Toward a Critical Reparative Practice in Post-1989 German Literature: Christa Wolf’s City of Angels or The Overcoat of Dr. Freud (2010)

To attend to questions of repair and mending in the context of post-1989 Germany, more than 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, might appear out of step. After all, West and East Germany merged over a generation ago, even before the formal end of the Cold War. Furthermore, the East German origins of both the current chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the current president, Joachim Gauck, seem to affirm symbolically a process of successful integration. Indeed, as the prominent pastor and public intellectual Friedrich Schorlemmer recently noted, the period of militant East-West German confrontations is finally over, with the struggle for global resources taking center stage.1 In many ways, however, the current rapprochement between East and West has failed to give rise to a differentiated postconventional identity in which the mutually respectful recognition of past differences and violations could yield new pathways toward building genuine relations. Instead, as the affectively charged discourse surrounding the recent anniversary of the building of the Wall indicates, a wound arising from the radical changes in 1989 continues to make itself felt in Germany’s public imagination.2 Using this chapter to examine the representational strategies by which post-1989 literature and Christa Wolf’s last novel, Stadt der Engel (2010, City of Angels), in particular, recalls East and West German asymmetries, I aim to shed light on the incomplete, partially failed, and still ongoing postunification process.