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Gerhard Wolf: Your life person

2023-02-08T10:32:40.159Z


He was a writer, publisher - and husband of Christa Wolf. Gerhard Wolf was a defender and companion for many GDR authors. He died in Berlin at the age of 94.


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Publisher and writer Gerhard Wolf

Photo: Jörg Carstensen / dpa

A husband has died, according to the first obituaries that appeared yesterday evening, shortly after it became known that Gerhard Wolf had died.

It is rare in Germany for men to be primarily defined by their role in a marriage.

It was quickly said in the news that Gerhard Wolf was of course also a writer, above all a publisher, and that he had played an interesting political role in the GDR, first more as a supporter of the SED regime and then more as a dissident.

But in the eyes of the public, he was primarily that: the husband of Christa Wolf, who was one of the most important German-language writers of the second half of the 20th century.

Although Christa Wolf was better known than her husband, the two understood each other as a unit.

Anyone who visited Christa Wolf was received by both.

With critical remarks and looks

DER SPIEGEL last came to Christa Wolf's apartment in Berlin-Pankow a year and a half before Christa Wolf's death to have a conversation with her about her memories of the GDR and the time of reunification.

And it was Gerhard Wolf who opened the door, who set the table with coffee and cake in the bay window, who stayed nearby while the interview was running and gave the visitors critical remarks and looks.

As the host, Gerhard Wolf maintained his form, but he wasn't really friendly.

Back then, in 2010, he resented the fact that SPIEGEL had reported sharply, a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, about his wife's early activities in the Stasi, which outside of the mere fact were not significant.

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He resented the criticism because his attitude was very different not only towards his wife but also towards a number of other artists: he was a defender, a companion to so many works.

Although he wrote his own books such as »Description of a Room« or »Der arme Hölderlin«, he also wrote essays in which he devoted himself to literature and art.

In the early 1960s, Wolf supported the young generation of poets in the GDR.

In the 1980s, together with the writer Günter de Bruyn, he published the »Märkischer Dichtergarten« series, which honored forgotten authors of the 18th and 19th centuries.

From 1988 to 1991 he was in charge of the series »Out of Order«, which paid tribute to the cultural workers who lived in Prenzlauer Berg.

In 1991 he founded the publishing house Gerhard Wolf Janus Press.

Gerhard Wolf was born on October 16, 1928 in Thuringia.

Like many of his year, he was still used as an anti-aircraft helper at the end of the Second World War.

He was then taken prisoner by the Americans.

After graduating from high school and studying German and history in Jena and Berlin, Wolf soon worked as an editor at Mitteldeutscher Verlag.

In 1951 he and Christa had married.

A central sentence in that last SPIEGEL interview with Christa Wolf was the statement "We loved this country" about the GDR - a sentence that certainly applied not only to Christa but also to Gerhard Wolf.

Both had believed in the utopia of a more just society, which was still widespread among intellectuals in the founding years of the GDR, but which was then reduced to absurdity by the authorities at the latest when the Wall was built in 1961.

Biermann's expatriation and the resolution

Gerhard Wolf joined the SED in 1946. He had been a member of the writers' association since 1957 and of the GDR's PEN center from 1973.

But he witnessed how the GDR regime increasingly harassed not only dissenters, but also followers, including his own internationally renowned wife.

In 1976, together with his wife, he signed the resolution with which East German cultural workers protested against the expatriation of the singer-songwriter and dissident Wolf Biermann.

Volker Braun, Stefan Heym, Stephan Hermlin, Günter Kunert and Sarah Kirsch also signed the letter.

As a result, Sarah Kirsch and Günter Kunert and Gerhard Wolf were expelled from the SED, and Stephan Hermlin and Christa Wolf received party penalties.

Biermann's expatriation, the resolution and the subsequent penalties for the renowned cultural workers marked the beginning of the end of the GDR, but unlike many of those who had signed, Christa and Gerhard Wolf stayed in the GDR.

They were spied on by the Stasi until the end.

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Thirty years after the Biermann resolution, when SPIEGEL asked some of the signatories, including Christa and Gerhard Wolf, if they were prepared to look back at the events of the time, the two, like many others, declined.

The group had long since grown apart, only a few kept in touch with each other, the paths of the former GDR citizens to reunified Germany had been too different.

The actor Armin Mueller-Stahl had long been a world star, but Christa Wolf was now sometimes suspected of being the »state poet« of the sunken GDR.

The rifts between East and West are worrying

The attitude that Christa and Gerhard Wolf had towards the GDR even after the fall of the Wall, this pro and con, was questionable in view of the deaths at the Wall, the persecution of dissenters, the general deprivation of liberty for which the GDR leadership was responsible.

Perhaps it would have been better if precisely such voices had been more audible in the first few years after unification.

Today's rifts between East and West are worrying, many of the reasons for this lie in exactly that phase that should have been a happy one for the Germans: in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Gerhard Wolf survived his wife by a good eleven years.

In 2020 he published the work »Herzenssache.

Memorial« with artist portraits by Irmtraud Morgner, Walter Jens, Carola Stern, Günter Grass and Brigitte Reimann, among others.

He himself said of this book: »I can only write about myself by writing about others.«

Incidentally, SPIEGEL's visit to the Wolfs in 2010 ended on a happy note: in a Greek restaurant around the corner, where the two were welcome guests.

Gerhard Wolf had supported his wife on the way there.

He died in Berlin on February 7, 2023 at the age of 94.

Source: spiegel

All life articles on 2023-02-08

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