In the Doghouse

Michael Hofmann

• What Remains, and Other Stories by Christa Wolf, translated by Heike Schwarzbauer and Rick Takvorian
  Virago, 295 pp, £8.99, April 1993, ISBN 1 85381 417 2
• The Writer’s Dimension: Selected Essays by Christa Wolf, edited by Alexander Stephan, translated by Jan van Heurck
  Virago, 336 pp, £17.99, April 1993, ISBN 1 85381 312 5

In the wall-month of November 1989 I translated two pieces from an anthology of East German writing for the magazine Granta, which in the end didn’t use either of them. (These things happen.) One of them was by Christa Wolf, an extract, I think, from her book Sommerstück. It was just two pages long, nothing more than a preamble and image, but of a Shakespearean power and amplitude. A group of adults and children (Wolf’s habitual, occasionally irritating, panti-social ‘we’), driving in rural East Germany, stop by a beautiful old farmhouse that is in the process of being vandalised by the local youth: doors and windows, furnishings, the massive Dutch stoves in the corners, everything senselessly in ruins. As they leave, a little girl in the party sees a birdcage toppled over in a nettle-patch and walks over to have a look. Then she sees it: the furry remains (what remains) of a cat, locked inside the bird-cage and left to starve and rot.