Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Fre

Veröffentlicht von Der Audio Verlag

Lange wurde sie erwartet. Nun ist sie da, Christa Wolfs monumentale Rückschau: auf ihr Leben in den drei deutschen Staats- und Gesellschaftsformen, auf Brüche und Neuanfänge. Es ist ein Anschreiben gegen das Vergessen, begonnen zu einem Zeitpunkt, als ein Vergessen für die Autorin eine Wohltat gewesen wäre. Denn 1993 ergießt sich in Deutschland der Hass des Feuilletons über die vermeintliche Stasi-Zuträgerin Christa Wolf. Ein Aufenthalt in Los Angeles schafft ihr den überlebensnotwendigen Abstand. Und in der Annäherung an die Stadt nähert sie sich auch sich selbst. Eine berührende Identitätssuche und kraftvolle Lebensbejahung - gelesen von der Autorin selbst.

• Sprache: Deutsch
• Herausgeber: Der Audio Verlag
• Erscheinungsdatum: 12. Okt. 2015
• ISBN: 9783862310081

Rezensionen für Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Fre

[elenadanielson · Bewertung: 5 von 5 Sternen]

The narrator, pretty much identical with Christa Wolf, flees Berlin to the edge of the world, in this case Los Angeles, and experiences a controlled nervous breakdown as she awaits the inevitable while enjoying a seemingly cushy fellowship at the Getty Museum. She knows that the Stasi file from her youth will be opened to scrutiny and her mild reporting on colleagues many years back will trigger an avalanche of negative publicity, hate mail, and possibly wipe out the previous appreciation of her life's work. She buries her anxiety in a study of the German emigres who came to Los Angeles as refugees from Nazi Germany, their troubles far worse than her own. She tracks down one woman refugee in particular with great tenacity. The past and present intertwine and intrude on each other. The narrator compulsively documents the bizarre local customs of the Angelinos and her fellow Getty scholars along with the fate of earlier emigres and watches helplessly as her own fate suffers at the hands of her compatriots back home. Her technique is to describe events and people in excruciating detail, while leaving out their well known names, that way the reader's preconceptions do not color her depictions and until she has finished a portrait. Most disengenuous is the note at the beginning claiming that the people in the book are not real.....This is all plenty real...

[thorold_1 · Bewertung: 4 von 5 Sternen]

Wolf's complicated last book, which reads more like a memoir and a travel book than a novel. The narrator is to all intents and purposes Wolf herself, looking back at her experiences in 1993-94 on a nine-month fellowship at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. There is a remarkably seamless mixture of tourist stuff about America, historical detail about the German intellectuals in exile in Los Angeles in the 30s and 40s, reflections on her own life and the history of the DDR which it is so tied up with, and a painful examination of the mental and physical collapse she goes through as a result of the revelations about her brief collaboration with the Stasi in the early sixties. There's a lot that we are left to work out for ourselves, and this probably isn't a book that it would make much sense to read unless you already know at least a bit about Wolf herself and the history of the DDR, but if you are ready for it, it is as rewarding (and demanding) as reading Wolf always is.