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"Am I maybe really this monster?"

In 1990, Christa Wolf asks herself this question in her diary, referring to the controversy after the publication of this autobiographical text. It must have been the most turbulent year in her grown-up life. In 1989, she witnessed the breakdown of East Germany, and made the decision to publish this short novel, "What remains", written in 1979. It revolves around her experience of living under the surveillance of the Stasi, the secret police, and it naturally was impossible to publish it until the state it described had collapsed.

It turned out to be an unwelcome witness account however. The literary elite of West Germany was celebrating the victory of liberal democracy, and they needed scapegoats and antagonists to make their victory shine ever brighter. Christa Wolf, the Kassandra of East Germany, the strong woman who REMAINS when others are either sacrificing themselves as heroes or leaving the burning state, is the perfect target for a public shaming or auto-da-fé.

WHAT REMAINS ... Was bleibt ...

To me, remembering that phase in German history and my perceptions of it as a young teenager, WHAT REMAINS is shame at being so naive, at really believing in the absolute perfection of one entire society and the damnable failure of another. WHAT REMAINS, for me, is to explore how much thought and pain and knowledge and understanding we can find in the witness account of Christa Wolf, an account of that time that was used by condescending outsiders to destroy her reputation, to call her an official communist state writer and a hypocrite for telling her story the way she perceived it from the inside of the Berlin Wall - her Troy. Just a few years after finishing her story of Kassandra, she experienced the invasion of Greek truths into her flawed but beloved Troy. She wrote with prophetic clarity in 1983 that Kassandra was a Trojan only after Troy was lost. And then she was nothing else.

That is WHAT REMAINS of Christa Wolf in 1990: her identity as a writer and witness of a sunk world. Suffering within its walls for being too independent and honest, suffering outside the walls for being a Trojan citizen and patriot.

Something inside me whispers that she was a welcome witch to burn, speaking as she did against the patriarchy on both sides of the wall, against the showy heroism of the Achilles characters that needed their stage time and their admirers. Achill das Vieh, she wrote - Achilles the idiot, the cattle, the rapist and killer...

There were voices that tried to protect her, that spoke of the hypocrisy of West German literary critics. Günter Grass, one of them, would experience the same self-righteous outcry a couple of years later, when he finally had reached the layer of his memory onion that dealt with his early immersion in Hitler Germany. His youth resembled Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster, her patterns of childhood, and maybe he instinctively understood the difficulty of trying to live an ordinary life in a burning world better than anyone else.

To Christa Wolf, 1989 means exile at home. WHAT REMAINS... is arranging life after the illusion of hope has vanished.

It will take time to heal, to build a new identity on the ruins of her life. WHAT REMAINS? WHAT REMAINS is to tell the story. WHAT REMAINS is to remember and to understand. WHAT REMAINS is to keep living. "There is no unhappiness except for the unhappiness not to live."

Brilliant. Short. Painful. Necessary.

"Was bleibt. Was meiner Stadt zugrunde liegt und woran sie zugrunde geht. Daß es kein Unglück gibt außer dem, nicht zu leben. Und am Ende keine Verzweiflung, außer der, nicht gelebt zu haben."