” encourages the Anglophone reader to look
beyond (or to overlook) the specific East German narratives that have
contextualised Wolf ’s writing.
Most significantly, this final section of the blurb frames the book as an
introduction to Wolf ’s writing. The publication of an “introductory” col-
lection of Wolf ’s texts after more than 20 years of publication as an inter-
national author could be read as an indication of the instability of Wolf ’s
translated author-function, requiring rebirth after the four-year gap since
the publication of Accident and the troubled debates of Reunification;
however, since Granta’s approach to the framing of Wolf ’s authorship
in 1992 implies that she needs no introduction, another reading might

be that her Anglophone author-function survived these debates to invite
a fresh surge of interest, or even that her public participation in the
discourse of Reunification had drawn attention to her in new ways (e.g.
as a political figure). In any event, the conceptualisation of the book as an
introduction, especially in the absence of explanatory notes, implies the
accessibility of Wolf ’s “short fiction”. This assumption belies the thematic
and structural complexity of the texts, as well as masking Wolf ’s inter-
weaving of fact and fiction in her subjective-authentic aesthetic.
The back cover demonstrates the fluidity of boundaries between dif-
ferent spaces at the threshold to the text, as epitexts become peritexts in
the quotations from reviews that are printed on the published volume.
The 1995 blurb is followed by two quotations from reviewers notable as
author and journalist Herbert Mitgang, a regular reviewer for the New
York Times, and novelist Mary Gordon. The favourable comments of
both reviewers, framed by the discursive functions of their authors, act as
consecrating frames for Wolf ’s writing. Tracing Wolf ’s author-function
right back to the (German) publication of Christa T., Mitgang frames her
as both a “serious author” and a writer who uses her own life to engage
with “universal themes”. Wolf ’s personal narrative is linked to her writ-
ing, but is framed as a vehicle for abstract concepts rather than under-
stood as an essential tool through which the she engages with socialism
and the recent past. The “universality” of Wolf ’s concern about “controls
upon human freedom” masks the specificity of the freedom she hopes
to discover within socialist narratives. Mary Gordon states that “Christa
Wolf has set herself nothing less than the task of exploring what it is to
be a conscious human being alive in a moment of history”, drawing on
the universal category of “human being” and positioning Wolf in narra-
tives of experience that, again, seem to transcend national boundaries to
marginalise the specificity of the East German context.
This shift to the universal as context is mirrored by the five quoted
remarks on the back cover to the 1993 edition, grouped together as “Praise
for Christa Wolf”. One for each of Wolf’s previous texts published by FSG,
they frame the new publication as part of a sustained authorial narrative
of “grace and humility”, “vision”, “convincing narrative”, “[her] search for
essential human freedom” and “things articulately left unsaid”. This last

comment is a particularly striking contrast to the German criticism of Wolf

precisely for things not said, and again reflects differences at the heart of
German- and English-language readings of her texts. As in the later edition,
the names of well-known reviewers such as Ernst Pawel and writer Marilyn
French add their own implicit endorsement of Wolf ’s author-function. The
ostensibly universal, humanist frame established by the reviewers quoted in
both editions contributes to the familiarity (and therefore acceptability) of
the narratives in which Wolf’s author-function is framed by the peritexts.
At the bottom of the 1995 back cover, a small paragraph contextualises
the book in Wolf ’s authorial narrative: “Christa Wolf ’s novels include
Accident and The Quest for Christa T. The Author’s Dimension is avail-
able in paperback from the University of Chicago Press.”27 Here, unlike
in Granta, Wolf ’s Anglophone author-function is defined by her most
recently published translation and by her first internationally successful
text. These two titles perform a double commercial function by endorsing
the text in hand for readers already familiar with Wolf ’s author-function
as well as promoting these earlier texts to those unfamiliar with Wolf ’s
writing, for whom the volume is truly introductory. The note continues:
“Wolf has worked as an editor, lecturer, journalist and critic. She lives
in Berlin.” These are the only biographical details or credentials offered,
and it is notable that a volume conceived as an “introduction” to the
author’s work does not include a reference to the recent literary and social
debates that had recontextualised the writer’s personal narrative. The
selective omission of the Literaturstreit and Stasi scandal frames Wolf ’s
author-function as uncontested. It also reinforces the distancing of the
writer’s personal narrative from the institutionally circulated narrative of
her authorship. The 1993 dust cover also shows a photograph of Wolf in
which she gazes out at the viewer: this image acts as affirmation of the
author-function, with the writer seeming to claim authorship over the
book by making eye contact with the reader.28
The Virago edition differs significantly from the two FSG editions
in the content of its blurb and is framed by an endorsement from
27
The 1993 edition includes a similar paragraph on the inside of the dust cover: “Christa Wolf ’s
novels include Accident, which was a bestseller in Germany, and The Quest for Christa T. She has
worked as an editor, lecturer, journalist and critic. She lives in Berlin.”
28
The photograph is dated by Böthig as 1980 (2004: 123).
Susan Sontag, whose own prominent Anglophone author-function as

a public female intellectual and writer suggests a dimension to Wolf ’s
writing that goes beyond fiction and adds emphasis to her descrip-
tion of Wolf: “Concentrated, fervent, authoritative … a writer who
can do almost anything”. Like the 1995 FSG/UCP blurb, Virago
identifies “What Remains” as a contested text but omits to mention
the Stasi controversy, identifying Wolf ’s fall from favour with the
delayed publication of the text and going no further to elaborate on
the debates. Foregrounding some of the same narratives as the FSG
editions (memory and self-consciousness, irony and identity), Virago
replaces the generalising “totalitarian” frame with the concept of the
Kafkaesque, drawing on another author-function from the canon of
German-language literature to frame the writer-narrator as “trapped”
in disorientating and menacing bureaucracy. While the 1995 US edi-
tion offers an introduction to her work, Wolf is described here as “this
most celebrated of East European writers” and the collection as “long-
awaited”: like the advertising in Granta which invites a particular kind
of reader, then, this framing strategy seeks to create the expectation
that Wolf ’s stories are deserving of publication, as much as it responds
to it. This guidance of the reader is consolidated in all three editions
by the publisher’s internal peritexts.
The Publisher’s Internal Peritexts
While the Granta format leaves no page blank, WROS includes very little
material to “fill the white space”. In the 1993 and 1995 FSG editions,
the first textual material is found on the verso of the flyleaf, where books
“Also by Christa Wolf ” are listed as The Quest for Christa T., Patterns of
Childhood (A Model Childhood), No Place on Earth, Cassandra, Accident:
A Day’s News and The Author’s Dimension: Selected Essays. Genette com-
ments that the list of the author’s other work is “a sort of personal cat-
alogue of the author’s” which can nonetheless also strongly reflect the
publisher’s interests (1997a: 100), and it is notable that this list omits
Divided Heaven, continuing after the end of the Cold War the exclusion
(whether by intention or by oversight) of Wolf ’s earliest translated text

from her Anglophone author-function.29 The Reader and the Writer, Joan
Becker’s translation of Lesen und Schreiben (1977, Seven Seas), is also
omitted. The exclusion of these two texts, whose promotion is not in the
commercial interest of the publisher, shows how the publishing institu-
tion intervenes in the author-function even while appearing to let the
author’s texts speak for themselves.
In the Virago edition, Wolf ’s work is listed twice: first, the flyleaf con-
tains a biographical note that lists her previous texts (without Der geteilte
Himmel but including Moskauer Novelle) with notes of her recognition by
public institutions, as well as her residence at the Getty Center in California
from 1992 to 1993, which embeds her authorship in Anglophone liter-
ary discourse. This ends with a list of Wolf ’s texts published by Virago,
making explicit the publisher’s interest in promoting the author’s previous
work. At the back of the book and under the title “Also by Christa Wolf ”,
Accident, A Model Childhood and Christa T. are allocated a page each for
a promotional précis. Each of these is headed by a quoted review from a
British publication and ends with an appeal to institutional or abstract nar-
ratives of visionary writing, memory and humanity already invoked on the
Virago back cover and in the FSG editions as key characteristics of Wolf ’s
author-function. The recurring categories in these peritextual frames are
a strong argument for the legitimacy of reference to an “Anglophone”
author-function, showing the consistency with which voices in the UK
and the USA have selected frames for Wolf ’s authorship. Both the FSG
and the Virago peritexts demonstrate that, although the author-function
is granted more prominence than in Granta, this discursive circulation is
nonetheless negotiated by the publisher.
The collection has two title pages, following common conventions in
book publishing. The first, on the recto following the flyleaf, shows only
the “half title” (Genette 1997a: 32) “What Remains”, emphasising it as a
focal point of the volume. The reverse of this page names the translators,
and on the next the book’s full title is followed by the author’s name, as
29
Peritextual exceptions to this trend, all from publishers other than FSG/Virago, are the earliest
British edition of Christa T. (Hutchinson, 1971), The Reader and the Writer (Seven Seas, 1977), The
Fourth Dimension (Verso, 1988) and In the Flesh (Verba Mundi, 2005). Divided Heaven is either
listed amongst Wolf ’s previous texts or briefly mentioned in a note on the author in each of these
four editions.
well as the name of the publisher in a smaller font. On all these pages,
and on the title page and first page of each story in the collection, the text
is indented from the left by the same motif of three thick vertical lines.
This uniformity recalls the formatting of title pages seen in Granta: in this
case the effect is not to draw several different authors into one accrued
narrative but to draw several texts into one narrative of authorship. While
Granta obliges individual author-functions to contend with the accrued
narrative of the volume and the institutional narrative of the magazine,
the publication of this introductory collection of Wolf ’s writing empha-
sises the institutionally constructed author-function as the narrative that
unites the texts.
Finally, the contents page of WROS suggests the ordering of the stories
in the book as a narrative of progression from “Exchanging Glances” to
“What Remains”. The order of contents (with German titles of the texts
added here for reference) is as follows:
Exchanging Glances (Blickwechsel)

Tuesday, September 27 (Dienstag, der 27. September)
June Afternoon (Juninachmittag)
Unter den Linden (Unter den Linden)
The New Life and Opinions of a Tomcat (Neue Lebensansichten eines
Katers)
A Little Outing to H. (Kleiner Ausflug nach H.)
Self-experiment (Selbstversuch)
What Remains (Was bleibt)
As in Granta, the spatial organisation of the contents (suggesting tempo-

ral ordering) frames particular stories as key points in the overall narra-
tive: the three cited on the back cover are positioned as the first, middle
and final items in the book, foregrounding them in the authorial narra-
tive to which the book claims to introduce the reader. The arrangement
of the texts does not strictly follow the chronological order of writing or
first publication (“Blickwechsel” was written later than the three that fol-
low it); however, the accrued narrative of introduction to and progression
through Wolf ’s author-function overrides the peculiarities of individual

texts and their publication and enforces a cohesive narrative of progres-

sion throughout the book. The almost chronological placement of the
texts, beginning with “Exchanging Glances”, in which the narrator is a
teenager, consolidates the writer’s progression through oppressive bureau-
cracy towards the feminist ideas in “Self-experiment” and final emphasis
on “What Remains” as the last of the stories to be written and the last
to be published. “What Remains”, having already been emphasised by
the title of the book and its separate title page, is therefore framed as the
(provisional) culmination of the accrued authorial narrative developed
throughout the earlier stories. Rather than a point of rupture and insta-
bility in the author-function, then, here in translation the text represents
a moment of closure and finality.
From this point onwards, there is no other peritextual material.
Unlike Wolf ’s two essay volumes published by UCP, WROS contains no
notes from the translator or publisher on Wolf or her writing.30 While
many of the peritextual elements identified by Genette are absent from
the framing of the texts in the volume, it is possible to see, even from
the few structures that do surround the text, that the narrative of the
publisher intervenes in the management of the author-function uniting
the volume, more than the reader is encouraged to recognise. It is a less
explicit dialogue with the author-function than in the Granta format,
where Granta’s discursive function and the accrued narrative of each
issue visibly contend with the author-functions of the contributors, but
it is an influential frame for the narrative of authorship that the reader
is invited to identify. While Mussell observes (2009: 100) how adver-
tising and similar material in the periodical prevent the reader from
“realising the conceptual limits of both organising structures and the
journalistic practices that sustained them”, in the FSG collection the
“white spaces” affirm the accrued narrative of the volume by offering an
opportunity to “fill in the gaps” of the narrative of the texts, controlled
by the peritextual frame.
30
As well as The Author’s Dimension with FSG (1993), UCP later published Parting From Phantoms
(1997): both essay collections are distinguished from Wolf ’s “fiction” by the presence of a foreword
in the peritext, in the first case written as an introduction by Grace Paley and in the second pro-
vided by the translator, Jan van Heurck.
“Other Stories” as Peritexts
The accrued narrative of Wolf ’s developing authorship is articulated and

affirmed by the individual texts in WROS their positioning in relation to
one another, suggested by their ordering in the volume, traces a progres-
sion from the post-war anxiety of “Exchanging Glances” to the narra-
tor’s self-conscious attempts to maintain normality in “What Remains”.
The selection of material for the volume is significant, particularly in
light of the implication that the collection is an introduction to Wolf ’s
writing in general. Moskauer Novelle (1961), for example, is similar in
length to Was bleibt, but is characterised by the same “messianic fer-
vour” (Buehler 1984: 70) for Socialist Realism as the reviews Wolf wrote
for the literary periodical Neue deutsche Literatur and is therefore not
surprising in its absence from the collection. As Wolf later noted, her
reviews from the period strongly und uncritically endorse party values,31
and Moskauer Novelle is the most orthodox of her texts as far as her
adherence to institutional narratives of socialism is concerned. Equally,
the prose text “Zu einem Datum” (1971) is omitted: not really a “story”,
it was written to mark the 25th anniversary of the founding of the SED
and explores the narrator’s discovery of Marxism through the texts of
Feuerbach and Engels, making clear the source-culture narratives of
socialism that contextualise Wolf ’s writing but are typically excluded
from her Anglophone author-function. Aside from selecting texts that
are not strongly characterised by East German institutional narratives,
the book also excludes her essays, interviews and speeches, in which
she articulates clearly the aims and challenges that have informed her
development as a writer. This selective focus on fiction is confirmed by
the “Also by Christa Wolf ” listing, which numbers five works of “fic-
tion” and only one of non-fiction. As in the publication of Cassandra,
where the lectures were framed as background to the “novel” and their
31
“Ja, ich habe Kritiken geschreiben—im falschen Sinne. Ein Kritiker, der Bücher nach einem
bestimmten Maßstab beurteilt. Das habe ich dann mit Entsetzen sein lassen.” [“Yes, I wrote criti-
cism—in the wrong sense. The kind of critic who judges books by pre-determined criteria. With
horror I then let that be”] (Werke XIII: 307). Wolf also looks back critically at Moskauer Novelle in
“Über Sinn und Unsinn von Naivität” [On the Sense and Nonsense of Naivety] (Werke IV:
438–450).
209
importance was diminished, here the publisher interferes “invisibly” in

the circulation of the author-function, directing the selection of texts
and the framing of the collection as fictional writing. Billing itself as an
introduction to Wolf ’s writing, the volume places a strong emphasis on
fiction and thus detaches her author-function from the social narratives
that embed it most strongly in the (East) German context.
The collection opens with a text exploring an early experience of ambiv-
alent victimhood in the writer’s personal narrative. “Exchanging Glances”
is an account of the 16-year-old autobiographical narrator’s experiences
as a Vertriebene expelled from former German territories at the end of the
Second World War, moving westwards ahead of the advancing Russian
troops and encountering reminders of her own mortality and guilt along
the way. As seen above, the blurb frames this narrative, shared by a num-
ber of Germans of Wolf ’s generation, in terms of a binary between the
fleeing narrator and the pursuing army that is reminiscent of the fram-
ing narratives of victimhood dominant in Granta 33. Thematic links to
other stories in the collection (e.g. the aeroplanes flying overhead, which
reappear in “June Afternoon”) ensure the echoes of this opening story
throughout the book, and its position at the opening of the volume
establishes the narrator’s flight and the “collision of childhood and war”
as starting points for the development of Wolf ’s author-function.
After this, “Tuesday, September 27” poses a challenge to the categori-
sation of the book as “fiction”. Wolf wrote the text, an account of a
day in the narrator’s life, for a project organised by the Soviet maga-
zine Iswestija: authors in various socialist countries were invited to note
their experiences on a specific day (27 September 1960). The planned
book never materialised, but Wolf continued to write a diary of 27
September for the next 40 years: her entries were published together
as Ein Tag im Jahr in 2003. “Tuesday, September 27” is the least sug-
gestively fictional of the texts in WROS because it takes the form of
a diary entry and includes details that correspond exactly to Wolf ’s
personal narrative, such as the preparations for her younger daugh-
ter’s birthday and the narrator’s reflections on a text she is writing
about a workers’ brigade at a factory (Der geteilte Himmel). However,
the framing effect of the volume encourages a shift of focus away
from the link between the writer’s personal narrative and the literary
narrative. The next text, “June Afternoon”, was written around the same
time as Nachdenken über Christa T., and its account of a family after-
noon in the narrator’s garden reflects an attempt to move away from
a totalising and objective mode of narration towards a subjective view
of events. These are ideas explored in Wolf ’s essay collection Lesen und
Schreiben and in particular its title piece (translated and published by
Seven Seas but not listed in the FSG or Virago translations), and which
are central to Wolf ’s search for subjective authenticity in her writing.
These two texts explore the integral link between the writer’s personal
narrative and her work, and between such personal narratives and the
institutional narratives in which they are embedded; however, their
framing as “fiction” and “stories” in the “destroyed normalcy” of the
collection emphasises the everyday life they depict, haunted by memo-
ries of war. Thus Wolf ’s Anglophone author-function can continue to
be understood to exemplify authorship as the creation of fiction at one
remove from social responsibility, and as a diegetic rather than a mimetic
approach to self-discovery.
The remaining texts before “What Remains” include the three stories
published as Unter den Linden: Drei unwahrscheinliche Geschichten in the
GDR in 1974 and as Unter den Linden in the FRG in 1977 (the title
story is named after the boulevard in central Berlin, which leads up to
the Brandeburg Gate and was home to several important administrative
buildings of the GDR). In this trio of texts, “Unter den Linden” nar-
rates a dream-like sequence of shifting identities and memories of the
past, while “New Life and Opinions of a Tomcat” enters a dialogue with
E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr and satirises the
scientific attempt to rationalise happiness. The gender-swap story “Self-
experiment” was written for a 1975 anthology of texts about sex change,
which also included writing by Irmtraud Morgner and Sarah Kirsch.
Commenting on her three narratives, Wolf explained:
ich hoffe, die “Unwahrscheinlichkeit” dieser Geschichten, ihre Verlegung

in Traum, Utopie, Groteske kann einen Verfremdungseffekt in Bezug auf
Vorgänge, Zustände und Denkweisen erzeugen, an die wir uns schon zu
sehr gewöhnt haben, als dass sie uns noch auffallen und stören würden. Sie
sollten uns aber stören—wiederum in der Zuversicht gesagt, dass wir

ändern können, was uns stört. (“Subjektive Authentizität”, Werke 4:

432–433)32
Wolf here invokes a Brechtian principle of art as Verfremdung, or estrange-

ment. This frame is excluded from the WROS peritexts by the application
of the category of fiction, with no more than a hint on the back cover that
the stories, with their reflection on the strange disjuncture between the
subjective self and social participation, are “sometimes chilling”. The unset-
tling events in the three Unter den Linden texts are quarantined as stories so
that the reader, while unsettled, is not invited to act on this response. The
mini-collection of the Unter den Linden texts is interrupted by the satirical
“Little Outing to H.” which was published in 1980 in the FRG and not
until 1989 in the GDR. Like “The New Life and Opinions of a Tomcat”,
the text satirises the institutional narratives of socialism and specifically
Socialist Realism, reframed as totalitarianism by the external peritexts,
while the categorisation of the writing as fiction defuses its political impact.
“What Remains”, as the last piece in the collection, is positioned as
the culmination of the narrative of authorship developed through these
preceding texts. Isolated from the narratives that contextualised Wolf ’s
GDR author-function and problematised Was bleibt at the time of its
publication, and from an institutional narrative of authorship as a posi-
tion of social responsibility, it is framed as a story in which the writ-
er’s life is semi-fictionalised in order to reflect on supposedly universal,
abstract concepts. Thus categorised, the translation does not boast the
same authoritative claim to truth about Wolf ’s personal narrative that
was destabilised in Germany after the revelation of her Stasi cooperation
and left Wolf ’s author-function vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy.
The conclusion of the text offers a hopeful ending not only to the story
but to the whole volume:
Why not simply sit down at this desk, by the light of this lamp, shuffle the
paper into place, take my pen, and begin? What remains? What is at the
32
“I hope the ‘improbability’ of these stories, their displacement into dream, utopia, the grotesque,
can engender estrangement in relation to events, conditions and ways of thinking to which we are
already far too accustomed for them to stand out and disturb us. But they should disturb us—said
again in the confidence that we can change that which disturbs us.”
root of my city and what is rotting it from within? That there is no misfor-
tune other than that of not being alive. And, in the end, no desperation
other than that of not having lived. (WR 295)33
Framed by the preceding accounts of the narrator’s flight from the

Russians, her struggle to write about the reality of workers’ lives, her
attempt at normality in the face of reminders of war, her escapism and
satire and her rejection of gendered roles, the ending of “What Remains”
offers acceptance and patient optimism in the narrator’s resolve to keep
writing. Coming as the conclusion to the volume’s narrative of develop-
ing identity and authorship, Was bleibt is framed in translation to signify
resolution and a sense of coming to terms with the writer’s identity. The
difference from the German response to the story as rupture and invalida-
tion of Wolf ’s author-function could hardly be more striking.
The Power of the Publisher’s Narrative of Authorship
The peritexts of the three editions of WROS show similarities to the tex-
tual thresholds of Granta 33. The institutional and abstract categories of
identity invoked in the blurbs to the three editions (artist, political figure,
woman, childhood, memory, totalitarianism, sexual politics, humanity)
frame Wolf ’s stories as accessible literary narratives for the Anglophone
reader, and the texts are presented as a coherent whole with Wolf ’s author-
function as the unifying origin for the collection. Each text contributes
to this accrued narrative of authorship and is contextualised by the other
contributions. Intervention by the publisher in the discursive circulation
of the author’s identity is also evident: in particular, the selection of cer-
tain texts for the volume, emphasis on fiction as a category and the focus
on the contextual significance of familiar target-culture or supposedly
universal narratives rather than “other” institutional narratives exercise
“ideological closure” over the peritext that contributes to the control
of the author-function by the publisher. Although less visible than the
This ending is notably missing from the Granta translation, which ends abruptly halfway through
33
Wolf ’s text.
213
institutional narrative of Granta, the commercial interests of FSG and

Virago as Wolf ’s publishers are still evident in the peritextual frame as
they “encroach on the prerogatives of the author” (Genette 1997a: 23).
Looking briefly beyond the peritexts, the reviews quoted on the cov-
ers of WROS corroborate the account of Wolf ’s authorship circulated
in the published volume. The epitexts offer a revealing contrast to the
peritextual space, with a stronger interest in Wolf ’s specific personal nar-
rative and her Stasi cooperation as a contextual frame, although in gen-
eral they continue to occupy the non-judgmental position adopted by
Anglophone commentators such as Eder (1993) and Weil (1993) during
the Literaturstreit. The scandal was ignored by Enright (1993) and Paley
(1993); Annan (1993) and Hofmann (1993) offered criticism of the
writing style in the translation, though not of Wolf herself. Meanwhile,
by intervening in the German Literaturstreit outside of the discourse
accessible to Anglophone readers, the “Das Kind” letter in 1993 revealed
the strength of the Anglophone author-function circulated in the peri-
texts and epitexts by the voices of literary and academic institutions.
By directly challenging the narrative of Wolf ’s authorship circulated
by her German commentators, those with the authority to narrate her
Anglophone author-function demonstrated its influence on the narra-
tion of her authorship elsewhere. The protestations of these Germanists,
whose own academic and institutional authority increases their authority
and control as narrators of Wolf ’s authorship, also disrupt an institu-
tional narrative of translation (Baker 2005) as a unilateral and neutral
transfer from source to target by asserting their own authority over the
interpretation of Wolf ’s writing.
isible and Invisible Authorities: Constructing

V
Authorship in the Peritexts
Wolf ’s comment to Grace Paley in an interview from 1983 expresses her
constant endeavour to engage in her writing with the tensions between
her personal narrative and the institutional narratives of GDR discourse:
One has to know the background of the whole development of writing in

my society to explain that this is not just a narcissistic occupation, my writ-
ing. I’m a person who is very strongly rooted in the society in which I live,
and what I usually write about are the conflicts between individuals and
the societies in which they live—and the society is always shown as a very
strong factor in the individual’s life. (AD 272)
However, the translations of Was bleibt have shown that the author-
function is often dominated by the discursive functions of target-culture
institutions and the accrued narrative of a volume in which the writer’s
texts might be included. The peritext is a site of negotiation, not only
with the dominant narratives of the receiving discourse and the accrued
narrative of the volume but also with the institutional narrative of the
publisher, whose own “ideological” and commercial interests must be
served by the publication of the text. With varying degrees of visibility,
the commercial and discursive interests of the magazine or publisher act
as a “gateway” for the identity of the author that inevitably controls the
narration of the author-function in the text and its surrounding material.
Although Wolf consistently emphasises the relevance of East German
discourse to the personal and institutional dimensions of her author-
function, the translations isolate her textual narrative from this context,
either by drawing attention away from its specific link to GDR narra-
tives or by framing Wolf ’s author-function in a disciplinary narrative of
fiction.
Echoes of the common division in Wolf ’s Anglophone author-function
between literary creativity and the relevance of political context are found
prominently in earlier reportage of the Literaturstreit. In the New York
Times, for example, David Binder (1990) criticised the mentality of tak-
ing sides that he considered to be typical of German discourse, where
literature was (in his view) unnecessarily framed in binary political nar-
ratives. This distinction seems to confirm the difficulty, for the translated
writer, of modifying her discursive presence in the target language. Wolf ’s
work as a journalist, essayist and lecturer, although acknowledged in the
peritexts to the Was bleibt translations, was for the most part not acces-
sible to the Anglophone reader, selectively reducing her author-function
to a fictional basis that is also reflected, for example, in the responses
215
to Medea. The dominance of social narratives imposed or favoured by

publishers in the framing of the text is also influential: in the periodi-
cal context of Granta, Wolf ’s narrator is reframed as a victim, while her
author-function is marginalised in the interests of the institutional and
accrued narratives dominating the volume; in the published FSG col-
lection, her author-function is assigned the role of accrued narrative,
imparting to the stories a centripetal (and sometimes misleading) sense
of unity and continuity.
The vulnerability of the translated author-function, lacking a con-
tinuous and authoritative presence in target-language discourse and reli-
ant on the intervention of publishers and translators, enables and even
necessitates the frequent reinvention of the translated author. The trans-
lated text of Christa T. illustrates some of the stylistic changes that have
occurred in the translation of Wolf ’s work, resulting in a shift away from
Wolf ’s mimetic, subjective-authentic aesthetic and a stronger focus on
the diegetic dimension of the text. Similarly, the epitexts to Cassandra
reflect a focus on the story to be told and a lack of interest in the critical
individual and collective self-examination that lies at the heart of Wolf ’s
writing. Following these earlier events in the narrative of Wolf ’s author-
function, it is perhaps little wonder that the translations of Was bleibt
demonstrate the ongoing impact of these shifts, in the fact that Wolf ’s
crisis of authorship in Germany in the early 1990s and the complexity
of her institutional position as a GDR writer did not engender a similar
crisis for her Anglophone author-function.
6
Conclusion: What Remains?
As Wolf ’s example demonstrates, authorship is a discursive construction,

articulated not only in textual narrative but also in the relationships
established between a text and the social narratives into which it is
received. What is more, the authorial function extends far beyond and
even outlives the writer’s personal narrative: Anglophone responses to
Wolf ’s death in December 2011 are witness to the ongoing narration of an
author-function, even after the death of the writer. British and American
obituaries outlining the main events of Wolf ’s life consistently identified
three texts as the key vehicles of her authorial identity: Christa T., as her
“most important work” (Webb 2011) and the one that established her as
an international author; Cassandra, as the consolidation of her feminism
and for some her best-known novel (Kellogg 2011); and What Remains as
the text that signified her resilience despite the German Literaturstreit and
a Stasi scandal that saw her shunned as a “stooge of the GDR” or at best a
“muddle-headed German idealist” (“Christa Wolf ” 2011). References by
German and Anglophone commentators to Wolf ’s destabilised status as
a “loyal dissident” (Binder and Weber 2011; “Christa Wolf ” 2011; Graff
2011; Harms 2011; Webb 2011), and in the Anglophone obituaries to

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40183-6_6
the feminism of Cassandra and Medea (Binder and Weber 2011; Kellogg
2011; Webb 2011), demonstrate the continuing relevance of selected
social narratives to the life of the author. The obituaries also reveal the
temporal and causal relationships into which her writing is sometimes
drawn with historical events such as Biermann’s expatriation in 1976, or
Reunification and the Stasi scandal in the early 1990s.
Wolf ’s example has shown how the translated author implicitly sanc-
tions the construction of her author-function by others, through depen-
dence on the discursive authority of translators, publishers, reviewers
and scholars for the continuing circulation of her author-function in
the receiving discourse. The Anglophone narrative of Wolf ’s author-
function that has been circulated discursively since her emergence as an
international author through the translation of Christa T. into English
in 1970 is characterised by the three significant shifts in framing that
have been explored here: the textual shift towards a unified narrative
voice lays claim to an external, individualist and authoritative vantage
point that is explicitly shunned by Wolf; translational epitexts exhibit
contextualisation of the author and her writing by abstract narratives of
universal experience and institutional narratives of target-culture femi-
nism; and specific institutional narratives of socialism that contextualise
her writing in a German-speaking cultural space are marginalised in
favour of abstract or institutional narratives that represent the inter-
ests of the discursive authorities of narration in peri- and epitexts. In
his seminal work on translation as rewriting, André Lefevere discusses
this reshaping of the translated literary text by two branches of target-
culture poetics:
A poetics can be said to consist of two components: one is an inventory of

literary devices, genres, motifs, prototypical characters and situations, and
symbols; the other a concept of what the role of literature is, or should be,
in the social system as a whole. (1992: 26)
Lefevere’s two aesthetic components reflect the systematic frameworks

into which the translated writer enters and which inform the textual and
paratextual presentation of the writing, thus also shaping the narration of
translated authorship as a product of the target culture.
6 Conclusion: What Remains? 219
Textual analysis of The Quest for Christa T. explored the reframing of

the subjective authenticity that is central to Wolf ’s aesthetic and thematic
concerns. The literary devices creating the “internal persuasiveness” and
heteroglossia of the German text, expressing the inherent subjectivity of
the narrative act and the narrator’s ongoing engagement with the “present”
past, are reconfigured in translation to establish narratorial authority, by
the positioning of narrator and protagonist in distinct temporal and spatial
contexts and by a shift away from an oral style to what Bakhtin would call
literary-artistic narration (1981: 262). The distinction between the writer’s
biography and the literary lives of her narrators and characters is made
clearer, contributing to an authorial narrative not so strongly marked by
the expectation of ideological “truth” that characterises the German com-
mentary on the author (explored only briefly here). Meanwhile, the epi-
textual framing of Cassandra demonstrated the considerable importance of
target-culture narratives of feminism in the framing of the text, character-
ised by a close alliance between Wolf ’s feminist ideas and the institutional
narratives of feminist groups, and by the challenge to a male-dominated
canon in the academy. The discursive authority of third parties such as
reviewers and scholars empowers them as narrators of the author-function,
particularly for the translated writer with limited access to target-language
discourse. In Wolf ’s case, this influential framing has helped to minimise
the relevance of the German institutional narratives that positioned her
as a perpetrator rather than a victim. Finally, the peritextual framing of
“What Remains” in two different publishing contexts, one marginalising
and the other overtly seeking to promote the author-function, revealed
the subordination of translated authorship to the narratives sponsored by
institutions that guarantee its circulation or to the accrued narratives of
particular volumes. The overall effect of this has been to lessen the rel-
evance to Wolf ’s author-function of narratives that frame her involvement
with the Stasi as particularly problematic, limiting censure of the author.
These English translations and their paratexts exemplify how the cir-
culation of Wolf ’s translated authorship has been dependent on textual
and discursive narration, not by the writer herself but by those with
the authority to narrate her author-function. Wolf ’s example demon-
strates the reliance of the translated author on the institutional narra-
tives of publishers and on the discursive agency of translators, and her
limited power to intervene in the translation.1 The reframing of the

author-function in new contexts has been highly significant in Wolf ’s
case, as her Anglophone author-function moved away from the role of
“moral example” assigned to her in German-language discourse and
demonstrated by the shift in public opinion about her in 1990–1993.
As a result, Anglophone framing of her Stasi involvement as an event
in the distant past formed a strong contrast to German reactions to her
revelation, which identified it with the narratives of guilt and betrayal
dominating reunified German discourse in the present; the Anglophone
author-function also led to an understanding of Wolf ’s collaboration as
a naïve mistake rather than a calculated deception.
Wolf ’s example shows that the re-voicing of the textual narrative and
the reframing of the author-function by target-culture poetics are inher-
ent in the translation of literature. Paradoxically, as the writer becomes
more well-known, her authorship becomes more fragmented as it is
renarrated in different discursive contexts. While Joan Becker’s 1965
translation of Der geteilte Himmel was criticised for its foregrounded
socialism and for the repositioning of the narrator as an objective and
omniscient voice, the more commercially successful translations pub-
lished by FSG and Virago also show how the intervention of discursive
authorities in text and paratext unifies the voice of the textual narrator,
excluding politically problematic contextual information in favour of
selected universal narratives (see also Summers 2014). While some may
feel that the American response to Wolf has been “simpler and more
balanced”, her Anglophone author-function is by nature no simpler or
more balanced than the narration of her authorship in East, West or
unified Germany. The translations, as well as archival material such as
reviews and letters, are rich in further evidence of the narratives at work
in the reframing and narration of Wolf ’s Anglophone author-function,
and show how these also change over time.
1
Unfortunately, it has not been possible to access Wolf ’s correspondence with her translators,
archived at the Akademie der Künste, which would have provided insight into her degree of
involvement in the publication of the English texts. My own personal correspondence with
Christopher Middleton, Heike Schwarzbauer and Martin Chalmers suggests that most had no
direct contact with the author, although in her foreword to Parting from Phantoms, Jan van Heurck
reports an encounter in 1991 and previous correspondence (van Heurck 1994: x–xi).
The three most recent English translations of Wolf ’s writing

demonstrate a much greater sense of how her subjective authenticity
might be replicated in English, particularly in the first of Lefevere’s two
branches of poetics. Luise von Flotow’s new translation of Der geteilte
Himmel (2013) offers a welcome contrast to Becker’s 1965 translation,
with a different translation strategy that maintains a fluid, shifting nar-
rative voice much more similar to that of the German text (Summers
2015). Damion Searls’ 2013 translation of Stadt der Engel or the Overcoat
of Dr Freud also comes closer to Wolf ’s style than the earlier translations,
imitating her incomplete and internally focalised syntax. The author note
on Wolf for the Searls translation broadens understanding of her texts by
describing her writing as “non-fiction, fiction and hybrids of the two” and
draws attention to the social critique encoded in Cassandra for the East
German reader. In Katy Derbyshire’s 2014 translation of August (2012),
too, the internal focalisation of the child narrator and the voices of those
he remembers from his past are reproduced without the tendency to
over-organise Wolf ’s prose or the consolidation of a division between past
and present that characterises some of the earlier translations. August is
also beautifully presented by the publisher (Seagull Books), with a muted
brown cover and large margins at the top of each page as an invitation to
contemplation; the cover blurb highlights the importance of the living
and lived past in Wolf ’s writing, and the physical appearance of the book
itself is subtle in its invitation to engage with Wolf ’s author-function.
As well as this shift in framing of Wolf ’s authorship, the recent transla-
tions also demonstrate continuity with the contextualising narrative ten-
dencies seen in the earlier publications. The GDR and its discourse, of
course, can only continue to move further away from the Anglophone
reader in the present: while the East German context of They Divided the
Sky is foregrounded on the front and back cover of von Flotow’s transla-
tion, it is also clear from the cover blurb that this is a distant, past set-
ting that is unlikely to exist in the consciousness of the target-language
reader (Summers 2015). In the publicity epitexts to August, Wolf ’s rela-
tionship with Communism is localised to her early writing: “Her earli-
est novels were controversial because they contained veiled criticisms of
the Communist regime which landed her on government watch lists”
(Seagull Books 2014). Perhaps increasingly, Wolf is becoming a “world
author” as understanding of the relevance of her East German identity

fades into the background of target-culture discourse. This is also reflected
in the importance given to her Stasi revelation, for example by the blurb
for City of Angels, which directly address Wolf ’s “shocking discovery” of
her Stasi involvement (significantly, implying Wolf ’s innocence by fram-
ing it as a fact previously unknown to her rather than a long-kept secret)
but focuses attention primarily on the book as “a powerful examination
of memory and a surprisingly funny and touching exploration of LA”.
A New York Times review similarly mentions Wolf ’s “albeit largely harm-
less” Stasi involvement in mitigating terms as context for the book and
makes much of the USA as the setting for the text to appeal to the poten-
tial American reader (Hammer 2013). Tellingly, another review com-
ments that “the book’s poetry should appeal to an American audience
even if the political context sometimes gets lost in translation” (“City of
Angels” 2012). The City of Angels note on Wolf demonstrates the con-
tinuing importance of feminist narratives as an interpretive lens for her
writing: Christa T. is described as a “feminist epic”, Cassandra as a crucial
text for Western feminists and Wolf herself as demonstrating “political
engagement and committed feminism”. The most recent translations
therefore show how each is marked by the discourse that produces it, and
suggest that while her translators have come much closer to an effective
replication of her style, the framing of her authorship in translation con-
tinues to prioritise compatibility with target-culture narratives, resulting
in a rewriting of her authorship.
arrating Authorship: Looking

N
Beyond Christa Wolf
While this discussion of Wolf ’s author-function has shown how the nar-
ration of her particular authorship has been characterised by specific
shifts in framing, the combination of social narrative with a Foucauldian
understanding of authorship provides the basis for a much broader dis-
cussion of the status of literary authorship in translation. Wolf ’s example
illustrates how social narratives characterise the circulation of authorial
identities, and how tensions emerge between the multiple and contingent
constructions of authorship as it crosses discursive boundaries. The narra-
tive and Foucauldian approach looks beyond the context of the individ-
ual narrative of the “writer”, to recognise the institutional narratives that
condition expectations of authors as political or moral examples or shape
the categories such as literature, socialism and feminism that are applied
as frames to the writer’s work, and the abstract narratives that underlie
categories of identity and experience. In particular, it is clear from Wolf ’s
example that institutions with the authority to narrate authorship are
crucial to the continuing presence of the (translated) author in discourse,
and that the power dynamics between literary cultures preclude a simple
distinction between a source author-function and derivative translated
variants. By way of a conclusion and in light of the analysis that has been
presented over the course of the last three chapters, it seems useful to
return to and briefly expand on some key observations made at the outset
of the study.
First, it is clear from Wolf ’s example that each different reading of a
writer’s authorship is negotiated by the dominant narratives of the liter-
ary discourses in which the author-function is received and constructed.
Where an author is previously unknown, it may be selected events from
the writer’s personal narrative or target-culture institutional narratives of
authorship, the novel or literature that inform reader expectations and
discursive responses to her writing. The specific influence of feminist
institutional narratives in Anglophone target culture has demonstrated
how the narratives of social movements can shape the translated author-
function through appropriation. As seen particularly in Chap. 4, shared
narratives invoked by the writer as common ground or a frame of refer-
ence for source-culture readers may no longer be recognised as such by a
target-culture audience with different cultural memory.
The writer’s position in source-culture discourse is also relevant, of
course: Gisèle Sapiro’s Bourdieusian approach to politicisation and the
literary field considers how writers towards the “autonomous” pole of the
literary field are those most likely to achieve international renown since
they are less deeply embedded in discourses specific to the source culture
(2003, 2010); Pascale Casanova makes a similar point, explaining that
“the writers who claim a (more) autonomous position are those who know
the law of the world literary field, and who use it to struggle within their
national field and to subvert dominant norms” (2010: 294). However,
while it fits with the reading of Wolf as close to the target-culture self
because of her perceived dissidence, this writer-focused understanding of
an author’s success in translation is certainly not the whole story for Wolf,
in whose case it is also the identification of seemingly non-contested,
supra-national (rather than nationally contingent) elements of her
writing that has contributed to her presentation as a marketable world
author. While her texts very much do embed themselves critically in
the institutional narratives of a socialist source culture, this context is
overshadowed in the translations and their paratexts by an emphasis on
the recognisable, “universal” narratives identified in her writing by her
target-culture advocates. Examination of the framing of Wolf ’s translated
author-function by abstract narratives reveals the normative reframing
of her translated authorship in line with a concept of a target-culture
self, for example in binaries of East/West allegiances: such categories are
interdependent with the cultural filter of the target reader or institution.
Wolf ’s example illustrates the vulnerability of author-functions to
reframing by target-culture categories of identity: she has been categorised
for example as a woman writer, a label that invokes particular narratives
as context for her writing. Where the author has already made a name
for herself in the target culture, these contextual narratives continue to
play a role but circulate more clearly around a central emerging strand of
the author’s individual discursive function. Wolf ’s developing Anglophone
author-function as a feminist and a teller of profound (or, perhaps,
weighty) universal stories has thus overshadowed readings of her writing
as an intimate and moral exploration of self. Different evaluations of the
author by Anglophone and German commentators on the Literaturstreit
and Stasi scandal reveal varying understandings of the relationship between
the writer’s personal narrative and her texts, and varying narratives of qual-
ity or social responsibility at the heart of the narration of authorship. These
differing expectations draw on established expectations of the category of
author within a discourse, on the dominant understanding of the role of
literature in that context, and on the accumulated author-function attached
to Wolf ’s name. In Wolf ’s case, an accumulated Anglophone sense of her
authorial identity helped to defend her from a fall from grace comparable
to the shift in opinion that surrounded her in German discourse.
A similar sense that source- and target-culture readers harbour

differing expectations of the author can be observed in the case of Günter
Grass, whose partial autobiography Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (2006)
was translated into English in 2007 amidst the debate about the moral
implications of his newly revealed service in the Waffen SS towards the
end of the Second World War. Like Wolf in the GDR, Grass had been
regarded as a mouthpiece for public conscience in the post-war FRG,
and he was denounced by many prominent German intellectuals as a
hypocrite following his revelation made in an interview publicising Beim
Häuten der Zwiebel. Criticism centred on the lateness of his revelation
and on its contradiction of the truth-telling that he had been advocating
through his literature for the last 40 years and that had contributed to his
receipt of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999. There are parallels here to
the aftermath of Wolf ’s Was bleibt and her Stasi revelation, not only in the
accusation that a late confession is worth relatively little, but also in the
difference between German and Anglophone responses: Neal Ascherson
in the London Review of Books, for example, commented that “it seems
certain to me that a quite large number of people, far from all of them
admirers of his work or his politics, were aware that Grass had been in the
Waffen SS but thought that ‘there is no point in talking about all that’”
(2006). His review of Grass’s book reflects not only a sense that German
literary discourse had been complicit in creating a Grass figure for itself
that was now being challenged, but also a much lesser feeling of personal
betrayal, suggesting the same distancing of the writer’s personal narrative
from the narratives of guilt that dominate German accounts of the recent
past and from the institutional narrative of authorship as a moral public
role that was reflected in the responses to Wolf in the early 1990s.
Secondly, the study of the mechanisms that construct Wolf ’s
Anglophone author-function has revealed the degree to which the trans-
lated author especially is dependent on particular target-culture institu-
tions for the selection, publication and circulation of her writing. Without
an enduring physical presence in the target culture and perhaps also hin-
dered by a lack of knowledge of the target language, the translated writer
is often not in a position to engage regularly with target literary discourse.
Even active participation by the translated writer and/or her translator in
target-culture discourse, for example through readings or visits, depends
for its assigned meaning on the institutional authorities by which it is

facilitated. Publishers, agents, reviewers and scholars all constitute pow-
erful institutional voices with the ability to shape the author-function.
Publishers have the power to select authors to represent particular catego-
ries; agents the power to promote writers to particular publishers; review-
ers to make comparisons and write creatively or emotively about the text;
and scholars to give writers profile through study or teaching and even to
intervene in public debates about the writer. This observation is highly
significant not just for the status of the author but also in the context
of literary and Translation Studies discourse focused on the agency and
authorial status of the translator, whose hard-won (and in some contexts
not yet won) visibility risks becoming a burden of culpability unless those
involved in producing, editing, consuming and critiquing translated lit-
erature recognise the influence of decisions made by others in the process.
The third and final observation worth revisiting here is the overturning
of the unilateral source-to-target narrative of translational influence. Since
any author-function is in some way a selective and unstable account of
authorship, the more obviously selective, translated author-function is by
no means subordinate to the source-culture understanding of the writer.
Instead, the tensions between different readings of an author-function
reveals the extent to which the author, and not just her texts, can be “rewrit-
ten” in translation. In Wolf ’s case, what could be seen as a compromise on
the author’s part (her contextualisation in the target culture by narratives
that differ from those she espouses) assures her of a position in Anglophone
literary discourse, in other words positioning her in an international liter-
ary field in which the English language occupies what Sapiro calls a “hyper-
central” position (2010: 420). The centrality of the English language to the
international or world literary field imagined by theorists such as Sapiro
and Casanova means that acceptance into Anglophone literary discourse
can act as a sort of insurance against domestic criticism. This target-to-
source trajectory of influence sheds light not only on the overt and covert
reframing of author-functions that is an inherent aspect of reception by
a new cultural space, but also on the workings of the world literary field.
Implicit throughout this study of Wolf ’s Anglophone authorship has
also been a call for literary and translation scholars to recognise new per-
spectives on the framing of the (literary) text. The analysis has explored
three main spaces (text, peritext and epitext) in which this narration of
the author-function takes place, and it would be possible to look even
further than this, expanding the boundaries of the text as suggested by
definitions of the paratext that include electronic or non-linguistic media
such as music (Hayles 2003; Stanitzek 2005), or into the realm of the
hypertext, which has the power to imitate or transform. Such mate-
rial was beyond the scope of the present study but plays an increasingly
important role in our experience of literature. The digitalisation of print
media has made it possible for multiple voices to narrate authorship
through editing or response, and the boundaries of authorial identity are
continually destabilised: Michael Heim has commented that
digital writing turns the private solitude of reflective reading and writing
into a public network where the personal symbolic framework needed for
original authorship is threatened by linkage with the total textuality of
human expressions. (1987: 215)
The social and technological reformulation of authorship further chal-

lenges the status of the book as a symbolic object (Landow 1992): this
opening of the framework of the text to intervention by multiple discur-
sive agents invites a discussion of how authors, translated or otherwise,
might themselves take advantage of this (Tuschling 2006). The explora-
tion of authorship as a brand, for example (Tuschling 2011), and the use
of marketing strategies that foreground particular categories of identi-
fication through media such as the author photo or genre designation
(Biendarra 2012: 28–43), raise important questions about control of
authorial identity, tying in closely to the discussion of the relationships
between writers and institutions that inform the author-function.
Thus, the analysis of Christa Wolf ’s Anglophone author-function
offers new insights into the discursive construction of authorial identity
in translation. Following a model for understanding translated author-
ship that recognises the permeable boundaries of literary discourse and
the contingent nature of the categories in which a writer’s texts are framed,
this case study invites a reconsideration of the status of the author in
translation. As the crucial point of intersection between the literary and
social narratives that formulate meaning in the text, the author-function
is constantly redefined by discursive agents and institutions beyond the

control of the writer, who compete with her for control over this narra-
tive. Wolf ’s example invites an interrogation of the categories that domi-
nate Anglophone literary discourse and determine the identities of world
authors, whose international visibility is often dependent on their fram-
ing within these categories. Most importantly, the demand to view trans-
lation as “a text in its own right” (Venuti 1992: 8) reveals the importance
of viewing the translated author-function as “an author in her own right”
and as a narrative bounded exclusively neither by a pre-existing source
nor by the limits of target-culture discourse. In Wolf ’s own words, we
might consider ourselves invited by the narrator of Christa T. to consider
what remains of the writer herself in the many accounts of her authorship
that circulate and compete with one another:
Einmal wird man wissen wollen, wer sie war, wen man da vergisst. Wird sie
sehen wollen, das verstände sie wohl. Wird sich fragen, ob denn da wirklich
jene andere Gestalt noch gewesen ist, auf der die Trauer hartnäckig besteht.
Wird sie, also, hervorzubringen haben, einmal. Dass die Zweifel verstum-
men und man sie sieht. Wann, wenn nicht jetzt? (Werke 2: 206)2
2
“One day we will want to know who she was, who is being forgotten. Will want to see her, she
would probably understand that. Will wonder whether that other figure really existed, on whom
sorrow obstinately insists. Will, then, be compelled to bring her forth, for once. So that the doubts
are silenced and she is seen. When, if not now?”
Bibliography
Christa Wolf’s Texts in German

Wolf, Christa. 1994. Auf dem Weg nach Tabou. Texte 1990–1994 [On the Road
to Tabou. Texts 1990–1994]. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch.
———. 1999–2003. Werkausgabe in 13 Bänden, ed. Sonja Hilzinger. Munich:
Luchterhand.
———. 2011. Bücher helfen uns auch nicht weiter [Books Cannot Help Us Any
Further Either]. Interview with Evelyn Finger in Zeit, 23 March.
Christa Wolf’s Texts in English Translation

A Model Childhood. 1980. [from 1984 onwards: Patterns of Childhood] Trans.
Ursule Molinaro and Hedwig Rappolt. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.
‘A Speech in East Berlin’. 1989. Trans. Henning Gutman. New York Review of
Books, 7 December.
Accident. A Day’s News. 1989. Trans. Heike Schwarzbauer and Rick Takvorian.
New York and London: Farrar Straus Giroux and Virago.
August. 2014. Trans. Katy Derbyshire. Calcutta: Seagull Books.

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40183-6
230 Bibliography
Cassandra. A Novel and Four Essays. 1984. Trans. Jan van Heurck. New York and
London: Farrar Straus Giroux and Virago.
‘Change of Perspective’. 1973. Trans. A. Leslie Willson, Dimension 6, Special
DDR Issue: 180–201.
City of Angels. 2013. Trans. Damion Searls. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.
‘Culture Is What You Experience: An Interview with Christa Wolf ’. 1982.
Trans. Jeanette Clausen. New German Critique 27: 89–100.
Divided Heaven: A Novel of Germany Today. 1965. Trans. Joan Becker, Berlin
(GDR): Seven Seas Books. (Re-published with a foreword by Jack Zipes and
bibliography in 1976. Evanston IL: Adler’s Foreign Books.)
In the Flesh. 2005. Trans. John Smith Barrett. Boston: Verba Mundi.
‘June Afternoon’. 1992. Trans. Heike Schwarzbauer and Rick Takvorian. Grand
Street 43: 11–27.
‘Liberation Day’. 1992. Trans. Heike Schwarzbauer and Rick Takvorian. Granta
42: 55–64.
Medea. A Modern Re-telling. 1998. Trans. John Cullen. New York and London:
Doubleday and Virago.
No Place on Earth. 1982. Trans. Jan van Heurck. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.
One Day a Year. 2007. Trans. Lowell A. Bangerter. New York: Europa Editions.
Parting from Phantoms: Texts 1990–1994. 1997. Trans. Jan van Heurck. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
‘Revised Philosophy of a Tomcat’. 1993. Trans. Nancy Lukens. In Daughters of
Eve: Women’s Writing from the German Democratic Republic, eds. Nancy
Lukens and Dorothy Rosenberg, 111–134. Lincoln and London: University
of Nebraska Press.
‘Self-Experiment: Appendix to a Report’. 1978. Trans. Jeanette Clausen. New
German Critique 13: 109–131.
‘Shall I Garnish a Metaphor with an Almond Blossom?’. 1981. Trans. Henry
J. Schmidt. New German Critique 23: 3–11.
The Author’s Dimension: Selected Essays. 1993. Trans. Jan van Heurck. New York
and Chicago: Farrar Straus Giroux and University of Chicago Press.
The Fourth Dimension. Interviews with Christa Wolf. 1988. Trans. Hilary
Pilkington. New York and London: Verso.
The Quest for Christa T. 1970. Trans. Christopher Middleton. New York: Farrar
Straus Giroux.
The Reader and the Writer. 1977. Trans. Joan Becker. Berlin (GDR): Seven Seas
Books.
Bibliography 231
They Divided the Sky. 2013. Trans. Luise von Flotow. Ottawa: University of
Ottawa Press.
‘What Remains’. 1990. Trans. Martin Chalmers. Granta 33: 141–158.
What Remains and Other Stories. 1993. Trans. Heike Schwarzbauer and Rick
Takvorian. New York and London: Farrar Straus Giroux and Virago.
Secondary Sources and Paratexts

Al Sharif, Souhad. 2009. Translation in the Service of Advocacy: Narrating
Palestine and Palestinian Women in Translations by the Middle East Media
Research Institute (MEMRI). Unpublished thesis (PhD), Centre for
Translation and Intercultural Studies, University of Manchester.
Annan, Gabriele. 1993. Clump, Clump, Clump, Clump. Observer, 2 May.
Anz, Thomas (ed). 1991. Es geht nicht um Christa Wolf: Der Literaturstreit im
vereinten Deutschland [It Is Not About Christa Wolf: The Literature Debate
in Unified Germany]. Munich: Edition Spangenberg.
Armstrong, Guyda. 2007. Paratexts and their Function in Seventeenth-Century
English Decamerons. Modern Language Review 102 (1): 40–57.
Arrojo, Rosemary. 1994. Fidelity and the Gendered Translation. TTR 7 (2):
147–163.
———. 1997. The “Death” of the Author and the Limits of the Translator’s
Visibility. In Translation as Intercultural Communication, eds. Mary Snell-
Hornby, Zuzana Jettmarová, and Klaus Kaindl, 21–32. Amsterdam and
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Ascherson, Neal. 2006. Even Now: The Silence of Günter Grass. London Review
of Books, 6 November.
Atwood, Margaret. 1998. Introduction. In Medea. A Modern Re-telling, ed.
Christa Wolf and Trans. John Cullen, ix–xvi. London: Virago.
Baker, Mona. 2001. Towards a Methodology for Investigating the Style of a
Literary Translator. Target 12 (2): 241–266.
———. 2005. Narratives in and of Translation. SKASE Journal of Translation
and Interpretation 1(1): 4–13. www.skase.sk. Accessed 4 Feb 2013.
———. 2006. Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account. London and
New York: Routledge.
———. 2007. Reframing Conflict in Translation. Social Semiotics 17 (2):
151–169.
232 Bibliography
———. 2010a. Interpreters and Translators in the War Zone: Narrated and
Narrators. The Translator 16 (2): 197–222.
———. 2010b. Translation and Activism: Emerging Patterns of Narrative
Community. In Translation, Resistance, Activism, ed. Maria Tymoczko,
23–41. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by Mikhail
Bakhtin. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holoquist, 2004 ed. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Bakhtin, Mikhail, and Pavel Medvedev. 1978. The Formal Method in Literary
Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics. Trans. Albert
J. Wehrle. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Bal, Mieke. 1981. The Laughing Mice, or: On Focalisation. Poetics Today 2 (2):
202–210.
———. 1985. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Trans.
Christine Van Boheemen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Baldo, Michela. 2008. Translation as Re-Narration in Italian-Canadian Writing.
Codeswitching, Focalisation, Voice and Plot in Nino Ricci’s Trilogy and Its
Italian Translation. Unpublished thesis (PhD), Centre for Translation and
Intercultural Studies, University of Manchester.
———. 2011. Translation and Opposition in Italian-Canadian Writing. Nino
Ricci’s Trilogy and Its Italian Translation. In Translation and Opposition, eds.
Dimitris Asimakoulas and Margaret Rogers, 161–181. Bristol, Buffalo and
Toronto: Multilingual Matters.
Bandish, Cynthia L. 2001. Bakhtin’s Dialogism and the Bohemian Meta-
Narrative of “Belgravia”: A Case Study for Analyzing Periodicals. Victorian
Periodicals Review 34 (3): 239–262.
Bardsley, Barney. 1985. East German Genius. Tribune, February 22.
Barthes, Roland. 1970. Historical Discourse. Trans. Peter Wexler. In
Structuralism: A Reader, ed. Michael Lane, 145–155. London: Jonathan
Cape.
———. 1975. Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative. Trans.
Lionel Duisit. New Literary History 6 (2): 237–272.
———. 1977. The Death of the Author. In Image—Music—Text, ed. Roland
Barthes and Trans. Stephen Heath, 142–148. New York: Hill and Wang.
Bassnett, Susan. 2011. The Translator as Writer. In The Translator as Author:
Perspectives on Literary Translation, eds. Claudia Buffagni, Beatrice Garzelli,
and Serenella Zanotti, 91–102. Berlin: LIT Verlag.
Bibliography 233
Bassnett, Susan, and Peter Bush (eds). 2006. The Translator as Writer. London
and New York: Continuum.
Bathrick, David. 1995. The Powers of Speech: The Politics of Culture in the GDR.
Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press.
Baum, Karl-Heinz. 1984. Genosse Marx, was ist aus uns geworden? [Comrade
Marx, What Has Become of Us?]. Frankfurter Rundschau. 8 March.
Beetham, Margaret. 1989. Open and Closed: The Periodical as a Publishing
Genre. Victorian Periodicals Review 22 (3): 96–100.
Behn, Manfred. 1978. Einleitung [Introduction]. In Wirkungsgeschichte von
Christa Wolfs ‘Nachdenken über Christa T. [Reception History of Christa
Wolf ’s Nachdenken über Christa T.], ed. Manfred Behn, 1–24. Königstein:
Athenäum.
Benford, Robert D., and David A. Snow. 2000. Framing Processes and Social
Movements: An Overview and Assessment. Annual Review of Sociology 26 :
611–639.
Benjamin, Walter. 1996. The Task of the Translator. Trans. Harry Zohn. In
Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1 1913–1926, eds. Marcus
Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, 253–263. Cambridge and London:
Harvard University Press.
Benn, Melissa. 1993. Rebel Within a Cause. New Statesman and Society, 23
April.
Bennett, Karen. 2007. Epistemicide! The Tale of a Predatory Discourse. The
Translator 13 (2): 151–169.
———. 2012. English Academic Discourse: Hegemonic Status and Implications for
Translation (With Particular Reference to Portuguese). Saarbrücken: Lambert
Academic Publishing.
Bennett, W. Lance, and Murray Edelman. 1985. Toward a New Political
Narrative. Journal of Communication 35 (4): 156–171.
Bernstein, Jutta. 1983. German Poets Seeking “Utopia”. Worcester Telegraph and
Gazette, 10 March.
Bernstein, Nina. 1984. A Call into the Future. Sunday, 2 September.
Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge.
Biendarra, Anke S. 2012. Germans Going Global: Contemporary Literature and
Cultural Globalization. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter.
Biermann, Wolf. 1990. Nur wer sich ändert, bleibt sich treu. Zeit, 24 August.
Binder, David. 1990. Despite All, German Literati Keep Jousting. New York
Times, 24 August.
234 Bibliography
Binder, David, and Bruce Weber. 2011. Christa Wolf Dies at 82; Wrote of the
Germanys. New York Times, 1 December.
Boase-Beier, Jean. 2004a. Saying What Someone Else Meant: Style, Relevance
and Translation. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 14 (2): 276–287.
———. 2004b. Knowing and Not Knowing: Style, Intention and the
Translation of a Holocaust Poem. Language and Literature 13 (1): 25–35.
———. 2006. Stylistic Approaches to Translation. Manchester: St. Jerome.
Boase-Beier, Jean, and Michael Holman (eds). 1998. The Practice of Literary
Translation: Constraints and Creativity. Manchester: St Jerome.
Boéri, Julie. 2008. A Narrative Account of the Babels vs. Naumann Controversy:
Competing Perspectives on Activism in Conference Interpreting. The
Translator 14 (1): 21–50.
Booth, Wayne. 1961. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Böthig, Peter, ed. 2004. Christa Wolf. Eine Biographie in Bildern und Texten.
Munich: Luchterhand.
Boyden, Michael, and Patrick Goethals. 2011. Translating the Watcher’s Voice:
Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao into Spanish. Meta 56 (1):
20–41.
Brake, Laurel. 2001. Star Turn? Magazine, Part-Issue, and Book Serialisation.
Victorian Periodicals Review 34 (3): 208–227.
Bridge, Helen. 2004. Christa Wolf ’s Kassandra and Medea: Continuity and
Change. German Life and Letters 57 (1): 33–43.
Brockmann, Stephen. 1991. Introduction: The Reunification Debate. New
German Critique 52 : 3–30.
Bruner, Jerome. 1991. The Narrative Construction of Reality. Critical Inquiry
18 (1): 1–21.
Buehler, George. 1984. The Death of Socialist Realism in the Novels of Christa
Wolf. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Burke, Seán. 1998. The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity
in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Bush, Peter. 2006. The Writer of Translations. In The Translator as Writer, eds.
Susan Bassnett, and Peter Bush, 23–32. London and New York: Continuum.
Campbell-Johnston, Rachel. 1998. Sweet Revenge. Sunday Times, 14 April.
Carr, David. 1997. Narrative and the Real World: An Argument for Continuity.
In Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences,
eds. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman, 7–25. Albany: State
University of New York Press.
Bibliography 235
Casanova, Pascale. 2010. Consecration and Accumulation of Literary Capital:

Translation as Unequal Exchange. In Critical Readings in Translation Studies,
ed. Mona Baker and Trans. Siobhan Brownlie, 285–303. New York:
Routledge.
‘Cassandra by Christa Wolf ’. 1985. Irish Press, 25 January.
Caute, David. 1967. Divided Hearts at the Wall. The Nation, 13 February.
Cavarero, Adriana. 2000. Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. Trans.
Paul A. Kottman. New York: Routledge.
Chatman, Seymour. 1978. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and
Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
———. 1990. What Can We Learn from Contextualist Narratology? Poetics
Today 11 (2): 309–328.
‘Christa Wolf ’. 2011. Daily Telegraph, 1 December.
‘Christa Wolf: No Place on Earth’. 1982. Kirkus Reviews, 15 June.
Christy, Desmond. 1993. Storyteller to the Stasi. Guardian, 4 February.
‘City of Angels or The Overcoat of Dr Freud, by Christa Wolf ’. 2012. Kirkus
Reviews, 1 November.
Cixous, Hélène. 1976. The Laugh of the Medusa. Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula
Cohen. Signs 1 (4): 875–893.
Claes, Koenraad. 2010. Supplements and Paratext: The Rhetoric of Space.
Victorian Periodicals Review 43 (2): 196–210.
Coalition of Women in German. 1983a. Newsletter 30, March 1983 [online].
http://www.womeningerman.org/?q=node/205
———. 1983b. Newsletter 31, August 1983 [online]. http://www.womeninger-
man.org/?q=node/205
Coleman, John. 1971. From Behind the Wall. Observer, 16 May.
Creeley, Robert. 1963. The Island. New York: Scribner.
Crick, Joyce. 1980. Establishing the Female Tradition. Times Literary Supplement,
3 October.
———. 1985. The Darkness of Troy. Times Literary Supplement, 15 November.
———. 1989. Christa Wolf and Virginia Woolf: Selective Affinities. In Responses
to Christa Wolf: Critical Essays, ed. Marilyn Sibley Fries, 91–107. Detroit:
Wayne State University Press.
Crites, Stephen. 1997. The Narrative Quality of Experience. In Memory, Identity,
Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences, eds. Lewis
P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman, 26–50. Albany: State University of
New York Press.
236 Bibliography
Cronin, Michael. 1996. Translating Ireland: Translations, Languages, Cultures.

Cork: Cork University Press.
Culler, Jonathan. 1975. Structuralist Poetics. Routledge Classics ed., 2002.
Oxford and New York: Routledge.
Cunningham, David, and Barb Browning. 2004. The Emergence of Worthy
Targets: Official Frames and Deviance Narratives Within the FBI. Sociological
Forum 19 (3): 347–369.
Dahl, Östen. 1985. Tense and Aspect Systems. Oxford: Blackwell.
Damrosch, David. 2003. World Literature, National Contexts. Modern Philology
100 (4): 512–531.
‘Das Kind mit dem Bade: Amerikanische Germanisten solidarisieren sich mit
Christa Wolf ’ [The Baby with the Bathwater: American Germanists Show
Solidarity with Christa Wolf ]. 1993. Zeit, 18 June.
de Lotbinière-Harwood, Susanne. 1991. Re-Belle et Infidèle. La traduction comme
pratique de réécriture au féminin [The Body Bilingual. Translation as a
Re-writing in the Feminine]. Montréal: Les éditions du remue-ménage.
de Wild, Henk. 1995. Bibliographie der Sekundärliteratur zu Christa Wolf.
Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Deiritz, Karl, and Hannes Krauss (eds). 1991. Der deutsch-deutsche Literaturstreit
oder ‘Freunde, es spricht sich schlecht mit gebundener Zunge’ [The German-
German Literature Debate or ‘Friends, It Is Difficult to Speak with a Tied
Tongue’]. Hamburg: Luchterhand.
Derrida, Jacques. 1985. Des Tours de Babel. In Difference in Translation, ed.
Joseph F. Graham and Trans. Joseph F. Graham, 165–207. Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press.
Díaz-Diocaretz, Myriam. 1985. Translating Poetic Discourse: Questions on
Feminist Strategies in Adrienne Rich. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins.
‘Die ängstliche Margarete’ [Anxious Margarete]. 1993. Spiegel, 25 January.
‘Divided Soul’. 2013. The Economist, 13 July.
Dölling, Irene. 1990. ‘Frauen- und Männerbilder: Eine Analyse von Fotos in
DDR-Zeitschriften’ [Images of Women and Men: An Analysis of Photos in
GDR Magazines]. Feministische Studien 8 (1): 35–49.
Drescher, Angela (ed). 1991. Dokumentation zu Christa Wolf ‘Nachdenken über
Christa T.’ [Documentation for Christa Wolf ’s Nachdenken über Christa T.].
Hamburg: Luchterhand.
Dueck, Cheryl. 2004. Rifts in Time and the Self: The Female Subject in Two
Generations of East German Women Writers. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Bibliography 237
‘East Germans Denounce Novel on Woman’s Travail’ 1969. New York Times, 3
June.
Eder, Richard. 1984. Cassandra by Christa Wolf. Los Angeles Times, 29 July.
———. 1993. Dance of the Marionettes. Los Angeles Times, 25 April.
Ehrenhaus, Peter. 1993. Cultural Narratives and the Therapeutic Motif: The
Political Containment of Vietnam Veterans. In Narrative and Social Control:
Critical Perspectives, ed. Dennis K. Mumby, 77–118. Newbury Park, CA:
Sage.
Einhorn, Barbara. 1985. Special Section: Barbara Einhorn Introduces Christa
Wolf. Journal of European Disarmament 14 : 16–19.
Emmerich, Wolfgang. 1991. ‘Affirmation—Utopie—Melancholie: Versuch einer
Bilanz von vierzig Jahren DDR-Literatur’ [Affirmation—Utopia—Melancholy:
Attempt to Account for Forty Years of GDR Literature]. German Studies
Review 14 (2): 325–344.
———. 1996. Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR (Erweiterte Neuausgabe)
[Little Literary History of the GDR (New Extended Edition)]. Leipzig:
Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag.
Enright, D.J. 1993. A Bruised Loyalty. Times Literary Supplement, 2 July.
Enzensberger, Hans Magnus (ed). 1990. Europa in Trümmern: Augenzeugenberichte
aus den Jahren 1944–1948 [Europe in Ruins: Eye Witness Reports from
1944–1948]. Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn.
Ewick, Patricia, and Susan S. Silbey. 1995. Subversive Stories and Hegemonic
Tales: Toward a Sociology of Narrative. Law & Society Review 29 (2):
197–226.
Fairclough, Norman. 1989. Language and Power. 2nd ed. (2001). London:
Longman.
Faull, Katherine. 2000. Christa Wolf. In Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into
English, ed. Olive Classe, vol. 2, 1500–1502. London: Fitzroy Dearborn.
Fehervary, Helen, and Sara Lennox. 1978. Introduction. In “Self-Experiment:
Appendix to A Report” by Christa Wolf, ed. Jeanette Clausen. New German
Critique 13: 109–131 (109–112).
Finney, Gail. 1999. Christa Wolf. New York: Twayne Publishers.
Fisher, Walter R. 1987. Human Communication as Narration: Toward a Philosophy
of Reason, Value and Action. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge, Trans. A.M. Sheridan
Smith. Routledge Classics edn (2011). London: Routledge.
238 Bibliography
———. 1977. ‘What is an Author?’, translated by Donald F. Bouchard and

Sherry Simon. In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard,
113–138. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
———. 1981. The Order of Discourse. In Untying the Text: A Poststructuralist
Reader, ed. Robert Young and Trans. Ian McLeod, 48–78. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul.
———. 1987. Death and the Labyrinth: The Works of Raymond Roussel, Trans.
Charles Rouas. London and New York: Continuum.
Fox, Thomas C. 1993. Germanistik and GDR Studies: (Re)Reading a Censored
Literature. Monatshefte 85 (3): 284–294.
French, Marilyn. 1982. Heinrich Kleist Could Not Last. New York Times, 10
October.
———. 1984. Trojan Woman. The Women’s Review of Books 11 (3): 13–14.
Fries, Marilyn Sibley, ed. 1989. Responses to Christa Wolf. Detroit: Wayne State
University Press.
———. 1992. Christa Wolf ’s “Ort” in Amerika [Christa Wolf ’s ‘Place’ in
America]. In Zwischen gestern und morgen: Schriftstellerinnen der DDR aus
Amerikanischer Sicht [Between Yesterday and Today: Female Writers of the
GDR from an American Perspective], ed. Ute Brandes, 169–182. Berlin:
Peter Lang.
García Vizcaíno, María José. 2008. ‘Cisneros’ Code-Mixed Narrative and Its
Implications for Translation. Mutatis Mutandis 1 (2): 212–224.
Genette, Gérard. 1980. Narrative Discourse. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York:
Columbia University Press.
———. 1988. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
———. 1997a. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Trans. Jane E. Lewin.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 1997b. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Trans. Channa
Newman & Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln, NE and London: University of
Nebraska Press.
Gentzler, Edwin. 2002. Translation, Poststructuralism and Power. In Translation
and Power, eds. Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler, 195–218. Amherst
and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press.
Gergen, Kenneth J., and Mary M. Gergen. 1997. Narratives of the Self. In
Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences,
eds. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman, 161–184. Albany: State
University of New York Press.
Bibliography 239
Geschiwster Scholl Prize Website. 2016. http://www.geschwister-scholl-preis.

de/start.php
Gewen, Barry. 1984. Writers and Writing: Eastern Lights. The New Leader, 15
October.
Gibson, Patrick. 1985. Attempts to Capture Elusiveness of Greece. Daily News,
27 November.
Girnus, Wilhelm. 1983. Wer baute das siebentorige Theben? [Who Built Seven-
Gated Thebes?]. Sinn und Form 2 (1983): 439–447.
Gitlin, Todd. 1993. I Did Not Imagine that I Lived in Truth. New York Times, 4
April.
———. 1997. Velvet Prisons. The Nation, 3 November.
Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organisation of
Experience. 1986 ed. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Gordon, Mary. 1989. Living with Hellish Dangers. New York Times, 23 April.
———. 1998. Skeleton in the Cellar. The Nation, 11 May.
Graff, Bernd. 2011. Eine Sozialistin, die im Sozialismus aneckte [A Socialist
Who Offended in Socialism]. Süddeutsche Zeitung, 1 December.
Granta. 1990. What Went Wrong? 33(Summer).
———. 1992. Krauts! 42(Winter).
Graves, Peter. 1986. Christa Wolf ’s Kassandra: The Censoring of the GDR
Edition. Modern Language Review 81 (4): 944–956.
———. 1994. The Treachery of St Joan: Christa Wolf and the Stasi. In Christa
Wolf in Perspective, German Monitor 30, ed. Ian Wallace, 1–12. Amsterdam:
Rodopi.
———. 1996. A Scapegoat, not a Sorceress. Times Literary Supplement, 4
October.
Greiner, Ulrich. 1990. Die deutsche Gesinnungsästhetik [German Politicised
Aesthetics]. Zeit, 2 November. Repr. Thomas Anz, (ed). 1991. Es geht nicht
um Christa Wolf: Der Literaturstreit im vereinten Deutschland [It Is Not About
Christa Wolf: The Literature Debate in Unified Germany], 208–216.
Munich: Edition Spangenberg.
Grutman, Rainier. 2004. Multilingualism and Translation. In Routledge
Encyclopaedia of Translation Studies, ed. Mona Baker, 157–160. London:
Routledge.
———. 2006. Refraction and Recognition. Literary Multilingualism in
Translation. Target 18 (1): 17–47.
Haase, Horst. 1969. Nachdenken über ein Buch [Reflections on a Book]. Neue
deutsche Literatur 17(4): 174–185. Repr. Angela Drescher (ed). Dokumentation
240 Bibliography
zu Christa Wolf ‘Nachdenken über Christa T.’ [Documentation for Christa

Wolf ’s Nachdenken über Christa T.], 79–85. Hamburg: Luchterhand.
Hafner, Katie. 1993. A Nation of Readers Dumps Its Writers. New York Times,
10 January.
Haines, Brigid, and Margaret Littler. 2004. Christa Wolf: Kassandra. 1983. In
Brigid Haines and Margaret Littler, Contemporary Women’s Writing in German:
Changing the Subject, 78–98. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hammer, Joshua. 2013. The Lives of Others: City of Angels by Christa Wolf.
New York Times, 22 February.
Harding, Sue-Ann. 2011. Translation and the Circulation of Competing
Narratives from the Wars in Chechnya: A Case Study from the 2004 Beslan
Hostage Disaster. Meta 56 (1): 42–62.
———. 2012. “How Do I Apply Narrative Theory?” Socio-narrative Theory in
Translation Studies. Target 24 (2): 286–309.
Harms, Ingeborg. 2011. Schwäche wusste sie in Stärke zu verwandeln [She
Knew How to Turn Weakness into Strength]. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
1 December.
Harper, Kenneth. 1984. Sampling Recent Soviet and Eastern-bloc Literature.
Christian Science Monitor, 10 October.
Hart, Janet. 1992. Cracking the Code: Narrative and Political Mobilisation in
the Greek Resistance. Social Science History 16 (4): 631–668.
Hartmann, Heidi. 1981. The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism:
Towards a More Progressive Union. In Women and Revolution: A Discussion of
the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, ed. Lydia Sargent, 1–41.
London: Pluto.
Harvey, Keith. 2003. “Events” and “Horizons”: Reading Ideology in the
“Bindings” of Translations. In Apropos of Ideology. Translation Studies on
Ideology—Ideologies in Translation Studies, ed. María Calzada Pérez, 43–70.
Manchester: St. Jerome.
Hayles, N. Katherine. 2003. Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink
Textuality. Yale Journal of Criticism 16 (2): 263–290.
Heilbron, Johan. 1999. Towards a Sociology of Translation: Book Translations
as a Cultural World-System. European Journal of Social Theory 2 : 429–444.
Heim, Michael. 1987. Electric Language. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Hermans, Theo. 1996. The Translator’s Voice in Translated Narrative. Target 8
(1): 23–48.
———. 1999. Translation and Normativity. In Translation and Norms, ed.
Christina Schäffner, 50–71. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Bibliography 241
Herrmann, Anne. 1989. The Dialogic and Difference: An/Other Woman in

Virginia Woolf and Christa Wolf. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hilzinger, Sonja. 1999. Entstehung, Veröffentlichung und Rezeption [Origins,
Publication and Reception]. In Christa Wolf: Werkausgabe in 13 Bänden, ed.
Sonja Hilzinger, vol. 2, 223–232. Munich: Luchterhand.
Hoffman, Daniel. 1979. Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing.
Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Hofmann, Michael. 1993. In the Doghouse. London Review of Books, 27 May.
House, Juliane. 1977. A Model For Translation Quality Assessment. Tübingen:
Narr.
———. 1997. Translation Quality Assessment: A Model Revisited. Tübingen:
Narr.
Hulse, Michael. 1982. Fleeing the Red Army. London Magazine, August/
September.
———. 1985. Against Heroes. London Magazine, February.
Huyssen, Andres. 1991. After the Wall: The Failure of German Intellectuals.
New German Critique 52 : 109–143.
Innes, Charlotte. 1998. A Woman Scorned. LA Weekly, 8–14 May.
Irigaray, Luce. 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter and
Carolyn Burke. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Jäger, Manfred. 1983. Ein kleines Bisschen Trotz [A Small Amount of Defiance].
Titel, June.
JF. 1985. Christa Wolf, ‘Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays’, [publication
unknown]. London, 28 January. Available in Christa-Wolf-Archiv Folder
L15, Akademie der Künste, Berlin.
Kahf, Mohja. 2010. Packaging “Huda”: Sha’Rawi’s Memoirs in the United
States Reception Environment. In Critical Readings in Translation Studies, ed.
Mona Baker, 30–46. London and New York: Routledge.
Kähler, Hermann. 1969. Christa Wolfs Elegie [Christa Wolf ’s Elegy]. Sinn und
Form 1/1969: 2251–2261. Repr. part in Angela Drescher (ed). Dokumentation
Kant, Hermann. 1978. Brief (mit Vorspruch) an Mr. Straus und Mr. Hill [Letter
(with preface) to Mr Straus and Mr Hill]. Neues Deutschland, 20 May.
Katan, David. 1999. Translating Culture. An Introduction for Translators,
Interpreters and Mediators. 2nd ed., 2004. Manchester: St. Jerome.
Kellogg, Carolyn. 2011. German Author Christa Wolf Has Died. Los Angeles
Times, 1 December.
242 Bibliography
Kindt, Tom, and Hans-Harald Müller. 2006. The Implied Author: Concept and
Controversy. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
Klocke, Sonja, and Jennifer Hosek. forthcoming. Christa Wolf: A Companion.
Berlin: de Gruyter.
Koerner, Charlotte. 1984. Divided Heaven: By Christa Wolf? A Sacrifice of
Message and Meaning in Translation. The German Quarterly 57 (2): 213–230.
Kollisch, Eva. 1984. Letter to the Editor. New York Times Book Review, 12
September.
Kovala, Urpo. 1996. Translations, Paratextual Mediation, and Ideological
Closure. Target 8 (1): 119–147.
Kuhn, Anna. 1984a. Wolf, Christa. Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays. Library
Journal, July.
———. 1984b. Telling the Myth of Cassandra in Feminist Terms. Philadelphia
Inquirer, 19 August.
———. 1988. From Marxism to Feminism: Christa Wolf ’s Utopian Vision.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 1994. “Eine Königin köpfen ist effektiver als einen König köpfen”: The
Gender Politics of the Christa Wolf Controversy. In Women and the Wende,
eds. Elizabeth Boa and Janet Wharton, 200–214. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
———. 2015. Christa Wolf: Literature as an Aesthetics of Resistance. In
Literature and the Development of Feminist Theory, ed. Robin Truth Goodman,
155–184. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Landow, George. 1992. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical
Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.
Latham, Sean, and Robert Scholes. 2006. The Rise of Periodical Studies. PMLA
121 (2): 517–531.
Lauer, Mark. 2007. DDR-Kulturpolitik und autobiographisches Schreiben vor
und nach der Wende: Christa Wolf und Günter de Bruyn. Unpublished the-
sis (PhD), Georgetown University.
Ledbetter, Kathryn. 2004. Bonnets and Rebellions: Imperialism in the Lady’s
Newspaper. Victorian Periodicals Review 37 (3): 252–272.
———. 2007. Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals: Commodities in Context.
Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing.
Leech, Geoffrey, and Mick Short. 1981. Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction
to English Fictional Prose. London: Longman.
Lefevere, André. 1992. Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary
Fame. London: Routledge.
Lefkowitz, Mary. 1984. Can’t Fool Her. New York Times, 9 September.
Bibliography 243
Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. 1984. Books of the Times. New York Times, 31

July.
Lemke, Christiane. 1990. Beyond the Ideological Stalemate: Women and
Politics in the FRG and the GDR in Comparison. German Studies Review 13
: 87–94.
Levine, Suzanne Jill. 1991. The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American
Fiction. St. Paul MN: Graywolf Press.
Littau, Karen. 1997. Translation in the Age of Post-Modern Production: From
Text to Intertext to Hypertext. Forum for Modern Language Studies 33 (1):
81–96.
Livesey, Ruth. 2007. Socialism in Bloomsbury: Virginia Woolf and the Political
Aesthetics of the 1880s. Yearbook of English Studies 37 : 126–144.
Loffredo, Eugenia, and Manuela Perteghella. 2006. Translation and Creativity:
Perspectives on Creative Writing and Translation Studies. London and New York:
Continuum.
Love, Myra. 1979. Christa Wolf and Feminism: Breaking the Patriarchal
Connection. New German Critique 16 : 31–53.
———. 1983. “Das Spiel mit offenen Möglichkeiten”: Subjectivity and the
Thematisation of Writing in the Works of Christa Wolf. Unpublished thesis
(PhD), University of California, Berkeley.
———. 1991. Christa Wolf: Literature and the Conscience of History. New York:
Peter Lang.
MacCarthy, Fiona. 1982. Nazi War Child. Times, 29 April.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1997. The Virtues, the Unity of a Human Life and the
Concept of a Tradition. In Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative
in the Human Sciences, eds. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman,
241–263. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Magenau, Jörg. 2002. Christa Wolf: eine Biographie [Christa Wolf: A Biography].
Berlin: Kindler.
Malpede, Karen. 1993. Cassandra [typoscript], Christa-Wolf-Archiv Folder 362.
Akademie der Künste, Berlin.
Marr, Andrew. 1982. Fiction. The Scotsman, 3 July.
Martens, Lorna. 2001. The Promised Land? Feminist Writing in the German
Democratic Republic. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Marx, Bill. 1998. A Crippled Version of a Modern Medea. Boston Globe, 2 April.
May, Rachel. 1994. The Translator in the Text: On Reading Russian Literature in
English. Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press.
244 Bibliography
McDonald, W.E. 1990. Who’s Afraid of Wolf ’s Cassandra—or Cassandra’s

Wolf?: Male Tradition and Women’s Knowledge in Cassandra. Journal of
Narrative Technique 20 (3): 267–283.
McGann, Jerome. 1991. The Textual Condition. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
McHaffie, Margaret. 1982. See No Evil. Times Literary Supplement, 4 June.
———. 1983. Meeting of True Minds. Times Literary Supplement, 13 May.
Meyer-Gosau, Frauke. 1984. Unsere lieben Frauen von der Literatur: Unsere
Christa [Our Dear Women of Literature: Our Christa]. EMMA 6 : 44–46.
Meylaerts, Reine. 2006. Literary Heteroglossia in Translation: When the
Language of Translation Is the Locus of Ideological Struggle. In Translation
Studies at the Interface of Disciplines, eds. João Ferreira Duarte, Alexandra
Assis Rosa, and Teresa Seruya, 85–98. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Mitgang, Herbert. 1978. East Germans Publish in U.S. New York Times, 11
May.
———. 1993. Books of the Times: Refracting an Author Through Reality and
Fiction. New York Times, 31 March.
Miller, Nancy. 1981. Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women’s
Fiction. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 96 (1):
36–48.
Min, Dongchao. 2007. Duihua (Dialogue) In-Between: A Process of Translating
the Term “Feminism” in China. Interventions 9 (2): 174–193.
Morgner, Irmtraud. 1990. Jetzt oder nie! Die Frauen sind die Hälfte des Volkes!
[Now or Never? Women Make Up Half the People!]. EMMA 2 : 32–39.
Munday, Jeremy. 2008. Style and Ideology in Translation. London and New York:
Routledge.
Mussell, James. 2009. Cohering Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century: Form,
Genre and Periodical Studies. Victorian Periodicals Review 42 (1): 93–103.
Niranjana, Tejaswini. 1992. Siting Translation. History, Post-structuralism, and
the Colonial Context. Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 1998. Feminism and Translation in India: Contexts, Politics, Futures.
Cultural Dynamics 10 (1): 133–146.
Noakes, John. 2000. Official Frames in Social Movement Theory: The FBI,
HUAC, and the Communist Threat in Hollywood. The Sociological Quarterly
41 (4): 657–680.
Nord, Christiane. 2011. Making the Source Text Grow: A Plea Against the Idea
of Loss in Translation. In The Translator as Author: Perspectives on Literary
Bibliography 245
Translation, eds. Claudia Buffagni, Beatrice Garzelli, and Serenella Zanotti,

21–29. Berlin: LIT Verlag.
Oberlin College Ohio Website. 2016. The Max Kade German Writer in Residence
Program. https://new.oberlin.edu/arts-and-sciences/departments/german/
writer-in-residence.dot
Offen, Karen. 1988. Defining Feminism: A Comparative Historical Approach.
Signs 14 (1): 119–157.
O’Sullivan, Emer. 2003. Narratology Meets Translation Studies, or, The Voice of
the Translator in Children’s Literature. Meta 48 (1–2): 197–207.
Paley, Grace. 1993. The Quest for Christa W. The Nation, 5 April.
Paley, Grace, et al. 1986. Let Us Now Praise Unsung Writers. Mother Jones,
January.
Parker, Stephen, and Matthew Philpotts. 2009. Sinn und Form: The Anatomy of
a Literary Journal. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
Paul, Georgina. 2016. Feminism in the German Democratic Republic: The
Discreet Charm of the Bourgeois Literary Tradition. Oxford German Studies
45 : 62–82.
Pawel, Ernst. 1971. The Quest for Christa T. New York Times, 31 January.
———. 1984. Prophecies and Heresies. The Nation, 22 September.
Pekkanen, Hilkka. 2007. The Duet of the Author and the Translator: Looking
at Style Through Shifts in Literary Translation. New Voices in Translation
Studies 3: 1–18. http://www.iatis.org/oldsite/newvoices/issues/2007/perkkanen-
paper-2007.pdf. Accessed 4 Feb 2013.
Philpotts, Matthew. 2007. Surrendering the Author-Function: Günter Eich and
the National Socialist Radio System. In Modes of Censorship and Translation,
ed. Francesca Billiani, 257–278. St Jerome: Manchester.
Polletta, Francesca. 2006. It Was Like A Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Polster, Heike. 2012. The Poetics of Passage: Christa Wolf, Time and Narrative.
Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Prager, Brad. 2004. The Erection of the Berlin Wall: Thomas Brussig’s Helden
wie wir and the End of East Germany. Modern Language Review 99 (4):
983–998.
Pratt, Jeff. 2003. Class, Nation and Identity: The Anthropology of Political
Movements. London: Pluto Press.
Pykett, Lyn. 1989. Reading the Periodical Press: Text and Context. Victorian
Periodicals Review 22 (3): 100–108.
246 Bibliography
Pym, Anthony. 2011. The Translator as Non-Author, and I am Sorry About

That. In The Translator as Author: Perspectives on Literary Translation, eds.
Claudia Buffagni, Beatrice Garzelli, and Serenella Zanotti, 31–43. Berlin:
LIT Verlag.
Raddatz, Fritz. 1993. Von der Beschädigung der Literatur durch ihre Urheber
[On Damage to Literature by its Creators]. Zeit, 29 January.
Random House Website. 1998. Author Essay: Margaret Atwood, ‘On Medea’.
http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0498/wolf/essay.html. Accessed 8
Feb 2013.
Rapping, Elayne. 1989. Coming to Terms with Terror. The Nation, July 4.
Ratcliffe, Michael. 1983. Past Master. Times, 17 March.
Redgrove, Peter. 1985. Cassandra’s Ghost. Guardian, 3 January.
Reich-Ranicki, Marcel. 1969. Christa Wolfs unruhige Elegie [Christa Wolf ’s
Unsettled Elegy]. Zeit, 23 May. Repr. Angela Drescher (ed). Dokumentation
Resch, Margit. 1997. Understanding Christa Wolf: Return Home to a Foreign
Land. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.
Rider, N. Ann. 1995. Reconceptualising Power and Resistance in the GDR: The
Example of Günter de Bruyn and the Socialist Entwicklungsroman. The
German Quarterly 68 (4): 357–371.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. 1983. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics.
London: Methuen.
Robinson, Douglas. 1997. The Translator-Function. Myriam Díaz-Diocaretz,
Translating Poetic Discourse. In What Is Translation? Centrifugal Theories,
Critical Interventions, ed. Douglas Robinson, 61–78. Kent, OH: Kent State
University Press.
Rogers, Pat. 1982. Public Life. London Review of Books, 1 April.
Rolston, Julie. 1984. Meditations on Nuclear Madness: Wolf Opts to ‘Speak the
Truth’. Los Angeles Herald Examiner, 12 August.
Rosenthal, Cindy. 1994. Echoes of a Contemporary Chorus. Kassandra: A
Symposium. Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 7 (1):
164–168.
Ross, Corey. 2002. The East German Dictatorship. London: Arnold.
Rotella, Mark. 1998. New Twist on Old Story Takes Blame Off Women.
Newsday, 13 April.
Rueschemeyer, Marilyn, and Hanna Schissler. 1990. Women in the Two
Germanys. German Studies Review 13 (DAAD Special Issue): 71–85.
Bibliography 247
Ryan, Judith. 1983. Christa Wolf. Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays. World
Literature Today, Autumn.
Sachs, Heinz. 1969. Verleger sein heißt ideologisch kämpfen [Being a Publisher
Means Fighting Ideologically]. Neues Deutschland, 14 May. Repr. Angela
Drescher (ed). Dokumentation zu Christa Wolf ‘Nachdenken über Christa T.’
[Documentation for Christa Wolf ’s Nachdenken über Christa T.], 99–101.
Saldanha, Gabriela. 2011. Translator Style: Methodological Considerations. The
Translator 17 (1): 25–50.
Sapiro, Gisèle. 2003. Forms of Politicisation in the French Literary Field. Theory
and Society 32 : 633–652.
———. 2010. Globalization and Cultural Diversity in the Book Market: The
Case of Translations in the US and in France. Poetics 38 (4): 419–439.
Sayer, Robert, and Michael Löwy. 1995. Romanticism as a Feminist Vision: The
Quest of Christa Wolf. New German Critique 64 : 105–134.
Schiavi, Giuliana. 1996. There Is Always a Teller in a Tale. Target 8 (1): 1–21.
Schirrmacher, Frank. 1990. Dem Druck des härteren, strengeren Lebens stand-
halten [Withstanding the Pressure of the Harder, More Austere Life].
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 2 June. Repr. Thomas Anz (ed). 1991. Es geht
nicht um Christa Wolf: Der Literaturstreit im vereinten Deutschland [It Is Not
About Christa Wolf: The Literature Debate in Unified Germany], 77–89.
Munich: Edition Spangenberg.
———. 1993. Fälle: Wolf und Müller. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 22
January.
Schiwy, Marlene. 1985. Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays. Spare Rib, July.
Schmid, Wolf. 2009. Implied Author. In Handbook of Narratology, eds. Peter
Hühn et al., 161–173. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter.
Schwartz, Lynne Sharon. 1988. Writers for Peace Consider Cassandra. PEN
International Newsletter, June.
Seagull Books. 2014. Christa Wolf. August. http://www.seagullbooks.org/index.
php?p=book_details&book_id=NDUx
Shenhav, Shaul R. 2005. Thin and Thick Narrative Analysis: On the Question
of Defining and Analysing Political Narratives. Narrative Inquiry 15 (1):
75–99.
Sievers, Wiebke. 2003. Otherness in Translation: Contemporary German Prose in
Britain and France. unpublished PhD thesis, University of Warwick.
Simon, Sherry. 1996. Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of
Transmission. London and New York: Routledge.
248 Bibliography
Simon, Sherry, and Paul St Pierre (eds). 2000. Changing the Terms: Translating in
the Post-colonial Era. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press.
Skare, Roswitha. 2007. Christa Wolfs Was bleibt: Kontext—Paratext—Text
[online]. http://munin.uit.no/bitstream/handle/10037/1412/thesis_Skare.
pdf?sequence=1. Accessed 15 Feb 2013.
Smith, Wendy. 1984. The Ancient Warning of Cassandra. Newsday, 7 August.
Smith, Colin E. 1987. Tradition, Art and Society: Christa Wolf ’s Prose. Essen:
Blaue Eule.
Snell-Hornby, Mary. 1995. Translation Studies: An Integrated Approach.
Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Sniader Lanser, Susan. 1986. Toward a Feminist Narratology. Style 20 (3):
341–363.
———. 1992. Fictions of Authority. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Somers, Margaret R. 1992. Narrativity, Narrative Identity and Social Action:
Rethinking English Working-Class Formation. Social Science History 16 (4):
591–630.
Somers, Margaret R., and Gloria D. Gibson. 1994. Reclaiming the
Epistemological “Other”: Narrative and the Social Constitution of Identity.
In Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, ed. Craig Calhoun, 37–99. Oxford
and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Stanitzek, Georg. 2005. Texts and Paratexts in Media. Trans. Ellen Klein. Critical
Inquiry 32 (1): 27–42.
Stanley, Jo. 1989. Vital Fresh Insights. Morning Star, 16 March.
Stephan, Alexander. 1980. Christa Wolf. In Neue Literatur der Frauen:
Deutschsprachige Autorinnen der Gegenwart [New Women’s Literature:
German-Speaking Female Authors of the Present], ed. Heinz Puknus,
149–158. Munich: Beck.
Stonor Saunders, Frances. 1999. Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural
Cold War. London: Granta Books.
Summers, Caroline. 2014. Patterns of Authorship: The Translation of Christa
Wolf ’s Kindheitsmuster. German Life and Letters 67 : 378–398.
———. 2015. World Authorship as a Struggle for Consecration: Christa Wolf
and Der geteilte Himmel in the English-Speaking World. Seminar 51 (2):
148–172.
Suominen, Marja. 2001. Heteroglot Soldiers. Helsinki English Studies: Electronic
Journal 1. http://blogs.helsinki.fi/hes-eng/volumes/volume-1-special-issue-
on-translation-studies/heteroglot-soldiers-marja-suominen/. Accessed 4 Feb
2013.
Bibliography 249
Susam-Sarajeva, Şebnem. 2006. Theories on the Move. Amsterdam and New York:

Rodopi.
Tahir Gürçaglar, Şehnaz. 2002. What Texts Don’t Tell: The Use of Paratexts in
Translation Research. In Crosscultural Transgressions. Research Models in
Translation Studies II: Historical and Ideological Issues, ed. Theo Hermans,
44–60. Manchester: St. Jerome.
Tannen, Deborah. 1990. Ordinary Conversation and Literary Discourse:
Coherence and the Poetics of Repetition. Annals of the New York Academy of
Sciences 583 : 15–30.
Tate, Dennis. 2007. Shifting Perspectives: East German Autobiographical
Narratives. Rochester NY: Camden House.
Thompson, Frances J. 1971. Exquisite Irony in Berlin. Tampa Tribune, 31
January.
Toolan, Michael. 1988. Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction. London:
Routledge.
Tuschling, Jeanine. 2006. Autorschaft in der digitalen Literatur [Authorship in
Digital Literature]. Bremen: Ifkud.
———. 2011. The Face of the Brand: Author and Book Market in Elfriede
Jelinek’s Prose of the Noughties. Austrian Studies 19 : 82–97.
Tymoczko, Maria, ed. 2010. Translation, Resistance, Activism. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press.
Tymoczko, Maria, and Erwin Gentzler (eds). 2002. Translation and Power.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Valdeón, Roberto A. 2008. Anomalous News Translation: Selective Appropriation
of Themes and Texts in the Internet. Babel 54 (4): 299–326.
Valentini, Ruth. 1990. Christa Wolf, la femme blessée [Christa Wolf, the Injured
Woman]. Le nouvel observateur, 4 October.
van Heurck, Jan. 1994. Translator’s Foreword, in Christa Wolf, Parting from
Phantoms. Selected Writings 1990–1994, Trans. Jan van Heurck, ix–xii.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Venuti, Lawrence. 1992. Introduction. In Rethinking Translation—Discourse,
Subjectivity, Ideology, ed. Lawrence Venuti, 1–17. London and New York:
Routledge.
———. 1995a. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London
and New York: Routledge.
———. 1995b. Translation, Authorship, Copyright. The Translator 1 (1): 1–24.
———. 1998. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference.
London and New York: Routledge.
250 Bibliography
Verkuyl, Hank J. 1993. A Theory of Aspectuality. The Interaction Between Temporal

and Atemporal Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vinke, Hermann (ed). 1993. Akteneinsicht Christa Wolf: Zerrspiegel und Dialog
[Inspection of the Christa Wolf Files: Distorting Mirror and Dialogue].
von Ankum, Katharina. 1992. Die Rezeption von Christa Wolf in Ost und West:
von Moskauer Novelle bis ‘Selbstversuch’ [The Reception of Christa Wolf in
East and West: From Moskauer Novelle to ‘Selbstversuch’]. Amsterdam:
Rodopi.
———. 1993. The Difficulty of Saying “I”: Translation and Censorship of
Christa Wolf ’s Der geteilte Himmel. Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 17
(2): 223–241.
von Flotow, Luise. 1997. Translation and Gender: Translating in the “Era of
Feminism”. Manchester: St. Jerome.
Waldstein, Edith. 1983. No Place on Earth by Christa Wolf. The Women’s Studies
Review 5 : 18–20.
Wallmach, Kim. 2006. Feminist Translation Strategies: Different or Derived?
Journal of Literary Studies 22 (1–2): 1–26.
Walters, Colin. 1984. The Captive’s Weaponry. Washington Times, 17 July.
Watts, Richard. 2000. Translating Culture: Reading the Paratexts of Aimé
Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. TTR: Traduction, Terminologie
Rédaction 13 (2): 29–46.
———. 2005. Packaging Postcoloniality: The Manufacture of Literary Identity in
the Francophone World. Oxford: Lexington Books.
Webb, W.L. 1971. Complex Fatality. Guardian, 27 May.
Webb, Kate. 2011. Christa Wolf Obituary. Guardian, 1 December.
Weedon, Chris. 1994. Changing Subjectivities? Women and Identity. In Women
and the Wende: Social Effects and Cultural Reflections on the German Unification
Process, eds. Elizabeth Boa and Janet Wharton, 115–123. Amsterdam:
Rodopi.
Weil, Lise. 1984. Letter to the Editor: Cassandra as Fiction. New York Times
Book Review, 7 October.
———. 1993. The Repression of Memory. Women’s Review of Books 10 : 19–20.
White, Hayden. 1980. The Value of Narrativity in the Presentation of Reality.
Critical Inquiry 7(1): 5–27. Repr. Hayden White, The Content of the Form:
Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, 1–25. Baltimore and
London: The John Hopkins University Press.
Bibliography 251
———. 1987. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical
Representation. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press.
Willett, John. 1971. The Quest for East Germany. New York Review of Books, 2
September.
Wolf, Michaela. 2002. Culture as Translation—And Beyond: Ethnographic
Models of Representation in Translation Studies. In Crosscultural Transgressions:
Research Models in Translation Studies II: Historical and Ideological Issues, ed.
Theo Hermans, 180–192. Manchester: St Jerome.
Woolf, Virginia. 2008. A Room of One’s Own’ and ‘Three Guineas’. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Xu, Xumei. 2006. Style is the Relationship: A Relevance-Theoretic Approach to
the Translator’s Style. Babel 52 (4): 334–348.
Zipes, Jack. 1976. Christa Wolf: Moralist as Marxist. In Christa Wolf, Divided
Heaven, Trans. Joan Becker, v–xxxvii. Evanston IL: Adler’s Foreign Books.
Zoran, Gabriel. 1984. Towards a Theory of Space in Narrative. Poetics Today 5
(2): 309–335.
Zuo, J., and R.D. Benford. 1995. Mobilization Processes and the 1989 Chinese
Democracy Movement. The Sociological Quarterly 36(1): 131–156.
Index1
A as social narrative, 17–19, 47, 49,

abridgements, 191, 193 51, 52, 198, 209, 215, 217,
Adler’s foreign books, 8 222, 227
Allende, Isabel, 177, 185, 189 authorship. See also author-function
Amis, Martin, 170n5, 177, 182n14, digital age, 227
185, 189, 190n17 fragmentation, 6, 7
Atwood, Margaret, 126, 144, 151 autobiography, 147, 148, 225
Aufbau-Verlag, 122, 136
authenticated subjectivity, 66, 93
author-function B
agency, 25, 47, 161, 162, 219, 226 Bachmann, Ingeborg, 140, 140n22
discursive construction, 29, 52, Baker, Mona, 17, 28–9, 36, 45–7,
217, 227 50, 213
marginalisation, 34, 110, 144, Bakhtin, Mikhail
191, 192 character-zones, 94, 96
multiple, 17, 20, 49, 56, 57, 227 heteroglossia, 18, 47–50, 96, 219
posthumous, 5 internal persuasiveness, 51, 94, 219
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ denote footnotes.

1

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40183-6
254 Index
Bakhtin, Mikhail (cont.) E

oral everyday narration, 65 Eder, Richard, 131, 132, 147–9,
pseudo-objectivity, 98 155, 194, 213
reaccentuation, 64, 190 Ellsen, Isabel, 176, 185–8
social language, 48, 49, 60, 64 EMMA, 118, 123
Barthes, Roland, 14, 40, 43, 70n12 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 169,
Becker, Joan, 8, 12, 205, 220, 221 176, 178, 185, 187–9
Biendarra, Anke, 31, 32, 35, 227 epic prose, 61, 61n4, 67
Biermann, Wolf, 10, 42, 44, 117, epitexts
163, 169, 218 journalistic review, 128
Brecht, Bertolt, 61 as peritexts, 46–56, 127, 128,
Bruner, Jerome, 17, 17n17, 37, 38, 141, 144, 147, 167, 168,
41, 43, 45, 56, 142, 167, 171–91, 193–214
168. See also hermeneutic scholarship, 127, 159
composability
F
C fact/fiction binary, 110, 152
Cartesian narrative subject, 61 Farrar Straus Giroux (FSG), 9,
Casanova, Pascale, 6, 223, 226 124–7, 134, 135, 141,
censorship, 32, 44, 121, 123, 154, 147, 147n26, 151, 151n30,
155, 157 153, 166, 170, 191–5,
Chalmers, Martin, 165, 169, 183, 197, 198, 200, 200n26,
193, 220n1 202–5, 207, 210, 213,
Clausen, Jeanette, 118n3, 192, 215, 220
192n18 Fehervary, Helen, 11, 117, 134–8, 192
coalition of women in German, 11, female experience, 35, 114, 116,
118, 138, 139 136, 137, 140, 144, 192
Cold War, 9, 10, 35, 36, 153, 154, feminism
165, 204 in the Federal Republic of
Creeley, Robert, 65, 65n8, 66, 81, 108 Germany (FRG), 115, 117,
Crick, Joyce, 13, 66, 136, 137, 123, 153
147, 148, 149n29, 150, in the German Democratic
155, 156 Republic (GDR), 115–18,
123, 124, 132, 142, 146,
153, 155, 217
D and the literary canon, 134
‘Das Kind mit dem Bade,’ 3, 114, 152 and pacifism, 129, 153–7, 159, 160
Derbyshire, Katy, 12, 221 second wave, 114–16, 118, 119,
dissidence, 35, 36, 111, 113, 164, 224 130, 154, 156
Index
255
and socialism, 117, 124, 135, 213. See also epitexts;

153, 154, 160, 218, 223 narrative voice; paratexts;
third wave, 117 peritexts
in the United Kingdom (UK), Geschwister Scholl Prize, 2
127, 132, 141, 146, 151 Gibson, Gloria D., 17, 17n17,
in the United states of America 28, 29, 31, 32, 34, 37–9,
(USA), 114, 115, 118, 43, 142
127, 131, 138, 146, 151, Goffman, Erving, 30, 46, 47
153, 164 Grand Street, 192
Foucault, Michel, 14, 15, 18, 23–30, Granta, 165, 168–73, 175–88,
32, 35, 37, 39–41, 43, 56, 190–5, 197, 200, 201,
165. See also 203–7, 209, 212, 213, 215
author-function Grass, Günter, 42, 144, 225
framing, 5, 19, 20, 46–56, 60, 62–4, Gunesekera, Romesh, 177, 178,
66, 68–74, 76–82, 95, 106, 185, 189
109, 110, 114, 126–30,
134–6, 138, 139, 141, 143,
144, 147–53, 155–7, H
159–61, 164, 166–8, 170, hermeneutic composability, 45, 56
171, 175, 178–81, 190–2, Hulse, Michael, 12, 108, 141,
194, 198–201, 204, 207, 144, 149
209, 210, 214, 215, hypertext, 157–60, 227
218–22, 224, 226, 228. See
also epitexts; narrative voice;
peritexts I
Frankfurter Poetikvorlesungen, 120 implied author, 25
Frankfurt lectures on poetics, 120 implied translator, 25
French, Marilyn, 11, 129, 130,
144, 203
Fries, Marilyn, 2, 4, 7, 9–11, 41, 63, K
64, 108, 135–8, 161, 162 Kant, Hermann, 10, 10n12
Kapuściński, Ryszard, 176, 177, 182,
185, 188, 189
G Koerner, Charlotte, 9, 12
Genette, Gérard, 18, 19, 44, 47, 51, Kollisch, Eva, 133–5
52, 54–6, 60, 61, 67, 70, Kuhn, Anna, 7, 10–12, 12n14, 20,
76, 83, 84, 86, 87, 94, 95, 66, 114–17, 129, 130,
96n20, 98, 114, 127, 128, 133–6, 138, 145, 146,
139, 158, 166–8, 174n9, 153, 154
175, 194, 204, 205, 207, Kulturelles Erbe, 81, 82, 130
256 Index
L and authorship, 46, 47, 49, 51,

Lefkowitz, Mary, 132–5 52, 57, 59, 64, 83
Lennox, Sara, 11, 117, 136, ellipsis, 74
137, 192 erlebte Rede, 98–102, 104
Literature debate. See Literaturstreit explicitation, 85, 86, 89, 99, 123
Literaturstreit, 1, 2, 2n2, 4, 5, 11, extradiegetic and intradiegetic
133, 163, 188n16, 203, level, 83–5, 89, 91–3, 102,
213, 214, 217, 224 108
Love, Myra, 7, 11, 51, 61, 108, 118, focalisation, 96, 98, 99, 101, 104,
136, 154 106–8
Luchterhand, 124n15, 151, 165 heterodiegetic and homodiegetic,
94, 96–9, 101, 106, 107
‘man’ pronoun, 79, 100, 101, 123
M mimetic language, 98, 104–7
Magenau, Jörg, 5, 17n16, 44, 118, modal particles, 101–3
122, 124n15, 188n16 narrator’s dimension, 61, 67, 76,
Malpede, Karen, 157–60 108
Martens, Lorna, 115, 116, 118, 119, and social narrative, 48, 49, 51,
126, 132, 146 52, 60, 77, 78
McGann, Jerome, 55, 181 spatial positioning, 76, 77, 108
McPherson, William, 172–4, 176, standardisation, 50, 85, 91
178, 185–8 syntax, 50, 84, 105, 122, 221
Meiselas, Nancy, 123n11, 135 temporal positioning, 69, 71, 77,
Middleton, Christopher, 19, 64–6, 84, 98
69, 108, 123, 151, 220n1 tense, 70, 73, 91
modern language association (MLA), translation of, 49–51, 60, 62,
135, 137 64–6, 70–5, 77, 79, 80,
Morgner, Irmtraud, 118, 118n3, 210 85, 91–4, 97–103,
106–9, 113, 123,
218, 221
N New German Critique, 192
narrative voice. See also Bakhtin, Nobel prize in literature, 2, 225
Mikhail
aspect, 17, 61, 70
authenticity, 48, 59–61, 64–6, 70, P
83, 93, 94, 108, 109, 221 Pacifism, 121, 129, 138, 153–7, 159,
authority, 45, 48, 51, 65, 66, 70, 160. See also feminism
73, 74, 84, 89, 91, 93, 94, Paley, Grace, 138, 139, 144–6, 159,
101, 102 207n30, 213
Index
257
paratexts. See also epitexts; peritexts 168, 170, 177, 178, 181,
authorship, 20, 45, 46, 53–7, 193–4, 196, 204–7, 209,
127, 166, 218–20, 227 212–15, 218, 219, 221,
factual, 128, 139, 149 226. See also individual
for translated texts, 47, 53, 56, names
63, 64 discursive authority, 19, 20, 170,
patriarchy, 119, 126, 131–3, 145, 171, 218, 219
154, 157
Pawel, Ernst, 11, 63, 109, 132, 147,
148, 203 R
PEN, 44, 117, 154 Reception of Christa Wolf ’s writing
periodicals. See also peritexts; in the FRG, 9, 23, 36, 64, 117,
individual names 123, 153, 225
authorial identity, 166 in the GDR, 77, 155
discursive function, 167, 168, 190 in post-1990 Germany, 1, 11, 20,
peritexts 23, 41, 68, 110, 138, 143,
advertisements, 166, 175, 178, 150, 152, 162, 163, 166,
183 169, 184, 191, 200, 211, 215
author note, 221 in the UK, 8, 11, 127, 132, 141,
back cover, 127, 147, 171–5, 146, 151, 164, 165, 205
194–205, 211 in the USA, 4, 45, 118, 127, 146,
blurb, 202, 212 151, 153, 164, 205, 222
collected volume, 165, 184, 194 Renault, Mary, 126
external, 171–5, 211 Resch, Margit, 4, 7, 12, 66
front cover, 54, 171–5 reunification, 11, 118, 135, 152,
internal, 175–84, 204–7 160, 162, 164, 184, 191,
logo, 141, 181 198, 200–2, 218
periodical, 166–8, 175, 184–90, reviewers, 5, 7, 11, 12, 14, 19, 25,
207 26, 29, 44, 56, 62–4, 108,
photographs, 175, 178 109, 113, 123, 124, 131,
publisher’s peritexts, 168, 176, 132, 134, 144, 149–51,
184 155, 157, 168, 193, 202,
title, 167, 175, 181, 194, 207 203, 218, 219, 226. See also
title page, 176–7, 181, 207 individual names
translator’s note, 126, 149 discursive authority, 19, 20, 170,
publishers, 7–11, 14, 20, 26, 29, 41, 171, 218, 219
44, 47, 53, 56, 57, 63, 113, revolution, 172–4, 181n12, 184–6,
122, 124, 125, 131, 134, 188, 190, 191
136, 141, 144, 146, 167, Romania, 172–4, 176, 185–8, 191
258 Index
Romanticism, 82, 130, 142 ‘right to narrate,’ 20, 69

Roorbach, Bill, 177, 185, 189 selection and exclusion, 44, 45,
51, 209
temporal organisation, 39, 189
S translation of, 19, 21, 27, 47, 49,
Sapiro, Gisèle, 6, 223, 226 51, 60, 76, 82, 222, 227
scholarship, 12, 127, 135, 137, universal experience, 35, 218
145, 159. See also individual Somers, Margaret, 17, 17n17, 28,
names 29, 31, 32, 34, 35, 37–9, 42
discursive authority, 19, 20, 170, Sontag, Susan, 144, 204
171, 218, 219 Stasi revelation
Schwarzbauer, Heike, 166, 191–3, German responses to, 6, 20, 222
220n1 non-German responses to, 164,
Scianna, Ferdinando, 176, 185, 188 201, 204
Searls, Damion, 12, 221 St Jerome, 24, 31, 32, 37, 39
Seven Seas Books, 8, 205, 210 Straus, Roger, 9, 10, 10n12, 135,
Sievers, Wiebke, 30, 33, 36, 53 141, 151, 151n30, 195
socialism, 2, 6, 8, 9, 36, 40, 42, 44, subjective authenticity, 29, 48, 59,
51, 62, 63, 78, 79, 82–4, 60, 62, 64–6, 83, 84, 93,
98, 110, 111, 111n24, 95, 106, 108–11, 114, 119,
117, 121, 122, 135, 143, 120, 122, 129, 136, 210,
153, 154, 156, 157, 160, 219, 221
161, 163, 173, 174, 183, Subjektive Authentizität, 67, 211
187, 202, 208, 211, 218,
220, 223
socialist humanism, 153–7, 160 T
socialist realism, 8, 33, 44, 62, 78, Takvorian, Rick, 166, 191–3
82, 84, 95, 208, 211 third way, 120, 147–9, 159
social narrative Tokareva, Victoria, 176, 178,
abstract, 82 185, 187
accrued, 170, 215 totalitarianism, 188n16, 201, 211, 212
binaries, 209, 214 translation
causal relationships, 148, 218 as commentary, 26, 56, 124, 219
disciplinary, 32, 214 narratives of, 98, 213, 226
institutional, 17, 49, 60, 78, 170, power relations, 6, 16, 36
199, 215 as rupture, 34, 207, 212
in the literary text, 17, 18 translator
personal, 49, 78, 82, 217 agency, 18, 25, 26, 30, 50, 114,
relational meaning, 82 162, 219, 226
Index
259
style, 12, 13, 50, 65, 101, 222 ‘Blickwechsel,’ 191, 206
visibility, 16, 183, 226 Cassandra: a Novel and Four
translator-function, 15, 16 Essays, 10, 114, 124
City of Angels or the Overcoat of Dr
Freud, 12
U Der geteilte Himmel, 8, 11, 62, 83,
University of Chicago Press (UCP), 205, 209, 220, 221
193, 195–7, 200, 203, der 27. September, 198, 206
204, 207 Dienstag, 198, 206
University of Ohio, 11, 118, 138, 139 Divided Heaven, 12, 63, 204
They Divided the Sky, 11, 221
‘Exchanging Glances,’ 191, 197,
V 199–201, 206–9
van Heurck, Jan, 123, 123n11, 126, as a female author, 41, 139, 141,
158, 207n30, 220n1 143, 198
victimhood, 2, 132, 133, 151, 156, as a feminist author, 131,
160, 173, 175, 179, 135, 138
187–91, 198–200, 209 as a German author, 20, 40, 110,
Vietnam, 45 162, 191, 200
Virago, 11, 124, 126, 127, 141, 142, ‘June Afternoon,’ 65n8, 192, 206,
151, 154, 169, 170, 193–6, 209, 210
198, 203–5, 210, 213, 220 Juninachmittag, 206
von Ankum, Katharina, 7n8, 8, Kassandra. Vier Vorlesungen Eine
12, 159 Erzählung, 10, 114, 120, 124
von Flotow, Luise, 11, 221 Kein Ort. Nirgends, 10, 129, 144
Kindheitsmuster, 10, 30, 45, 104,
124, 135
W Kleiner Ausflug nach H, 206
Waldstein, Edith, 137, 138, Lesen und Schreiben, 29, 60, 61,
142, 146 81, 95, 119, 148, 205, 210
Weil, Lise, 133–5, 194, 213 Liberation Day, 191
Wolf, Christa ‘A Little Outing to H.’, 206
Accident. A Day’s News, 11, Medea: A Modern Retelling, 11
184, 204 Medea: Stimmen, 11, 150
as an East German author, 2, 37, A Model Childhood, 12, 13,
118, 137 127n19, 141, 143, 183,
August, 221 204, 205
The Author’s Dimension: Selected Moskauer Novelle, 8, 33, 45, 62,
Essays, 200, 204 205, 208, 208n31
260 Index
Wolf, Christa (cont.) 122, 124, 135, 143, 153,

Nachdenken über Christa T, 9, 18, 154, 156, 157, 160, 161,
33, 42, 59–111, 113, 210 163, 173, 183, 187, 202,
Neue Lebensansichten eines 208, 218, 220, 223
Katers, 206 Störfall. Nachrichten eines Tages, 11
‘The New Life and Opinions of a ‘Tuesday, September 27,’ 206, 209
Tomcat,’ 201, 206, 211 Unter den Linden, 198, 206, 210,
No Place on Earth, 10–12, 129, 211
131, 135, 142, 144, 183, Unter den Linden: Drei
204 unwahrscheinliche
obituaries, 5, 217, 218 Geschichten, 210
Parting from Phantoms, 207n30, Was bleibt, 1, 3, 3n4, 6, 11, 20,
220n1 40, 43, 59, 161–215, 225
The Quest for Christa T, 9, 10, 63, ‘What Remains,’ 1, 11, 14–21,
63n7, 66, 72, 88, 89, 91, 145, 182n13, 185, 190,
102, 103, 105, 108, 129, 193–6, 196n20, 197, 198,
134, 184, 193, 203, 200, 201, 204–12, 217–28
203n27, 204, 219 What Remains and Other Stories,
The Reader and the Writer, 10n13, 11, 145, 193–6, 206–9, 212
205, 205n29 as a world author, 224, 228
Selbstinterview, 29, 59, 68, 84n15 Zu einem Datum, 208
Selbstversuch, 116, 192, 206 Woolf, Virginia, 113, 129, 140,
‘Self-experiment,’ 192, 206, 207, 140n22, 141–3
210
socialism, 2, 6, 8, 9, 36, 40, 42,
44, 51, 62, 63, 78, 79, Z
82–4, 110, 111, 117, Zipes, Jack, 8

Caroline Summers Auth - Examining Text and Authorship in Translation What Remains of Christa Wolf - Palgrave Macmillan 20

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

Caroline Summers Auth - Examining Text and Authorship in Translation What Remains of Christa Wolf - Palgrave Macmillan 20

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Caroline Summers Auth - Examining Text and Authorship in Translation What Remains of Christa Wolf - Palgrave Macmillan 20

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

EXAMINING

Examining Text and

ISBN 978-3-319-40182-9 ISBN 978-3-319-40183-6 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016961254

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover design by Samantha Johnson

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The experience of writing this book has been an exhilarating and a

Images and Magnum Photos for the permission to reproduce photo-

© Caroline Summers, 2016

by Christa Wolf, translated by Christopher Middleton. English translation

2 Understanding Translated Authorship23

3 The Subjective Narrator: Nachdenken über Christa T.59

4 The Author as Feminist: Kassandra113

5 Politics, Morality and Aesthetics: Two Translations

6 Conclusion: What Remains?217

Christa Wolf, Werke

English Translations of Wolf’s Texts: Editions Cited

AD The Author’s Dimension: Selected Essays (1993) translated by Jan van

Q The Quest for Christa T. (1970) translated by Christopher Middleton,

AAV Archiv des Aufbau-Verlags, Handschriften, Staatsbibliothek zu

Es geht (doch) um Christa Wolf

© The Author(s) 2017 1

(1990) as a belated and insensitive attempt by the author to align herself

Wenn Christa Wolf den um sie tobenden Literaturstreit in der (west)

In this context, following Wolf ’s 1993 admission of her Stasi involvement,

It also expressed sympathy for Wolf ’s situation and condemned the

Wenig Verständnis haben wir daher für den rechthaberischen Gestus—vor

Confronting Wolf ’s (male) critics for reducing their statements on the

r­etelling of the Medea myth, published in 1996, was a bestseller. While

“Eindeutig ist: Das Material wirkt—anders als im Fall des Dramatikers

writer) once it is received by a more powerful target-language discourse.

sphere dominated by British and American publishing i­nstitutions.

Wolf in English Translation

accused of failing “to render the book’s unmistakable internal awareness

over a number of years. Thirty-five archived letters between them, written

commercial contexts, as shown by the response from reviewers (especially

particular for its recreation of Wolf ’s narrative style in comparison with

process of translation: Fiona MacCarthy (1982) advised the reader of A

Despite this criticism of the English texts, the Anglophone response

themselves unstable and shifting. Looking beyond the example of Christa

 hat Remains? Understanding Wolf’s

is reconstructed through linguistic transfer and through ­repositioning in

While the prescribed invisibility of the translator-function demands

the most important consequence poststructuralism could bring to transla-

A worthwhile addition to this list, as this book suggests, would be a

stable while the author’s source-culture institutional position may be

three categories of time, level and person to examine the construction of

Hayden White (1980: 18) describes the narrative instinct as “the

These three powerful sources of influence on a target-culture reading of

The developing trajectory of Wolf ’s Anglophone authorship, and

© The Author(s) 2017 23

experience and changed status in the debates characterising the German

Narrating Authorship in Translation

nature of these practices and an inquiry into the conditions in which an

 ypes of Narrative: The Personal, the Institutional

In order to better understand the epistemological and ontological claim

2 Understanding Translated Authorship23

3 The Subjective Narrator: Nachdenken über Christa T.59

4 The Author as Feminist: Kassandra113

6 Conclusion: What Remains?217

Es geht (doch) um Christa Wolf

retelling of the Medea myth, published in 1996, was a bestseller. While

sphere dominated by British and American publishing institutions.

Wolf in English Translation

hat Remains? Understanding Wolf’s

is reconstructed through linguistic transfer and through repositioning in

Narrating Authorship in Translation

ypes of Narrative: The Personal, the Institutional

Personal Narratives: Stories of the Individual or the Self

experience as a method of involving the reader, and the narratives of

each author-function as allied or opposed to the structures of power. This

but also through the selective marginalisation of politically problematic

In translation, these abstract narratives are deceptive in their a pparent

Features of Narrative: Relation and Selection

Temporal and Causal Relationships

or what can and cannot be concluded about their relative significance.

Selection, Emphasis and Exclusion

F raming Authorship: Texts, Peritexts

Textual Framing: Narrative Voice

aratext, and towards a concept of the agency of the translation-event,

owards a New Understanding of Translated

Nachdenken über Christa T.

reported retrospectively that he found some of Wolf ’s prose simplistic and

“ Contemporaneousness”: Narrative Time

Temporal Specificity: Isolating Christa in the Past