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    They Divided the Sky: A Novel by Christa Wolf
    They Divided the Sky: A Novel by Christa Wolf
    They Divided the Sky: A Novel by Christa Wolf
    Ebook226 pages4 hours

    They Divided the Sky: A Novel by Christa Wolf

    By Christa Wolf and Luise Von Flotow

    3.5/5

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    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Ottawa Press
    Release dateJan 26, 2013
    ISBN9780776620343
    They Divided the Sky: A Novel by Christa Wolf
    Author

    Christa Wolf

    Christa Wolf (1929-2011) was one of the most celebrated German writers of the twentieth century. Wolf was a central figure in East German literature and politics, and is the author of many books, including the novels The Quest for Christa T., Patterns of Childhood, and Cassandra.

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    • 4/5
      Der geteilte Himmel is a very early work — only Wolf's second novel to be published, in 1963 — and is set in an industrial city in East Germany in the period immediately before the building of the Berlin Wall. Superficially, it could be read as a simple propaganda story: a young woman's loyalty to the Workers' and Peasants' State helps her overcome the temptation to follow her bourgeois fiancé into the West. But of course, it's a lot more complicated and rewarding than that. Wolf draws on her experience of a period she and her husband spent working in a railway carriage works to show us what the socialist state looks like in practice for industrial workers, students and academics, and explains how the realities of personal ambition, bullying, weakness — and above all, the dangerously recent legacy of the Nazi period — make it difficult to achieve its ideals. With hindsight, it's easy to see what's missing from the picture: her version of the DDR may have its fair share of pollution, inefficiencies, pettiness, and incompetence, but its policemen confine their efforts to directing traffic, there don't appear to be any prisons or censorship, and the existence of the Stasi is only very indirectly hinted at. When things go wrong, they are resolved by workers' meetings and self-criticism, not by the forcible intervention of state agencies. And of course we wouldn't really expect anything else. Not only would it have been difficult and dangerous to speak out about state terror, but it would probably also have been redundant: none of her readers in East or West would have been under any illusions in that respect. Certainly not in 1963. The question she is trying to answer is not why around 20% of the population of the DDR chose to leave before the 13th of August 1961, but rather why 80% chose to stay. And she wants us to see that it's a complicated question that goes beyond simplistic ideas about native soil, economics, or abstract loyalty to a political ideal. Her central character, Rita, is someone who was born outside the DDR and fled there at the end of the war (like Wolf herself); she lives in an unattractive industrial city where she has no family ties, and she's not a fanatical communist. She is well aware of the problems in the running of the factory where she works and the institute where she studies; she sees good people being frustrated in their ambitions and bad ones profiting. Moreover, she feels for a long time that her love for Manfred is the most important thing that's ever happened to her. But nonetheless, she feels a loyalty to the common project of building a better world that she shares with her co-workers and fellow students, and she sees how she is losing Manfred to his all-consuming hatred for his fellow-travelling ex-Nazi father and his scheming bourgeois mother. In the end, it is the loyalty to her friends that wins, as we know from the start of the book, but it's not an easy decision. And it's probably no coincidence that she takes that decision on the Sunday before the Wall went up...

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