A MODEL CHILDHOOD

by Christa Wolf ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 1980

A novelistic memoir--seeking moral shapes, discounting answers--by East Germany's most impressive writer, author of the odd, haunting The Quest for Christa T. (At her wish, it is being published as non-fiction, though she disavows any similarity between characters or incidents in the narrative and real people or ""actual events."") Wolf's alter.-ego, here called Nelly, is remembered in the turnings of her ""model childhood"" under Hitler: how, at eleven, she came to hate and fear the Jews; Kristellnacht in her small eastern town; the extermination of a retarded aunt (hushed-over among the family) during the Nazi euthanasia program; at JungmÄdel (Hitler-Youth) camp; fleeing the Russians on a cart at war's end and passing concentration camp inmates on the road. Maybe most telling of all: a mid-war family party in which a friend hypnotizes everyone as a parlor game. Are the German people, the narrator wonders, so eager for the classic--even to be classic monsters of submission--that they are denied, going in, a moral memory? The question hounds her; this is a book of fragments--""the naked everyday time of the present"" is contrasted, on an adult trip back to Nelly's birthplace, now in Poland, ""with the time of the past, compact, vehement, concentrated, as though smelted into time ingots""--and they fairly writhe: poisoned Proust. It isn't easy reading, mostly because of its cakey, crumbly texture (heroically rendered by translators Molinaro and Rappolt) and occasionally because of its Soviet--bloc pieties and its indulged discontinuities. Unlovable, then, but scouring--and notable for the sheer detailed rendering of the memories.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1980

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1980

Categories: NONFICTION