Journal Articles
Adler, Hildegard. “Scham und Schuld: Barrieren des Erinnerns in Christa Wolfs und Peter Hartlings Kindheitsmustern und im psychoanalytischen Prozess.” Der Deutschunterricht: Beitrage zu seiner Praxis und wissenschaftlichen Grundlegung 35.5 (1983): 5-20.
Bock, Sigrid. “Christa Wolf: Kindheitsmuster.” Weimarer Beitrage:
Zeitschrift fur Literaturwissenschaft 23.9 (1977): 102-30.
Bresson, Daniel. “La langue et les relations grammaticales dans l'organisation du recit: Kindheitsmuster de C. Wolf.” Cahiers d'Etudes Germaniques 6 (1982) 123-149.
Dollenmayer, David. “Generational Patterns in Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster.” German Life and Letters 39.3 (1986): 229-234.
Dufresne, Eva Fauconneau. “En quete du moi: Pronoms variables dans le roman allemand contemporain.” Etudes Germaniques 40.2 (1985):
195-208.
Fickert, Kurt J. “'Fantastic Precision': The Style of Christa Wolf's An Illustration of Childhood.” International Fiction Review 17.2 (1990): 124-127.
Explores fantastic precision, that is, the combination of autobiography and fiction in Kindheitsmuster in relation to Wolf’s goal of writing. For Wolf, storytelling must establish its validity and the novel should not “become an escape from the real world but an exercise in giving expression to it with notable precision ” (124).
Through an interplay between autobiographical evidence and her intuition, through a creative commingling of precision and vision, Wolf tries to achieve a true representation of reality.
Frieden, Sandra. “'In eigener Sache': Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster.”
The German Quarterly 54.4 (1981): 473-487.
Fries, Marilyn Sibley. “Problems of Narrating the ' Heimat': Christa Wolf and Johannes Bobrowski.” Cross-Currents: A Yearbook of Central European Culture 9 (1990): 219-230.
Ganguli, Selina. “Patterns of Childhood: Reflection on Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster.” Journal of the School of Languages 7.1-2 (1980):
54-64.
Argues that unlike many of her contemporaries who made haste to forget the shameful past, Wolf chose to face that past in all its gruesome details to see an answer to the disturbing question: How did it all
ever come about? By portraying reality at the level of experience and at the level of mental reflection about that experience, Wolf provides the reader with an insight into how patterns of thinking are changing— from fascist to critical. Kindheitsmuster refuses to come to terms with past on account of forgetfulness, and it never seeks to hide the fact that the vast majority of the German people did absolutely nothing against Nazi rule and most of them were party to it.
Gilliland, Gail. “Self and Other: Christa Wolf's Patterns of Childhood and Primo Levi's Se questo e un uomo as dialogic texts.” Comparative Literature Studies 29.3 (1992): 183-209.
Argues that Wolf’s Patterns of Childhood is an attempt to explain the self to the Other while Prime Livei’s Se Questo E Un Uomo responds from the Other’s side. The two texts form a dialogue between the Germans and the Jews, between the Self and the Other. Both books are concerned with the possibility that man can become a beast and address the metaphysical question, What is man? Levi, surviving Auschwitz, site of the largest Nazi concentration camp, shows that the Germans in the camp provided the best example of what man is not.
Yet Wolf, in her honesty, cannot responds to Levi although she addresses the generation of Germans who allowed the Holocaust to happen and invites them to explore their collective guilt in it.
Ginsburg, Ruth. “In Pursuit of Self: Theme, Narration, and Focalization in Christa Wolf's Patterns of Childhood.” Style 26.3 (1992): 437-46.
Emphasizes the impossibility of knowing one ’s past self by exploring the narrative techniques used in Patterns of Childhood to constitute a self. “The authentic recreation of the past is . . . inextricable from the speaker of the present moment . . . . There is no simple recollecting and telling of the past; past and present are interdependent, mutually transforming, and transformed” (435). To integrate selves, to create a unified “I,” the narrator struggles to convert unwanted memories into language and articulate the repressed, but this attempt fails since there is always unconscious repression. Besides, the third-person Nelly is not allowed to develop her genuine self for the narrator imposes her own point of view upon this character.
Greiner, Bernhard. “Die Schwierigkeit, 'ich' zu sagen: Christa Wolfs psychologische Orientierung des Erzahlens.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fur Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 55.2 (1981): 323-342.
Hille, Ursula. “Christa Wolf: Kindheitsmuster: Aufbau Verlag Berlin und Weimar 1976.” Nemet Filologiai Tanulmanyok Arbeiten zur Deutschen Philologie 12 (1978): 141-49.
Jackson, Neil and Barabara Saunders. “Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster:
An East German Experiment in Political Autobiography. ” German Life and Letters 33 (1980): 319-29.
Points out that Wolf’s political argument in Kindheitsmuster is that neither West nor East Germany has truly come to terms with its totalitarian heritage. Though socialist, GDR is complacent and self-satisfactory, and certain modes of its behavior have their roots in past totalitarian structures. The breakdown of Wolf’s own authorial personality into three parts (Nelly, narrator and author) demonstrates that until the German people confront their own past experiences they will continue to live with damaged psyches in a state of self-alienation. Wolf’s use of fictional devices is “a conscious confrontation of the presence of fiction and fantasy in the life of the individual, far removed from a sentimental evasion of responsibility”(323). Despite its fictional elements, Kindheitsmuster demonstrates autobiography’s concentration on a search for fulfillment in the present with critical reference to the past.
Kane, B. M. “In Search of the Past: Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster.”
Modern Languages: Journal of the Modern Language Association 59 (1978): 19-23.
Krieger, Gerd. “Ein Buch im Streit der Meinungen: Untersuchung literaturkritischer Reaktionen zu Christa Wolfs 'Kindheitsmuster.'”
Weimarer Beitrage: Zeitschrift fur Literaturwissenschaft, Asthetik und Kulturwissenschaften 31.1 (1985): 56-75.
Lamse, Mary Jane. “Kindheitsmuster in Context: The Achievement of Christa Wolf.” University of Dayton Review 15.1 (1981): 49-55.
Linn, Marie Luise. “Doppelte Kindheit: Zur Interpretation von Christa Wolfs Kindheitsmuster.” Der Deutschunterricht: Beitrage zu seiner Praxis und wissenschaftlichen Grundlegung 30.2 (1978): 52-66.
Marks, Elise. “The Alienation of 'I': Christa Wolf and Militarism.”
Mosaic 23.3 (1990): 73-85.
Studies how Wolf confronts the problem of women ’s response to war and the issue of how an individual can resist the conforming pressures of a militaristic society in A Model Childhood and Cassandra. The
case of Nelly shows how a child growing up in a militarized state can be socialized to devote to its militarist values. Nelly never recants her identification with the military order set up by Hilter while Cassandra is torn between loyalty to her state and resistance to its militarism. For people to survive in and resist the pressures of a warlike society without suffering persecution, without experiencing alienation from their social group, without becoming agents of violence themselves, the best way, Wolf seems to suggest, is ”to maintain a constant, humane awareness of how deeply systems of violence can penetrate us and influence our own behavior ” (84).
Melzer, Bernd. “Zu Christa Wolfs Prosaarbeiten der siebziger Jahre.”
Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Wilhelm Pieck Universitat Rostock. Gesellschaftswissenschaftlich 31.8 (1982): 9-22.
Mitscherlich, Margarete. “Die Frage der Selbstdarstellung: Uberlegungen zu den Autobiographien von Helene Deutsch, Margaret Mead und Christa Wolf.” Neue Rundschau 91-2-3 (1980): 291-316.
Ohrgaard, Per. “Ein Foto mit Hut - Bemerkungen zu Christa Wolf:
Kindheitsmuster.” Orbis Litterarum: International Review of Literary Studies 42.3-4 (1987): 375-387.
Plavius, Heinz. “Gewissensforschung: Christa Wolf. Kindheitsmuster.”
Neue Deutsche Literatur 25.1 (1977): 139-51.
Roberts, Louis. “Novel Form in Apuleius and Christa Wolf.” Classical and Modern Literature: A Quarterly 3.3 (1983): 125-138.
Touches two issues of critical theory by examining Apuleius’
Metamorphoses and Wolf’s works, primarily Kindheitsmuster: (1) the relation between objective social reality and its subjective reflection in individual consciousness; (2) the relation between literature and reality and the difficulty of constructing a literary whole out of partial perspectives that are both subjective and objective. For Wolf, the art of knowing reality “involves a personal coefficient which tends to shape all factual knowledge and in so doing bridges the disjunction between subjectivity and objectivity ” (135).
Thus, literature is a result of reality that has been transformed by the perceiver. In other words, literature is personal truth.
Kindheitsmuster demonstrates not only how personal commitments shape perception of reality but also how writing becomes the way to self-knowledge and self-realization. Roberts refers to this transformation of reality as metamorphoses.
Viollet, Catherine. “Nachdenken uber Pronomina: Zur Entstehung von Christa Wolfs Kindheitsmuster.” LiLi: Zeitschrift fur Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 17.68 (1987): 52-62.
Wendt-Hildbrandt, Susan. “Kindheitsmuster: Christa Wolf's 'Probestuck.'” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 17.2 (1981):
164-176.
Explores how Wolf investigates the effects of fascism on the lives of Nelly and her family by applying the concept of perspective multiplicity. The reader has to unite the pieces of information supplied on various narrative levels into a meaningful whole. The use of multiple perspective produces an effect of distancing which in turn minimizes sentimentalization of the content. In addition, juxtaposition of past and present is essential to Wolf ’s concept of realism. By these narrative techniques, Wolf attempts to tap the potential of prose to broaden self-awareness.
Wiesehan, Gretchen. “Christa Wolf Reconsidered: National Stereotypes in Kindheitsmuster.” The Germanic Review 68.2 (1993): 79-87.
Zahlmann, Christel. “Das Exil und die Heimat der Sprache: Zu Christa Wolfs Kindheitsmuster.” Michigan Germanic Studies 12.2 (1986): 164-174.
Book Articles
Barnett, Pamela R. “Perceptions of Childhood.” Christa Wolf in Perspective. Ed. Ian Wallace. Amsterdam : Rodopi, 1994. 59-72.
Argues that Wolf’s interest in analyzing the development stages of childhood and their social and psychological significance can be seen in most of her works and especially in her Kindheitsmuster. For Wolf, children are a positive force embodying spontaneity, imagination and empathy. Children’s imaginative faculty, in particular, is vital to the well-being of both the individual and society. For Wolf perceives imagination as an antidote to inhumanity, destructiveness, war and the sort of science that opts out of morality. The adult world is a damaging agent, both psychologically and socially, and it causes more damage when it involves systematic distortion or suppression of spontaneous feeling. Kindheitsmuster dramatizes this process of de-formation in the child Nelly, whose emotional vitality has been deadened during the years of National Socialism, a period in which spontaneous feelings are persistently and insidiously stifled.
Baudrier, Andree Jeanne. “Aspects du fascisme hitlerien dans deux romans allemands contemporains: Die Blechtrommel de Gunter Grass et
Kindheitsmuster de Christa Wolf.” Recit et histoire. Ed. Jean Bessiere. Paris : PU de France, 1984. 243-251.
Baumgart, Reinhard. “Das Leben - kein Traum? Vom Nutzen und Nachteil einer autobiographischen Literatur.” Literatur aus dem Leben:
Autobiographische Tendenzen in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsdichtung. Beobachtungen, Erfahrungen, Belege. Ed.
Herbert Keckmann. Munich : Hanser, 1984. 8-28.
Beddow, Michael. “Doubts about Despair: Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster.”
Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman. Ed. James Hardin. Columbia : U of South Carolina P, 1991. 415-417.
Argues that Kindheitsmuster aims at contemplate, understand, and talk about the past in the interests of the present and the future.
The mother in the text holds that “those who have lived through the past need to find a way of speaking to those who know only the present ” (417) in order to bring out changes in the present and future.
Kindheitsmuster develops the genre of Bildungsroman by shifting focus to the problems of understanding, evaluating, and truthfully portraying experiences in retrospect. Wolf subordinates the retelling of childhood and adolescence to her present search for self-understanding and self-expression. In the form of a dialogue with the self, Wolf not only explores her past but also tries to develop the reader’s grasp of what that exploration is meant to achieve. Beddow concludes that Wolf continually affirms the “belief that a certain kind of happiness is the attainable goal of individual and collective human existence” (443).
Bock, Sigrid. “Christa Wolf: Kindheitsmuster.” Zum Roman in der DDR.
Ed. Marc Silbermann. Stuttgart : Klett, 1980. 131-151.
Brodzki, Bella. “Mothers, Displacement, and Language in the Autobiographies of Nathalie Sarraute and Christa Wolf.” Life/Lines:
Theorizing Women's Autobiography. Ed. Bella Brodzki and Celeste, Schenck. Ithaca : Cornell UP, 1988. 243-259.
Points out that women’s autobiographies always express a desire to return to the preexilic state of union with the mother, but Nathalie Sarraute’s Childhood and Christa Wolf’s Patterns of Childhood reject this nostalgic search by calling into question the assumption of an unmediated presence embodied in/by the mother and an unproblematical relation to the maternal origin. For both Wolf and Sarraute, the maternal origin is a cultural construct. The two works also show a conflict characteristic of women’s autobiographies— the “conflict between an over whelming compulsion to address and an equally strong
internal resistance against self-disclosure” (247).
Frieden, Sandra. “A Guarded Iconoclasm: The Self as Deconstructing Counterpoint to Documentation.” Responses to Christa Wolf: Critical Essays. Ed. Marilyn Sibley Fries. Detroit : Wayne State UP, 1989.
266-278.
Explores Wolf’s transgression of generic boundaries in Patterns of Childhood and No Place on Earth. To break the autobiographical convention of linear narration, Wolf constantly shifts temporal levels in her Patterns of Childhood. Through disruption of chronology, the idea of historical and political continuities is challenged. Wolf renders the expansion of relevance from the specifically autobiographical to the general through the dissection of childhood memories and its application to the present. The autobiographical claim to truth is problematized as Wolf relativizes factual data and the objectivity that such data supposedly provide.
The use of pronoun reference also departs from expected forms. No Place on Earth also similarly subverts the traditional linear narration of biography. The documentation, used in biography to claim authenticity, is to contrast what is known to have happened with what is felt to have happened. In both cases, Wolf sets the narrating self out to find the other.
Frieden, Sandra. “'Falls es strafbar ist, die Grenzen zu verwischen':
Autobiographie, Biographie und Christa Wolf.” Vom Anderen und vom Selbst: Beitrage zu Fragen der Biographie und Autobiographie. Ed.
Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand. Konigstein/Ts. : Athenaum, 1982.
153-166.
Friedrichsmeyer, Sara. “Women's Writing and the Construct of an Integrated Self.” The Enlightenment and Its Legacy: Studies in German Literature in Honor of Helga Slessarev. Ed. Sara Friedrichsmeyer and Cantarino Barbara Becker. Bonn : Bouvier, 1991.
171-180.
Gattens, Marie Luise. “Language, Gender, and Fascism: Reconstructing Histories in Three Guineas, Der Mann auf der Kanzel and Kindheitsmuster.” Gender, Patriarchy, and Fascism in the Third Reich: The Response of Women Writers . Ed. Elaine Martin. Detroit : Wayne State UP, 1993. 32-64.
Argues that Three Geneas, Der Mann auf der Kanzel, and Kindheitsmuster first expose the interrelationship between patriarchal and fascist structures, secondly unearth family structures that reproduce gendered subjects that in turn reproduce
the existing authoritarian order, and finally attempt to break with the hierarchical structures that inform patriarchal history. All three texts employ history as a political intervention against the imposed conformity to a rigid gender system. History is critically re-examined from a female point of view so that women become active producers of culture. In Der Mann auf der Kanzel and Kindheitsmuster, the mother-daughter relationship assumes central significance in the daughter’s reconstruction of the past which leads to a recognition of the paternal order. Kindheitsmuster also unearths the most silenced history of women under National Socialism.
Gattens, Marie Luise. “Madchenerziehung im Faschismus: Die Rekonstruktion der eigenen Geschichte in Christa Wolfs Kindheitsmuster.” Der Widerspenstigen Zahmung: Studien zur bezwungenen Weiblichkeit in der Literatur vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Ed. Sylvia Wallinger and Monika Jonas. Innsbruck : Inst.
fur Ger., Univ. Innsbruck, 1986. 281-293.
Komar, Kathleen L. “The Difficulty of Saying 'I': Reassembling a Self in Christa Wolf's Autobiographical Fiction.” Redefining Autobiography in Twentieth-Century Women's Fiction: An Essay Collection. Ed. Janice Morgan, Colette T. Hall, and Carol L. Snyder.
New York : Garland, 1991. 261-279.
Argues that Patterns of Childhood, The Quest for Christa T, and Accident: A Dog’s News “form a continuous autobiographical fictional narrative that reveals Wolf’s attempts to come to terms with defining the self in literature” (262). The narrator of Patterns of Childhood treats Nelly’s childhood in third person while her own reflections in the past and on contemporary events in the GDR and the world are cast in second person. The narrator realizes that her story will come to a successful end only when she can reintegrate and reunify the community of selves she has created in the text— that is, only when she could reconstruct herself as a whole being. In Quest for Chirsta T, the difficulty of saying “I” shows the need to establish a self within a legitimate community. In the two works, Wolf calls into question the separation of fiction and reality by conflating the experiences of author and narrator without allowing them to be identified as the same.
Kuhn, Anna K. “Patterns of Childhood: The Confrontation with the Self.”
Christa Wolf’s Utopian Vision: From Marxism to Feminism . Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988. 96-137.
Points out that Wolf’s resistance to the first-person form in her autobiographical narrative arises out of a sense of
self-estrangement from her own past. This sense of self-alienation is so profound that Wolf does not follow out her original plan that in the ending the third person of Nelly and the second person of you would converge into an “I.” Kuhn argues that this is not Wolf’s failure to express subjective authenticity. Rather, this failure to synthesize the two selves highlights the never-ending process of self-examination, which is achieved by reviewing the past through the prism of the present. Yet this self-examination does not overcome the sense of self-alienation, which culminates as the narrator reluctantly acknowledges her childhood self as an autonomous subject and seeks to place her present self in relationship to her former self.
Lauckner, Nancy A. “The Treatment of Holocaust Themes in GDR Fiction from the Late 1960s to the Mid-1970s: A Survey. ” Studies in GDR Culture and Society. Ed. Margy Gerber. Washington, DC : UP of Amer., 1981.
141-154.
Offers a brief survey of holocaust themes in GDR fiction from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. Lauckner focuses on Jurek Becker’s Jakob der Lugner (1969) and Der Boxer (1976), Hermann Kant’s Das Impressum (1972) and Der Aufenthalt (1977), and Christa Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster (1976) in order to trace the change of interest in holocaust themes in this period. The early focus has been largely on the sufferings of the Jews, but the interest is gradually shifted to portraying the postwar effect of the holocaust on Germans as they confront the guilt issue and attempt to come to terms with their past.
Mahlendorf, Ursula. “Der weisse Rabe fliegt: Zum Kunstlerinnenroman im 20. Jahrhundert.” Deutsche Literatur von Frauen, I: Vom Mittelalter bis zum Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts; II: 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Ed.
Gabler Gisela Brinker. Munich : Beck, 1988. 445-459.
Pickerodt, Gerhart. “Christa Wolfs Roman Kindheitsmuster: Ein Beitrag zur 'Vergangenheitsbewaltigung'?” Exile: Wirkung und Wertung:
Ausgewahlte Beitrage zum funften Symposium uber deutsche und osterreichische Exilliteratur. Ed. Donald G. Daviau and Ludwig M.
Fischer. Columbia, SC : Camden House, 1985. 293-308.
Roshnowski, Stanislaw W. “Der Roman als Form des historischen Bewusstseins: 'Kindheitsmuster' von Christa Wolf und 'Der Aufenthalt' von Hermann Kant.” Literatur im Wandel: Entwicklungen in europaischen sozialistischen Landern 1944/45-1980. Ed. Ludwig Richter, Heinrich Olschowsky, Juri Bogdanow, and Swetlnan A.
Scherlainowa. Berlin : Aufbau, 1986. 430-447.
Stephan, Alexander. “Von Aufenthalten, Hosenknopfen und Kindheitsmustern: Das Dritte Reich in der jungsten Prosa der DDR.”
Proc. of 6th Internat. Symposium on Ger. Democratic Republic Studies in GDR Culture and Society. Ed. Margy Gerber. Washington, DC : UP of Amer., 1981. 127-139.
Wolf, Christa. “A Model of Experience: A Discussion on A Model Childhood.”
The Fourth Dimension: Interviews with Christa Wolf. Trans. Hilary Pilkington. London: Verso, 1987. 39-63.
Tells the interviewer that what prompts her to write A Model Childhood is the feeling that something is missing. This sense of a lacuna
Tells the interviewer that what prompts her to write A Model Childhood is the feeling that something is missing. This sense of a lacuna