Sommerstück: On Christa Wolf’s Rediscovery of the Idyll

Abstract

This article examines Christa Wolf's Sommerstück (1989) through the lens of modernist utopian thinking and genre-theory. The novel challenges the common-sense definition of utopia as an imagined paradisiacal state and the idyll as an idealized vision of communal harmony, complicating the question of dwelling within a utopian idyll at the specific historical conjuncture that preceded the Mauerfall. Interrogating the function of fantasy and the structure of mirage in idealized moments of crystallization with reference to Jameson’s opposition of idyll to utopia, the article contends that utopian impulses in Sommerstück aim to replace the harsh reality of East Germany through the idealization of the quotidian. Although lampooned by Hegel in the Aesthetics as lacking development and the many-sidedness of human interests evinced in epic poetry, the idyll is nonetheless positioned as the prosaic ground for romance and on a continuum with hybrid forms of epic. The article charts the temporal structure of development and progression inherent in the formalism of the genre in terms of the temporal structure of utopian striving. I first identify the temporal structure of idyll and utopia as outlined in the narrative. Of paramount importance is how the narrative, despite being rooted in a specific historical context, attempts to create a utopian vision of social relations as at once timeless and evolving. The shifting relationship between utopian ideals and a changing political reality becomes a focal point for thinking the inseparability of the idyllic from the utopian. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, anti-utopian elements of the negative ideal – the remnants of the old society of control and surveillance – were rendered more prominent to the observers of the divide. From a certain vantage point, then, one could say that the phenomenon of utopia is one of perspectival and spectatorial distance; it intersects with the idyllic mirage of a harmonious collocation in a state of innocence where different societal ideals and classes merge into indistinction. The article deepens the analysis of utopia by considering it within broader frameworks of genre-theory and German idealist thinking, suggesting that the quest for a perfect society may involve control, assimilation, and power struggles – dystopian themes highlighted by the novel when reread in light of catastrophe and a critical reevaluation of the meaning of dwelling at ‘the end of history.’