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T A B L E+T A L K

"People snarling, wild opinions flung around, lines drawn in the sand": Garrison Keillor and Salon readers have it out in Table Talk over "Sister Carrie"

F E A T U R E

"Sister Carrie"
By Garrison Keillor
Why did they ever ban a book this bad?
(10/13/97)

R E C E N T L Y

Gods of Death
By Yaron Svoray
Nonfiction
(10/16/97)

Bleeding London
By Geoff Nicholson
Fiction
(10/15/97)

The Subtle Knife
By Philip Pullman
Fiction
(10/14/97)

The Last Time I Wore a Dress
By Daphne Scholinski (with Jane Meredith Adams)
Nonfiction
(10/13/97)

Stone Cowboy
By Mark Jacobs
Fiction
(10/10/97)

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P A R T I N G+F R O M phantoms
SELECTED WRITINGS, 1990-1994

303 PAGES

BY ROB SPILLMAN | christa Wolf is perhaps the best-known writer and intellectual of the former East Germany. Her personal, haunting novels -- including "The Quest for Christa T" (1968) and "Accident" (1989) -- offered unveiled criticism of communist Germany. Inside the GDR, she championed intellectual freedom and was very visible in the protests that led to the collapse of the state in November 1989. Afterwards, the unapologetic leftist denounced the West's "Anschluss" disguised as unification and was especially critical of paternalistic putdowns of Eastern intellectuals. In 1990, after Wolf published a novella about being watched by the infamous, omnipresent Stasi, the former symbol of East German resistance was crucified for publishing the work only after it was safe. She was then slapped with the dreaded "collaborator" tag after her own Stasi files were leaked to the press; among more than 40 volumes of "victim files" about Wolf, there were also records of her having been willingly interviewed by the Stasi between 1959 and 1962.

"Parting From Phantoms" chronicles Wolf's personal and intellectual post-Wall travails, from a protest speech she gave on the night of the government's collapse to her eloquent defense of her 40 years of adult life under communism (she was 16 at the end of World War II). The book includes essays, lectures, letters, diary entries and interviews. Wolf repeatedly returns to the idea that East Germans have a right to their history, that it was more than "a repellent monotony of oppression and scarcity." She chides market-driven Westerners "who are capable of imagining anything in the whole wide world except the possibility that anyone could wish to live a different sort of life than they do." And after all the polemics and fighting to control history, Wolf concludes that "'the truth' about this time and about our lives must come from literature."

Arranged chronologically, the collection would have benefited from an introduction giving background to Wolf's public battles. As is, the specific accusations against Wolf appear within a probing interview with Gunter Gaus that appears well into the book. Still, this difficult, prickly collection is much like Wolf herself -- unsparing, intelligent, dissident, passionate -- and it offers an invaluable view into the "other side" of German unification.
Oct. 17, 1997

Rob Spillman lives in New York. He is a regular contributor to Salon.