First published in 1963, in East Germany, They Divided the Sky tells the story of a young couple, living in the new, socialist, East Germany, whose relationship is tested to the extreme not only ...because of the political positions they gradually develop but, very concretely, by the Berlin Wall, which went up on August 13, 1961.
First published in 1963, in East Germany, They Divided the Sky tells the story of a young couple, living in the new, socialist, East Germany, whose relationship is tested to the extreme not only ...because of the political positions they gradually develop but, very concretely, by the Berlin Wall, which went up on August 13, 1961. The story is set in 1960 and 1961, a moment of high political cold war tension between the East Bloc and the West, a time when many thousands of people were leaving the young German Democratic Republic (the GDR) every day in order to seek better lives in West Germany, or escape the political ideology of the new country that promoted the "farmer and peasant" state over a state run by intellectuals or capitalists. The construction of the Wall put an end to this hemorrhaging of human capital, but separated families, friends, and lovers, for thirty years. The conflicts of the time permeate the relations between characters in the book at every level, and strongly affect the relationships that Rita, the protagonist, has not only with colleagues at work and at the teacher's college she attends, but also with her partner Manfred (an intellectual and academic) and his family. They also lead to an accident/attempted suicide that send her to hospital in a coma, and that provide the backdrop for the flashbacks that make up the narrative. Wolf's first full-length novel, published when she was thirty-five years old, was both a great literary success and a political scandal. Accused of having a 'decadent' attitude with regard to the new socialist Germany and deliberately misrepresenting the workers who are the foundation of this new state, Wolf survived a wave of political and other attacks after its publication. She went on to create a screenplay from the novel and participate in making the film version. More importantly, she went on to become the best-known East German writer of her generation, a writer who established an international reputation and never stopped working toward improving the socialist reality of the GDR.
Christa Wolf Klocke, Sonja E; Hosek, Jennifer R
2018, 2018-03-19, Letnik:
8
eBook
The series offers lively, comprehensive accounts of contemporary German culture written by experts and designed for advanced student readers and scholars alike. Both in monographs and closely-defined ...edited collections, it aims to introduce major authors, thinkers, filmmakers, literary topics, genres and landmark individual works, focusing on the period since 1989 but reaching back, where appropriate, to the vital hinterland of the 1970s.
Excerpts from "Ein Tag im Jahr: 1960-2000" Wolf, Christa; Flury, Angela
PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America,
05/2007, Letnik:
122, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Flury presents her translation of an excerpt from Christa Wolf's recent publication Ein Tag im Jahr. In her diary, Wolf has created a chronological thread, consciously pursuing Sep 27 as a day that ...is the day of the year to be recorded. She reiterates that Wolf's entries from Sep 27 share with her unpublished diary an inceptive sense of privacy and are more intimately akin to her diary than is her fiction.
Remembering Christa Wolf Wolf, Christa; Herminghouse, Patricia; Colombo, Daniela ...
German studies review,
05/2013, Letnik:
36, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Laid to rest in the Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof among other major figures of postwar German culture (among them Heiner Müller, Stephan Hermlin, Hans Mayer, Bertolt Brecht, Anna Seghers), Christa ...Wolf was long heralded as 'die gesamtdeutsche Autorin,' a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize. After 1989 in unified Germany, however, she was often consigned to an identity as 'DDR Schriftstellerin' or 'Staatsdichterin,' as can be seen in the limited resonance of her final major work, Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud (2010).2 While published responses to the news of her death on December 1, 2011, were strikingly muted, some commentators did grasp the opportunity to reopen the old debates and accusations about Wolf's integrity and her loyalty to a bygone regime, taking one last chance to topple another GDR literary monument. Reprinted by permission of the German Studies Review
They divided the sky Wolf, Christa; Von Flotow, Luise
They divided the sky,
c2013
eBook
First published in 1963, in East Germany, They Divided the Sky tells the story of a young couple, living in the new, socialist, East Germany, whose relationship is tested to the extreme not only ...because of the political positions they gradually develop but, very concretely, by the Berlin Wall, which went up on August 13, 1961.
