GERMANY

READ

Germany has a rich literary history, so I had lots of books to choose from for this post. I decided to go with a book that’s on the late rock icon David Bowie’s list of one hundred books. The author of A Book of Book Lists, Alex Johnson, describes Bowie’s list this way: “It is a list of books he felt were important rather than his actual 100 favourite reads.”

I wish I could have seen whatever it was that Bowie saw in this book, but unfortunately, I found The Quest for Christa T., by Christa Wolf, to be confusing, hard to follow, and frankly, somewhat tedious. It tells the story of a young woman – always Christa T., never just Christa – who grows up in Germany during the Nazi era and then the Soviet occupation of East Germany.

The book’s narrator is a friend who met Christa T. during what appears to have been their high school years. They lose touch, but reconnect later in graduate school. We learn early on that Christa T. dies at a relatively young age from leukemia, and her friend, the narrator, whose name we never know, ends up with all of Christa T.’s writings. It seems that Christa T. had a fear of vanishing without a trace, so she was always writing things down – in her diary, on scraps of papers, in letters – writings that she often then destroyed “so that the right hand needn’t know what the left hand is doing.”

Christa T. goes through the motions of living – school, work, getting married, having children – but seems to find little joy in any of it. At one point, she even contemplates suicide: “Why should I go on deluding myself: there’s no gap for me to live in.” And yet something about her is a source of endless fascination to the narrator.

Apparently, this book was extremely controversial when it first came out. According to the blurb on the back of the book, “When The Quest for Christa T. was first published in East Germany, there was an immediate storm: bookshops in East Berlin were given instructions to sell it only to well-known customers professionally involved in literary matters; at an annual meeting of the East German Writers Conference, Mrs. Wolf’s new book was condemned. Yet the novel has nothing explicitly to do with politics.”

Maybe The Quest for Christa T. would be more meaningful to me if I had a better understanding of the events that were occurring in East Germany during the time covered by this novel. As it is, I’m sure the significance of many of the book’s details were lost on me, so I’m hard-pressed to explain how the government of East Germany could have found this book to be so threatening.

COOK

Food didn’t play a huge role in The Quest for Christa T., but there were several references to potatoes, so I made Black Forest Potato Salad from a recipe I found on the International Vegetarian Union (IVU) website. This isn’t your typical potato salad, as the ingredients include sauerkraut and an apple, both of which were also mentioned in The Quest for Christa T. The recipe was very easy to make, and it was tasty enough, but the cider vinegar and the sauerkraut made it rather more tart than I would have liked.

GIVE

One of the themes in The Quest for Christa T. appears to be the struggles that young people face in school and in life. Teachers and mentors can help students cope with these problems, which is why I chose an organization from GlobalGiving.com’s website that helps to find and support mentors for pupils in Berlin. Most of the children helped by this program live in an area in which the majority of the inhabitants are immigrants from many different countries. Among the benefits of providing mentors to the children in this program are improved language skills and increased self-esteem, which lead to better opportunities for them in the long-run. More information about this mentoring project is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/pasch-mentoring-project/.

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