A Model Childhood by Christa Wolf
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Total War: Total Amnesia

Proust had his madeleine. Wolf’s Nelly has an infinity of objects ‘beyond the Oder’, in her pre-war Prussian homeland, to evoke memories of her childhood. But Proust had clarity, while Nelly’s memories are fragmentary and unreliable, reflecting a very un-Proustian ambiguity: “One could be there and not be there at the same time, the ghastly secret of human beings in this century.”

Nelly’s family is ‘unpolitical,’ that is to say, unconcerned about government and its activities beyond the usual mendacity and corruption of the local council. Like most families, its main issues were Auntie Emmy’s embarrassing act as a gypsy witch and disputes over the invisible children’s territorial boundaries. Life wasn’t luxurious; but it wasn’t oppressive or unstable. People got along.

But so little engagement in governmental politics didn’t mean a lack of politics tout court. The politics of daily existence were learned at the dinner table and in the school yard: “That obeying and being loved amount to one and the same thing... A misdeed without consequences is no longer a misdeed... To rejoice in undue praise... The difficult job of sparing the parents... The link between good deeds and well-being.” And perhaps the most important political precept of all: “Not to be normal is the worst thing by far.”

These are the politics exploited by governments everywhere to achieve their ends. Without these unseen, unremarked, ingrained, politics of the heart, government becomes impossible. So when government becomes insane, it is only by the cessation of routine daily politics that its insanity can be controlled. This is perhaps a lesson of acute relevance to the present-day citizens of the United States who seem to have fallen into one of the periodic faux pas of democratic societies, one not dissimilar to that of Germany in 1933.

Wolf suggests the signal for reconsidering the continuation of daily politics in the face of governmental insanity: “The feeling that overcomes any living being when the earth moves underfoot is fear.” This fear may be the sign to stop being normal, particularly within the family and its political mores. “A family is an agglomeration of people of different ages and sexes united to strictly conceal mutually shared embarrassing secrets.” To coin a phrase, good government begins at home and before the age of seven.

Knowing when it is necessary to suspend normal politics, to take to the streets in order to protect others at the expense of one’s own interests, should not be one of the secrets. If it is, then as Wolf says, “Total war: total amnesia.”

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