Illness as Metaphor: Christa Wolf, the GDR, and Beyond

Abstract

Christa Wolf's 2002 narrative Leibhaftig continues the author's longstanding preoccupation with illness as a metaphor. A nameless female protagonist, who neglects to seek prompt medical attention for a common appendicitis, waivers on the fringes of consciousness as her body combats the lingering effects of infection. Because the narrative reflects events from 1988, critics have chosen to read it as a metaphor for Wolf's struggle to come to terms with the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Such an interpretation fails to take into account Wolf's continued use of illness as a metaphor in other literary texts and in her essays. Closer examination of Wolf's use of illness in this text reveals significantly broader implications for understanding the metaphor. The illness that is central to Leibhaftig represents not only a direct confrontation with the GDR's history but also a continuation of Wolf's self-exploration. Wolf's concern with world affairs in a broader sense allows us to read Leibhaftig as a commentary on contexts that extend beyond the boundaries of both individual and GDR reality.

Acknowledgments

Carol Anne Costabile-Heming is professor of German and chair of World Languages and Literatures at Northern Kentucky University. She has published widely on GDR and post-unification German literature, especially on Peter Schneider, F. C. Delius, and Christa Wolf.

Notes

I am grateful to Dr. Rachel Halverson, Dr. Martina Caspari, and Dr. Andrea Fieler for their close reading of and insightful comments on this essay. I would also like to thank the external reviewers whose comments helped to strengthen and focus my argument.

¹Of course, Marcel Reich-Ranicki's review made this interpretation all the more plausible by claiming that Christa T. died from leukemia, but it was the GDR that made her sick.

²See “Krebs und Gesellschaft” and “Krankheit und Liebesentzug. Fragen an die psychosomatische Medizin,” held 1984 at the meeting of the Arbeitsgruppe “Psychosomatische Gynäkologie.”

³Birgit Kaute points out that, in this case, Wolf actually narrates from the perspective of the ill woman (50).

⁴Wolf often employs imagery that impacts multiple senses. In the short story “Im Stein” (1996), Wolf describes her hip replacement surgery. Instead of putting the patient to sleep, doctors opted for a local anesthetic. Wolf was thus awake throughout the entire procedure and able to experience her operation with multiple senses, except the sense of sight: “Der Bügel über den die grünen Tücher geworfen werden die mir die Sicht verwehren das Auge als wichtigstes Sinnesorgan […] Daβ ich hören riechen schmecken kann scheint sie nicht zu beunruhigen Beunruhigt es mich” (85).

⁵See Caspari.

⁶The third-person perspective occurs when the patient is presented as passive object. See Luukkainen (186) and Cosentino, “Christa Wolf's Leibhaftig” (121).

⁷Dennis Tate devotes an entire chapter to “subjective authenticity” (194–235). He views the split as the alienation of the body from the mind (222).

⁸She is accompanied by the anesthesiologist Kora Bachmann. Martina Caspari has detailed the rich associations attributed to this name, including homage to Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann and the mythological Persephone (136).

⁹Before the real cause and hence also the treatment for TB was discovered, doctors typically advised patients to travel to a different climate. This trip functioned as a type of self-imposed exile, well in keeping with the romantic ideas of travel (36).

¹⁰This link was the topic of another of Wolf's speeches, “Krankheit und Liebesentzug. Fragen an die psychosomatische Medizin.”

¹¹The premise for Leibhaftig draws specifically on Wolf's own experiences in 1988, when she underwent a series of operations to battle an infection that resulted from a burst appendix.

¹²Time references in the novel make it possible to date this experience in 1963. Wolf's own attempt to produce a film version of Moskauer Novelle was rejected by the Soviet authorities in the early 1960s. Dennis Tate suggests that the episode could be a conflation of this event with the 1966 banning of Fräulein Schmetterling, for which Wolf wrote the screenplay (224).

¹³The descent into a subterranean realm carries its own significance, for Wolf employed the working title “Hadesfahrt” for this narrative. Tate sees this journey through a maze as reminiscent of Walter Benjamin's metaphor of the labyrinth (224–25).

¹⁴The doctor makes two additional references to her weak immune system (125, 128). Elke Brüns equates the protagonist's sick body with the “body politic.” See “Leibhaftig” (145–58) and Nach dem Mauerfall (251).

¹⁵In Man and His Symbols, C. G. Jung gives the example of a patient suffering from asthma. The real cause was his home life, an environment in which he simply could not breathe (9).

¹⁶For Elke Brüns, “[d]iese Verleiblichung im eigenen Autorenkörper gleicht einem Hadesgang in die Abgründe der eigenen Erinnerungen, die sich somatisiert zeigen im kranken Körper der Autorin” (Nach dem Mauerfall 254).

¹⁷This imagery harks back to the belief that if a body was cut open, the soul could escape.

¹⁸Brigitte Kaute also addresses the close correlation between the protagonist's personal history and contemporary developments in the GDR.

¹⁹A further manifestation of the multiple meanings of leibhaftig, Tate chooses to equate Urban as the narrator's opposite and the devil incarnate (225). Tate proposes that Urban is symbolic of Hans Koch. Volker Braun calls Christa Wolf “‘das leibhaftige Gegenteil’ jenes Professor Urban oder Hans Koch” (15).

²⁰Caspari notes that Urban's suicide was for him an attempt at self-preservation. Unfortunately, this came at a time when the only means of saving himself simultaneously resulted in his self-destruction (136).

²¹For Cheryl Dueck, “truth” is a core value that is essential to all of Wolf's critiques on civilization (159).

²²Like Wolf, her protagonist too needs Goethe's poetry to aid her recovery.