Christa Wolf

Shall I Garnish a Metaphor with an Almond Blossom

I thank the German Academy for Language and Literature for awarding me the Georg Buchner Prize this year. On such occasions, dissatisfaction with ones own work increases greatly; self-doubt about ones chosen way of life grows. To avoid sounding irrelevant or perhaps vain, I shall spare you my disquisition on this recurring theme, and I shall omit those pages that reflected my difficulty to speak here today. With Buchners example before me, I am disturbed more than ever by the deep complexity of writing and living, of responsibility and guilt, which molds and likewise threatens to destroy anyone who writes by living and lives by writing. This complexity, I now believe, must not only be endured but accepted. To be innocent and without responsibility this may well be wishful thinking in times of weakness; it is an image of escape. In the concrete circumstances in which we live and write, become mature which also means seeing in which we involve ourselves, fail, fight back, and yearn for new experience: in these concrete circumstances a state of irresponsible innocence has no place. Here and now! is the watchword, and in passing it tears the masks from our faces. Will the faces come off with them?** To read Buchner again means seeing ones own situation more sharply. I accustomed myself to the sight of blood. But I am no guillotine blade. The path of Germans through history a laborious, often dislocated, tedious, violent, sometimes desolate path could be paved and decorated with the words of its poets. Using Bichners sentences, I wanted to make a speech that would sound as if it had been written today. But what was left undone in his time cannot be recovered.