The best way to understand a nation is through its literature. The division of postwar Germany into East and West might feel like ancient history now, but it was a fairly recent occurrence when Bowie was sleeping off the effects of Los Angeles in his Hauptstrasse apartment in 1977. By then, citizens of the German Democratic Republic were regarded by many in the West as blankly exotic metaphors for alienation. How did they live, think, and feel? Were they happy with their lot or did they yearn for Republikflucht (flight from the Republic)? To find out, you needed to read writers like Christa Wolf, East Germany’s preeminent literary novelist.
My hunch is that Bowie did this (at least) twice—in 1976 or so, when Wolf was in the news for being a cosignatory on a letter condemning the expatriation of the dissident East German singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann; then again, in the 2000s, when he was trying to make imaginative sense of his nostalgia for his Berlin days. Wolf’s influence is all over Bowie’s mournful comeback single “Where Are We Now?” with its talk of walking the dead, a man lost in time, and the crowds surging across the Bösebrücke at the Bornholmer Strasse border crossing after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, an event Wolf felt deeply ambivalent about—she pleaded with East Germans to stay put and create an open, democratic society of their own.
Born into a middle-class, pro-Nazi family in 1929, Wolf grew up in Landsberg—now Gorzów Wielkopolski in Poland—and was a member of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the female wing of the Hitler Youth. After the war, her family fled the advancing Soviet army, only to end up in Russian-controlled Mecklenburg. As the extent of the Nazis’ atrocities became apparent, an anguished Wolf embraced communism with religious zeal and briefly informed on her fellow intellectuals for the Stasi, the East German secret police, unaware that she was herself under surveillance. (In fact, Wolf failed to supply the Stasi with interesting enough information and her file was closed in 1962. She wrote about the experience many years later in a self-lacerating memoir, City of Angels: or, the Overcoat of Dr. Freud.)
The Quest for Christa T. is Wolf’s most famous novel. It’s dense and lyrical, frequently challenging, ultimately heartbreaking. Poet Christopher Middleton’s sensitive English translation was published in 1970, two years after the German edition. On a basic, human level it’s about the unnamed narrator’s grief for her friend Christa, who has died age thirty-five from leukemia. The narrator can’t believe that someone so vital and singular—the schoolgirl she remembers blowing a pretend trumpet made from rolled-up newspaper—is dead, disappearing, buried in a cemetery beneath two buckthorn bushes. So she devotes herself to reconstructing Christa out of a mixture of her own memories and the letters, diaries, stories, and assorted other written fragments that Christa left behind.
We learn a certain amount about the woman—that she became a teacher, married a vet, dreamed of building a house by a lake; that she was awkward, angular, something of an outsider—but her story never coheres, never progresses in the way we might expect. Partly, Wolf is making a point about the unreliability of memory. But she’s also posing a philosophical question: what happens to the individual, to the subjective self, in a collectivist society like the GDR—a society you believe (if you are Wolf) to be broadly a good thing? “I” is a fragile entity at the best of times.
Christa feels she doesn’t fit in the GDR. It’s a society for straightforward, ambitious, literal-minded people, whereas she is somehow porous, receptive to new ideas and situations. This is the condition to which Bowie always aspired, the cause of him ending up in Berlin in the first place. It’s also why, despite its difficulty and complexity, The Quest for Christa T. was such an important book for him.