Christa Wolf

Narrative and Fantasy in the Post-War German Novel, a study of novels by Uwe Johnson, Max Frisch, Christa Wolf, Jurek Becker, and Günter Grass, investigates the fictions and fantasies invented by five narrators, examining the purpose which the fictions serve within each text and the means by which each author deliberately draws attention to them. All five authors are shown to be concerned with the kinds of stories which ordinary people tell about themselves and their past lives. While some of the texts demonstrate the positive power of imagination, others point to the dangers of fiction: its tendency to falsify reality and to encourage escapist and violent fantasies. This is the first major study of this distinctive trend in post-war German fiction.

Post-Fascist Fantasies examines the cultural function of the novels of communist authors in East Germany from a psychoanalytic angle. Other critics of this genre have argued that these socialist realist fictions were monolithic attempts to translate communist dogma into the realm of aesthetics. Julia Hell argues to the contrary that they were in fact complex fictions, sharing the theme of opposition to fascism, which made antifascism the founding discourse of the German Democratic Republic. Employing an approach informed both by Slavoj Zizek's work on the communist's sublime body and by British psychoanalytic feminism's concern with feminine subjectivity, Hell concentrates on works written by exiled authors and authors tied to the resistance movement in the first part of the book. In part two, she strives in particular to understand the ways in which the writing of Christa Wolf, the GDR's most prominent author, is engaged in this reconstruction of symbolic power.

By focusing on the unconscious fantasies about post-fascist body and post-fascist voice that suffuse Wolfs (and others') texts, Hell radically reconceptualizes the author's notion of subjective authenticity. Since this notion occupies a key position in previous literary-historical accounts of GDR culture, Hell's psychoanalytic approach problematizes the established literary model of an "authentic feminine voice" that gradually liberates itself from that country's dominant ideological narrative. Far from operating solely on a political level, claims Hell, the novels of Wolf and others were intricate family sagas portraying a psychology that represented the complex social dynamics in the GDR. She shows how the psychodynamics ofGDR literature steadily evolved through its representations of the family, describing a paternal narrative organized around the figure of the communist father as antifascist hero.

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Photography has transformed the way we picture ourselves. Although photographs seem to "prove" our existence at a given point in time, they also demonstrate the impossibility of framing our multiple and fragmented selves. As Linda Haverty Rugg convincingly shows, photography's double take on self-image mirrors the concerns of autobiographers, who see the self as simultaneously divided (in observing/being) and unified by the autobiographical act. Rugg tracks photography's impact on the formation of self-image through the study of four literary autobiographers concerned with the transformative power of photography. Obsessed with self-image, Mark Twain and August Strindberg both attempted (unsuccessfully) to integrate photographs into their autobiographies. While Twain encouraged photographers, he was wary of fakery and kept a fierce watch on the distribution of his photographic image. Strindberg, believing that photographs had occult power, preferred to photograph himself. Because of their experiences under National Socialism, Walter Benjamin and Christa Wolf feared the dangerously objectifying power of photographs and omitted them from their autobiographical writings. Yet Benjamin used them in his photographic conception of history, which had its testing ground in his often-ignored Berliner Kindheit um 1900. And Christa Wolf's narrator in Patterns of Childhood attempts to reclaim her childhood from the Nazis by reconstructing mental images of lost family photographs. Confronted with multiple and conflicting images of themselves, all four of these writers are torn between the knowledge that texts, photographs, and indeed selves are haunted by undecidability and the desire for the returned glance of a single self.