PERSPECTIVE ON CULTURAL REUNIFICATION : To Taint All, Discredit the Best : The campaign against author Christa Wolf is part of an attempt to erase East German culture.

Christa Wolf, perhaps the most prominent woman writer in post-war Germany, has become the eye of a literary storm that threatens the cultural and even political identity of the former communist half of the nation. The West German literary Establishment, which lavished praise on her work and her role as an artist in East Germany for more than 20years, is using Wolf’s latest publication, a novella titled “Was Bleibt?” (What Remains?) to launch an attack on her and all hitherto respected East German authors.

Wolf has published a dozen volumes of fiction and nonfiction in East and West Germany, and her works have been translated in several languages, including English and Japanese. In 1980, she won West Germany’s most prestigious literary award, the Buchner Prize.

In “Was Bleibt?” Wolf chronicles a period when she was under surveillance of the East German security police. Critics accuse her of opportunism because she published the manuscript, which lay in her desk drawer for 10 years, only after the communist regime was toppled. They relegate her to the status of a privileged state poet, withholding material that might have been offensive to the regime. In fact, Wolf repeatedly criticized the East German regime, even though she was a party member. She represented integrity and a vision of socialism imbued with dignity, justice and tolerance. No doubt, Wolf’s critical voice helped to shape the process of political self-assertion long before she addressed mass audiences at public rallies last autumn. The charge of “state poet,” certainly misses the mark. But it strikes an extremely vulnerable spot because it is by far the easiest way to destroy Wolf’s status as a spokeswoman. It goes without saying that if one of East Germany’s most respected writers is discredited, all colleagues who shared her vision will be tainted.

This turnabout of the West German literary Establishment, the vehemence of the attack and the suspicious unity of voices in various media is perplexing until it is fit into the larger picture of post-Wall German politics. Then, the “literary” campaign is consistent with the conservative model of German unification, which is intent on replacing East Germany’s political and economic structures and erasing its culture. Gunter Grass, the most illustrious of Wolf’s few defenders, made this connection in a recent interview when he protested, “We should not repeat in literature that which happens daily in the political and especially the economic sphere; namely the colonization of the GDR.” The literary campaign has yet another version of the “German Question” at its core: The cultural and historical identity of the united Germany is at stake.

By styling Christa Wolf as a state poet, the Western literary Establishment extends to the cultural realm what is already accepted in politics and economics: the dichotomization of East Germans into victims and perpetrators. This all-or-nothing categorization erases those East Germans who shaped niches of freedom within the authoritarian social order, criticized the regime and finally revolted against it. By identifying exclusively with the victims, West Germans engage in the collective psychological maneuver of projecting the responsibility for German history onto the communists. Suddenly, people who ignored traces of National Socialism in West Germany are finding Hitler’s legacy preserved in East German communists and, by association, in all those who refuse to abandon what might be called an East German identity. But East German communism was not, no matter what parallels one can find, Hitler’s National Socialism. Political repression, corruption and intimidation do not add up to Auschwitz, a fact to which Wolf’s work testifies.

By discrediting East German literature, the current “literary” campaign erases facets of East German reality and history and discourages East Germans from finding an authentic identity within the united Germany. Wolf refuses to participate in this political, economic and cultural absorption of East Germany. Her work preserves the German Democratic Republic in literature. But the East was supposed to cease existing Tuesday, except as a nightmare best forgotten. West Germany’s cultural absorption of the East is yet another version of German intolerance to identities other than its own. And literary chroniclers like Wolf are perceived as a threat by those intent on presenting to the world a Germany healed of its division and unburdened of its National Socialist past.

Wolf’s indictment by the West German media is almost unanimous. But then, it is difficult to find any reporting on East Germany that does not subscribe to the agenda of annexation. Beyond the unmistakable irony that voices such as Wolf’s might finally be silenced just as the communists vanish for good, the current West German appropriation of political, cultural and historical reality represents a troublesome beginning for the “new” Germany.