It amounts to a veritable literary event: Christa Wolf’s completion of the major new novel on which she worked for more than ten years. City of Angels or The Overcoat of Dr. Freud reflects the entire life of the Büchner Prize-winning writer, repeatedly in connection with crucial moments in post-war German history. Readers familiar with her work will discover in this latest novel new and fascinating facets of her writing; others will view City of Angels as an opportunity to immerse themselves in the world of one of the great contemporary authors writing in German.

The narrator is spending several months in Los Angeles in the early nineteen-nineties; a fellowship from the Getty Center allows her to stay at the idyllic Miss Victoria Hotel. Her research involves the correspondence of a woman known as L., letters the narrator found among the papers of a deceased friend. Her investigation is no easy task, since she knows no more than the woman’s initials and the fact that she emigrated to the USA from National Socialist Germany. The visiting scholar studies the American way of life, makes new acquaintances, immerses herself in the history of the city of angels, retraces the steps of artists and writers like Thomas Mann or Bertolt Brecht who belonged to the wartime colony of German exiles. In the course of her daily reading, of her dreams, of conversations especially with her neighbour, the ironically mocking Peter Gutman, the narrator moves closer to the substance of the matter which is tormenting her, an ordeal she survived and must render account of. For decades under the constant surveillance of the Staatssicherheit in the GDR, she first inspected her Stasi dossier a few months before travelling to the USA. She looked through forty-two volumes of files, ordered photocopies, found out the real names of those who had spied on her. And then her hand chanced upon a file labelled »informal collaboration«: an innocuous hand-written report about a colleague; protocols by two contact agents recording their »meetings« with her. In the midst of the media blizzard that breaks out in response to this discovery, one question is especially disquieting: How could I forget?

A fascinating tapestry densely woven from shifting narrative strands, temporal planes, and themes: brilliant, compelling, upsetting. Christa Wolf depicts a human life that stands its ground as one political system gives way to the next, always resuming the search for her own identity. She tells of the painful, but liberating, confrontation with her own past, and addresses a subject of universal relevance: the art of remembering, of confirming a personal identity that has undergone fracture and dislocation, and of asking: What makes us turn out as we do? With that question, Christa Wolf picks up the thread of her major success Patterns of Childhood, a novel recalling a childhood during the Third Reich and the subsequent transition to the authoritarian GDR; a book that touched upon national traumata. City of Angels – in a certain sense autobiographical, like all of her work, but, as she notes, »not strictly bound by the facts« – reflects the entire life of Christa Wolf, repeatedly in connection with crucial moments in German history.

It’s Quite Comfortable Being Caught in the Middle