3 - Literature and politics

Summary

But now the men are gone

To the Indies,

From that breezy spit of land

And hillsides of grapes, where

The Dordogne descends

Toward the majestic Garonne

And the two flow out

As one wide sea. But memory

Is taken and given by the ocean,

And the eyes of love do not waver in their gaze,

But poets establish what remains.

Friedrich Hölderlin, from “Remembrance”

In the summer of 1990 Christa Wolf published a short book entitled Was bleibt. Because of its publication only a few months prior to German reunification, its focus on the political life of a writer in East Germany, and the savage attacks that were immediately directed against it, the book and the debate it gave rise to became a kind of ground zero for German literary reunification, embodying and prefiguring many of the debates that were subsequently to emerge about the complex relationship between literature and politics in Germany. If Wolf's novella was a first attempt to locate the position of the writer politically at the moment of reunification, the attacks on Was bleibt offered a completely different view of the relationship between literature and politics in a reunified Germany. As the novella's title suggested, Wolf seemed to be arguing for an essential continuity between the antifascist political commitment of the postwar past and the possible literary developments of the future.