The fantastic GDR: Four narratives by Christa Wolf.

Abstract

My dissertation posits the GDR as a fantastic construct with an intriguing development. From the utopian ideal of an autonomous post-W.W.II socialist society on German soil (and the resultant fanatical dystopia of rigid party control), to the utopian moment of the Fall of the Wall (and the subsequent dystopic Fall Christa Wolf), to its current status as u-topos (literally, no place), the GDR has exhibited itself as a stylized, rhetorical, fantastic entity. To pursue this idea further, I examine four short stories by Christa Wolf, Neue Lebensansichten eines Katers, Selbstversuch, Kleiner Ausflug nach H., and Unter den Linden as particularly rich and evocative models with which to enter discussions of the GDR's fantastic nature, and of Wolf's aesthetic project. Wolf uses the fantastic as an epistemological tool to explore how the human subject negotiates the particular socialist, technocratic, patriarchal structures upon which the former GDR was based. Each chapter of the dissertation is devoted to the analysis of one tale from a distinct methodology or perspective that focuses on the stories' narrative and metaphorical structures. Neue Lebensansichten eines Katers and Selbstversuch (which comprise Part I, Unreal Bodies Negotiating Real Spaces), both present unreal bodies and the attendant difficulties those bodies have negotiating with and within a scientific, technocratic paradigm. Epistemological systems are challenged by bodies that deny rational logic. In both tales, the unreal bodies present political and technological attempts to fashion ideal subjects as suspect. Part II (Real Bodies Negotiating Unreal Spaces) includes chapters on Kleiner Ausflug nach H. and Unter den Linden and focuses on the ways a subject develops a relationship with a political, public space. The narrator of Kleiner Ausflug nach H. must find his way among the bureaucracies of literary production that blur the line between reality and fiction. In Unter den Linden, the narrator demonstrates a coming-to-oneself that is both necessitated and facilitated by her relationship to the significant landmarks that punctuate her journey. In the conclusion I show the ways that the fantastic of the tales can be read as echoes of the fantastic positions of Wolf and her oeuvre, and of the GDR.