2 - Matriarchal Morality: Women and Hope in Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster (1976)

Summary

KINDHEITSMUSTER REPRESENTS A MILESTONE in the memory politics of both Germanies. Pioneering historian Claudia Koonz commends the novel as one of the first works, literary or otherwise, “which challenged canonical accounts of the Third Reich as a ‘man's world.’” Implicating her female protagonists in the ideological and moral corruption of the Third Reich, Christa Wolf subverted the model of history sanctioned by the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED, Socialist Unity Party), which upheld the definition of fascism adduced at the seventh congress of the Communist International in 1935 and viewed National Socialism as an expression of “der reaktionärsten, am meisten chauvinistischen, am meisten imperialistischen Elemente des Finanzkapitals” (the most reactionary, most chauvinist, most imperialist elements of finance capital). This focus on politico-economic structures overshadowed questions of individual responsibility. Accordingly, the few GDR histories of women in the Third Reich centered not on their complicity but on the regime's misogynist policies. The preeminent historian Jürgen Kuczynski set the tone, declaring that the discrimination and degradation of women “erreichte unter kapitalistischen Bedingungen ihren Höhepunkt in den Jahren der faschistischen Monopoldiktatur” (reached its peak under capitalist conditions during the years of the fascist dictatorship). In Kindheitsmuster, Christa Wolf complicates this view, showing how the Third Reich provided welcome opportunities for female advancement.

Wolf's intention to challenge the state-sanctioned version of history sounds in the incipit of Kindheitsmuster: “Das Vergangene ist nicht tot. Es ist nicht einmal vergangen” (The past is not dead. It is not even past). This translated quotation from William Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun (1951) had previously been cited by Wolfgang Joho in Das Klassentreffen (The School Reunion, 1968) as a means to assert the continuity between the Third Reich and West German society. By contrast, in an interview with Hans Kaufmann, Wolf explains that it is erroneous to purport that fascism was effaced “nachdem man seine Machtzentren und Organisationsformen zerschlagen hatte” (after its centers of power and structures of organization had been destroyed). Rather than depicting National Socialism as bygone history, the narrative of Kindheitsmuster shifts associatively between the Third Reich and the global upheaval of the 1970s.