Christa Wolf and the Coming to Oneself:

Reflections on a Friendship
Thomas S. Hines

The recent death of the great German writer Christa Wolf (18 March 19291 December
2011) has called up vivid memories of our friendship of eighteen years. My first awareness
of her came in the early 1990s, when I read a review of her work in the New York Times
that emphasized her novel The Quest for Christa T. This convinced me to read the book
itself. As a kind of bildungsroman, it traces the narrators friendship with another woman,
Christa T., whose partially fictitious identity mirrors and merges with that of Christa
Wolf herself. I was especially moved by Wolf s selection of the books epigraph from the
poet Johannes Becher: What is itthis coming to oneself?1 The Quest for Christa T.
would remain my favorite of all Wolf s works and would prompt me to continue with her
equally moving Patterns of Childhood and beyond.2
I was thus delighted when I learned shortly after those readings that Wolf would
be spending the 199293 academic year in Los Angeles as a visiting scholar at the Getty
Research Institute (GRI).3 Kurt Forster, then director of the institute, later told me that
even as Cold War passions were subsiding, he and the Getty were criticized for inviting
this East German Communist to the GRI. Early in that year, I told a mutual friend,
Gwendolyn Wright, also a Getty Scholar, that I would like very much to meet Wolf. I
then suggestedat the time, half seriouslythat I would be happy to take her on a tour
of modern Los Angeles architecture, with an emphasis on the Austrian migrs Richard
Neutra and Rudolph Schindler, about whom I had been writing. I was pleasantly surprised
when I promptly got a phone call from Wolf herself, telling me that she would happily
accept my offer. Her husband, the writer and editor Gerhard Wolf, was visiting her in
Santa Monica, and, joined by Getty Scholar Marco de Michelis and his wife, Agnes Kohlmeyer, both professors of German cultural and architectural history, we selected a day
and set forth in what Christa would later describe as my kleine, blaue Honda.4
We began early on what would turn into an all-day tour, resulting in numerous
photographs of ourselves with famous buildings in the background. Christa was especially intrigued with Frank Lloyd Wrights Hollyhock House (191921) for the wealthy
socialist Aline Barnsdall, Neutras Lovell Health House (192729) for Philip and Leah
Lovell, and Schindlers own Schindler-Chace House (192122), designed for himself
and his wife, Pauline, and their friends Clyde and Marion Chace (fig. 1). Both the Wolfs
were understandably fascinated by the left-leaning propensities of all of those clients,
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Fig. 1. Gerhard Wolf, Christa Wolf, Thomas Hines, Agnes Kohlmeyer, and Marco de Michelis
at Rudolph Schindlers Schindler-Chace House, West Hollywood, 20 December 1992.

especially Pauline Schindler, a lifelong radical who was a member in the 1930s and 1940s
of the American Communist Party.
In addition to those landmarks, our tour included such significant but lesserknown works as Neutras Jardinette Apartments (1927)arguably the first major
structure in America of what would come to be called the International Style. And here
occurred an incident that Christa would recount first in a short story and then in her last
novel, Stadt der Engel; oder, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud.5 After taking in the main streetfacing facades of the apartment building, Marco, Agnes, and Gerhard decided to explore
the back, while Christa and I remained in the front to witness, alas, what at first seemed a
harmless but then suddenly alarming incident. As Marco and the others returned to meet
us, walking jauntily down the middle of the street, a handsome black couple in a sporty
convertible had to swerve and screech to a halt to avoid hitting them. This infuriated the
driver, who then stood up in his seat and shouted an epithet at the white tourist intruders in the predominantly Korean and African American neighborhood. A diplomatic
silence on the part of the visitors would likely have allowed his hostility to subside, but
the irrepressible Marco replied in kind, motivating the increasingly incensed driver to
begin backing up slowly to encounter his antagonist. Since Christa and I had watched the
incident unfold, we quickly saw this as a crisis in the making and intervened to explain our
impetuous friends indiscretion. We are architectural historians, we explained, and
we are only here to study that important building, a sentiment so apparently perplexing
to the driver that, with a bewildered expletive, he and his companion fortunately drove
away. Christa and I later congratulated ourselves, with only slight hyperbole, on possibly
averting a conflict that the press would inevitably label racial incident.
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That evening, the group came back for dinner at my apartment in Westwood, where
we were joined by the German American photographer and film editor Karl Kuehn, who
would make one of the most appealing pictures of Christa during her whole year in Los
Angeles (fig. 2). Just before dinner, the days intensity was also happily countered when
Christa discovered a corny movie poster in my bathroom that caused her to laugh louder
than I would ever hear her again and which prompted her to summon Gerhard, who joined
in her hilarious reaction. The poster was for a 1949 RKO Cold War B picture titled I Married a Communist, directed by Robert Stevenson and starring Robert Ryan, Laraine Day,
and John Agar. After the poster was designed, negative audience reaction to the title persuaded RKO to change it to Beautiful But Dangerous. Luckily, the Wolfs saw the original
poster, which prompted a unique reaction that the studio would not likely have been able
to imagine.
Kuehn himself would later invite us all for dinner at his sprawling house and studio nestled in the hills just below the Hollywood sign. There, Christa seemed especially
fascinated with the experience of my friend Alan Onoye, a Japanese American businessman who, following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, had spent four years during the war as
a child with his parents and grandparents in a Colorado internment camp. She had never
actually met anyone who had been, as she put it, in an American concentration camp,
although Alan was careful to insist that those demeaning but relatively nonviolent camps
were not to be compared with the deadly concentration camps of the Nazi Holocaust. In
her recounting of this in Stadt der Engel, Christa changed my name to Bob Rice. Alan was
disguised only by a shift in spelling to Allan.
During Christas year in Los Angeles, we continued to explore the area, especially
Santa Monica, where I drove her by the homes of that earlier generation of migrs:
Fig. 2. Agnes Kohlmeyer, Gerhard Wolf, Christa Wolf, Marco de Michelis, and
Thomas Hines at Hiness home in Westwood, Los Angeles, 20 December 1992.
Photo by Karl Gernot Kuehn. Karl Gernot Kuehn.

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Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno, and Salka and Bertold Viertel. We also
enjoyed suppers together at beachside restaurants in Malibu, and she came to my house
for a number of small dinners, one of which occurred in the same week her name was
revealed in the German and international press to have been in the files of the Stasi, the
notorious East German secret police. While I was in the final stage of cooking dinner that
night, she came back to the kitchen to talk. Well, how are you? I asked. Its the worst
week of my life, she replied. I then asked if, given the situation, she would rather be in
California or in Germany to confront the issue, and she replied that it would be bad in
either place, but that, all in all, she was glad that she was in L.A. The Getty was providing
her both a shelter from the storm and a quiet source of resuscitation and inspiration for
the tasks ahead.
Then, and later in other conversations, she reiterated her long-held commitment to socialism and her continuing belief that the system could work. To help make
it work, she had long known that she had to participate and to do what she could to
strengthen the arts, especially literature, as an expression of socialisms highest goals and
programs. As in all political systems, this included serving on panels and review boards
and making difficult choices of certain programs or individuals over others. When she
supported Person A over Person B, for example, as being better and more valuable
for a particular prize or position, she only slowly came to realize how politically damaging such judgments could be, as recorded in the Stasi files, for the fate of Person B. This
caused her, she told me, to try to make such judgments and recommendations more cautiously and with a more realistic recognition of their potential political consequences.
Her larger and more public responses to the Stasi issue would soon, of course, be widely
discussed and publicized, and she would reiterate them in numerous writings, including Stadt der Engel. The Stasi files also revealed that she, herself, had been the subject of
surveillance and investigationas recounted in the great title story of her collection Was
Bleibt (What remains).6
Yet most of our conversations were less politically focused and centered instead
on issues of philosophy and literature. At that time she was particularly enthusiastic
about the nineteenth-century German novelist Theodor Fontane, and, among her own
contemporaries, Gnther Grass, but she also wanted to talk about English and American
literature, including T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, whose poems we would read aloud.
Another time we read from Bertolt Brechts To Posterity and The Seven Towers of
Thebesshe from the German original, I from the English translation.7 He was a great
poet, I observed, to which she replied, Yes, but he was not a nice man. In the same vein,
when I showed her a pompous nineteenth-century Festschrift to Otto von Bismarck,
lavishly illustrated with portrait engravings of his relatives, friends, and associates, her
reaction was, I think I dont like the Germans.

On another evening, the architectural historian and fellow Getty Scholar Jean-Louis
Cohen drove Christa to my house and paraphrased, on the way, a story that I had told him
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earlier. Upon arrival, she insisted that I tell the story again in your own words, a story
that would ultimately become the subtitle, rendered in English, of Stadt der Engel; oder, The
Overcoat of Dr. Freud. The coat story, to which she ultimately gave a heightened literary
significance, concerns Richard Neutras lifelong friendship with Sigmund Freuds son,
the architect Ernst Freud, from their school days in Vienna to their architectural apprenticeships in 1920s Berlin and through their periodic reunions in London after Ernst and
his extended family, including his father and his sister Anna, had been forced to flee Nazi
Germany and Austria. On one of those visits after the war, Neutra and his wife, Dione, had
left balmy, semitropical Los Angeles to arrive at the Freud home in cold, rainy London,
whereupon Richard, according to Diones memory, confessed to Ernst that he had not
packed wisely and wondered if Ernst could lend him an overcoat. Ernst quickly replied,
No, Richard. I will not lend you a coat: I will give you fathers last coat, which the senior
Freud had bought in England after his immigration in 1938. Since Neutra had been a frequent childhood visitor in the Freud household and a devoted Freudian, he was greatly
excited and honored to own the masters mantle, which he proudly wore the rest of his life.
Later, in the mid-1990s, on a sunny Los Angeles winter afternoon, I stopped by for
tea with Neutras widow, who asked as I started to leave, Do you need an overcoat? My
first, unspoken thought was no. I still had a heavy overcoat from my graduate school days
in Wisconsin, but I sensed that I should ask, Would this be Richard Neutras overcoat?
Well, yes, she replied, Richard wore it the last twenty years of his life, but it was originally Sigmund Freuds overcoat. I happily accepted this mantle of two famous men and
took it to UCLA with the intention of ultimately depositing it in the Neutra Archive, but
first I brought it to my seminar, where my students and, later, certain colleagues clearly
enjoyed trying on the hallowed coat. I then hung it on the back of my office door and went
to Washington, D.C., to serve on a National Endowment for the Humanities panel. When
I returned to UCLA, the coat, alas, was gone, along with my office typewriterthe casualties of a string of burglaries in my building. Our suspicion was that the burglar had used
the coat to cover and conceal the typewriter, after which he probably discarded the coat.
I reported this to the campus police, but the coat was never found. I could never summon
the courage to tell this to Dione Neutra.
What could have happened to Freuds overcoat? Christa asked intently. Had it
maybe been tossed into a Dumpster, we conjectured, to be claimed by some homeless
person as a welcome cover when sleeping under some freeway overpass? Where is it
now? she kept asking, and I replied that, of course, I did not know. I am an historian and
cannot answer that, I reminded her, but you are a novelist and can therefore supply the
answer. I give you this story and I look forward to your explanation. Ultimately, I was
disappointed that in Stadt der Engel she did not take the story further in that direction
and instead used the mystery of the wayward overcoat chiefly as a symbol of the migr
condition in midcentury Los Angeles. Later, in 2010, after the books publication, when
asked by a journalist about the origins of the books mysterious subtitle, she replied only
that she had gotten the idea from a friend in Los Angeles.8

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Throughout the 1990s, after she had left California, we continued to correspond, usually
in the form of brief New Years greetings. On 1 January 1994, she wrote: a new date, a new
year....I am longing for you, for Santa Monica, even for LAthe monster. For the sea, of
course. I dont know if and when I will return to meet all of you. A lot of obligations here.
A lot of stress. I remember our meeting at Gladstones [on Malibu beach]. I hear your
voice reading this poem about the rain. Here she was referring to Edith Sitwells Still
Falls the Rain, written during the London Blitz of 1940, whose haunting opening lines
Christa would later quote in Stadt der Engel: Still Falls the Rain/ Dark is the world of man,
black as our loss/ Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails/ Upon the cross.9
In the summer of 1999, I attended the ceremonies of the Pritzker Architecture
Prize in Berlin, awarded that year to Sir Norman Foster in recognition of his lifes work,
but particularly for his recent restoration of the old nineteenth-century German Reichstag
(1894) and its retrofitting in the late 1990s as the new home of the national Bundestag.
During my week there, I had three long and pleasant meetings with the Wolfs in Berlin
and Frankfurt an der Oder, impressions of which I paraphrase from rough journalnotes:

On 8 June 1999, I meet them for dinner at the Mao Tai restaurant in Prenzlauer Berg
because Christa says they like the Thai food and especially the exotic cocktails! I suggest that they also like its pun on the name of Chairman Mao. Christa laughs. Students
stop by the table and ask for her autograph. The owner of the Georg Buchner bookstore
across the street comes over to say hello. Christa looks good, having lost weight following recent hip surgery, which causes her to walk with a slight limp. Over dinner we talk
about geography and ideology and the effect of her familys wartime flight westward
from Landsberg, in what would become Poland, to the western edge of Mecklenberg. If
they had gone just a bit farther west, she observes, she would have grown up in the West
German Federal Republic. Would this have given her a totally different political ideology, I ask, to which she replies, Of course, but the question I most often wonder about
is: Would I still have become a writer?10
Two afternoons later, we drive to Frankfurt an der Oder and spend an hour over
coffee and dessert at an outdoor caf near the river (figs. 3, 4). We continue talking about
life and politics in the German Democratic Republic, the higher goals of which Christa
says she still supports, though she opposes the current waves of GDR nostalgia and
resists giving in to such sentimental longing. An architect friend of theirs stops by our
table to say hello and talk about his new book on Frankfurt native Konrad Wachsmann,
an architect who had worked with Walter Gropius at the Bauhaus and at Harvard and had
spent the last decades of his life in Los Angeles teaching at the University of Southern
California. Because I had known him in L.A., they are interested to hear about this.
We then visit the Frankfurt home and museum of the poet Heinrich von Kleist,
a favorite of the Wolfs, and proceed to Christas public reading from her just-published
volume of collected stories, Hierzulande, Andernots (Another Time, Another Place; 1999),
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Fig. 3. Gerhard Wolf and Christa Wolf, Frankfurt an der Oder, Germany, 10 June 1999.
Photo by Thomas Hines. Thomas Hines.
Fig. 4. Christa Wolf, Thomas Hines, and Gerhard Wolf by the Oder River in Frankfurt an
der Oder, Germany, with the Polish shore visible in the background, 10 June 1999.

which includes a funny account of a trip to the California desert with a small group of
female friends from Los Angeles. The hall is packed and the appreciative audience frequently breaks into laughter. Since this work is clearly a departure from much of Christas
less lighthearted work set in the GDR, someone asks if her stay in Los Angeles caused her
to question received stereotypes of California and America. She replies that, slowly but
surely, her attitudes had changed in a positive direction, with the help of L.A. friends,
including one who is in the audience.
The next day, Christa invites me to tea at their home at 7 Amalienpark, Pankow,
in a pleasant ensemble of houses from the late nineteenth century. Their second-floor

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apartment has large windows and very high ceilings and is furnished mostly with plain,
old furniture that gives it a kind of minimalist elegance. On one of the massive bookcases
in Christas study, I am pleased to see Karl Kuehns photograph of us taken at dinner in my
apartment in Los Angeles (see fig. 2). On this visit to Pankow, I drive out with my friend
and Berlin host, the industrial designer Max Andreas Kant, along with his companion,
Undine, and their young daughter, Hannah. I had earlier recounted to Christa the story
of Maxs arrest in the demonstrations of 1989, when the police officer asked him the same
question I had asked when we had first met in 1985: Are you a descendant of the great
philosopher Immanuel Kant? Maxs spontaneous answer was neither yes nor no, but
rather, At times like this, I dont think genealogy is important! This sophisticated reply
so impressed the officerwho assumed mistakenly that such a cool response confirmed
the family kinshipthat Max was immediately released! Christa is so delighted with the
story that she insists that Max retell it in his own voice. I wonder if she will record it in
her journal.

That afternoon in Pankow was the last time I saw her, but we continued to communicate
in brief annual New Years messages. On 21 December 2004, on the back of a postcard
of Brechts bedroom in Berlin, she wrote of the passing year: I am a little bit incontent because I did not work enoughyes my City of Angels is not yet finished, but I
hope, I hope, next year will be very busy. Dear Tom, my English vanishes as you see. On
21December 2006, she wrote: We are well, so farif you dont pay attention to what
happens in the world. I am working very slowlyyes on Engelstadt. It is a very, very difficult thing. On 8 December 2007, she enclosed a picture of their house with a greeting
from Mecklenburg, the landscape where we live in summertime. You see our house, an
old farmers house under wonderful trees....I am near the end of City of Angels (Los
Angeles) or The Overcoat of Dr. Freud. A very difficult thing. I suffered by writing. What
else? WeGerd and me and our family are o.k.without my knee suffering by arthritis.
But: in 1 years I will become 80 years.11 In 2009, I wrote to congratulate her on reaching that milestone.
Thus in almost every communication after she left California, Christa commented
on the slow and difficult progress of her L.A. book. But on 14 January 2010, with the assistance of her bilingual granddaughter, Jana Simon, she wrote:
I have just recently turned in the 450 pages strong manuscript to my publishing house....As you can see, the story of the lost overcoat has come a long way.
In my book I recall and describe in detail the afternoon when you told us this
story, inspiring me to say I would write a book with that title and you generously replied: Use anything you need. And thats what I did. So there will be a
revenant of younaturally very different and adapted for literary use. As you
know, writers depend heavily on the real world to steal ideas from and translate them into their own literary language. Sometimes this means to re-invent
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situationsalways based on the intention not to destroy them....I wanted to

tell you about this...in advance and underline how grateful I am for your generosity. Such a long time has passed since we spent that afternoon togetherits
been 16 years!and thats how long it took me to deal with this stuff.12
Now, as often in human memory, such stuff returns to my consciousness with a collective richness I had not fully appreciated while it was happening. Christa Wolf was
indeed one of the people in my life who best helped me ponder, This coming to oneselfwhatis it?
Thomas S. Hines is professor emeritus of history and architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles.
I am indebted to the following friends who read this manuscript and made helpful comments:
Notes
Marianna Birnbaum, Luisa Ciammitti, Carlo Ginzburg, Michael Heim, and Michael Osman.

1. In German, the Becher quotation reads: Was ist das: dieses Zu-Sich-Kommen des Men-

schen? The epigraph appears without a citation in the original German edition., Christa Wolf, Nachdenken
ueber Christa T. (Halle: Mittteldeutscher Verlag, 1968). The English translation also includes this epigraph:
Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T. (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1970).

2. The original German title was Kindheitsmuster (Berlin und Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1976). In

the first English translation, the title was given as A Model Childhood (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux,
1980), to which the author strongly objected. I told her that I rather liked that version with its clearly
ironic connotations, a sentiment with which she disagreed, arguing that she had intended no such irony
and even if she had, most readers would not have understood it. In the next edition, the English title
was accordingly changed to Patterns of Childhood (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1984), which she
believed was closer to her intention and to the original German title.

3. At the time, the institute was named the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humani-

ties, and later, the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities. I use the current,
shortened name, Getty Research Institute (GRI), throughout to avoid confusion.

4. Christa Wolf, Begegnungen Third Street, Neue Deutsche Literatur 2 (1995): 731.

5. For the short story, see Wolf, Begegnungen Third Street. For the novel, see Christa Wolf,

Stadt der Engel; oder, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010).

6. Christa Wolf, Was Bleibt (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau, 1990); English translation, What

Remains and Other Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1993).

7. Who Built the Seven Towers of Thebes? is the first line and popular title of Brechts

poem; the official title is Questions from a Worker Who Reads (1935). This poem and To Posterity can be found in numerous editions, as in, for example, Bertolt Brecht, Poems, 19131956 (New York:
Methuen,1976), 25253.

8. Cited in the publicity materials distributed by the publisher.

9. Christa Wolf to Thomas Hines, 1 January 1994. This and the other communications cited

below are in the possession of the author, with copies in the files of the Getty Research Journal. Sitwells
Still Falls the Rain can be found in many editions, as in, for example, Edith Sitwell, Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1965), 27273.

10. The paraphrases here in the first person come from rough journal notes, in possession of the

author and with copies at the Getty Research Institute.

11. Wolf to Hines, 21 December 2004; 21 December 2006; 8 December 2007.

12. Wolf to Hines, 14 January 2010.

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