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In 1983, Christa Wolf was 54 years old. She had lived much of her life in East Germany, a Soviet-controlled state that had split her country in two since the end of World War II. When Hitler’s Nazi Party took control in August of 1934, she was five. When the Nazi-controlled German Army invaded Poland in September of 1939 she was ten. In May of 1945, when the Russians had invaded Berlin, she was just 16 years old, a young, seemingly helpless and removed teenager from the greater machinations around. And yet, despite having no say, no voice, and arguably no real opinion on the matter at the time, the events that peppered the setting of her youth would hold a considerable sway over the events of the rest of her life. It’s hard to imagine it now, what it might’ve been like in Germany at the height of the Cold War, when the world’s two largest superpowers in the history of its existence spent decades holding a proverbial doomsday gun, in the form of atomic energy, at each other, across a thin, barricaded line in a Central European city. In 1961, in August, the Soviets began building a wall made up of 100 miles of barbed wire, 96-miles of concrete, guard towers, machine gun posts, and searchlights in order to keep East Berliners from escaping the Capitalist-held West Berlin. Christ Wolf was 32 (Editors). It would be years later, on a trip to Greece that seemingly was made without any real plan, according to Wolf’s own account, that Wolf would find a way to express these events, this perspective, through the reading of an ancient text of Greek antiquity. The Oresteia. “The following morning, in the empty apartment where no more telephone calls, no more letters strayed by mistake, I began to read Aeschylus’s’ Oresteia,” wrote Wolf in her essay “Travel Report, About the Accidental Surfacing and Gradual fabrication of a Literary Personage.” She continued, “I witnessed how a panic rapture spread through me, how it mounted and reached its pinnacle when a voice began to speak: Aiee! Aieeee! Apollo! Apollo! Cassandra. I saw her at once. She, the captive, took me captive; herself made an object by others, she took possession of me” (Wolf 144). In Cassandra, a character from Greek antiquity, Wolf found not only an understanding but a voice to speak to the continuum of violence at the hands of powerful, short-sighted, and brutish men, who desire above all else power and glory, at the folly of their own hubris. Wolf’s novel uses an eternal return motif, opening the story in her then modern time, staring up at ruin brought on by time “This is where she stood. These stone lions looked at her; not they no longer have heads,” eventually bringing the story back to Cassandra’s time, centuries before, passing a gulf of time, which links the violence and lies, the drumbeat of war and the trauma and consequence, of Cassandra’s own time into the modern age of consequence and war of World War II, the Atomic Age, the police-state like fascistic government of East Germany, and the ever-present and looming drumbeat of the Cold War (Wolf 1) (Ross). Works Cited: -Editors, History.com. "Berlin Divided." History (2009). https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/berlin-is-divided. -Ross, Alex. "Nietzsche’s Eternal Return." The New Yorker (2019). https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/14/nietzsches-eternal-return. - Wolf, Christa. Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984.
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