City of Angels or, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud / A Novel

by Wolf, Christa; Searls, Damion

• ISBN13: 9780374269357
• ISBN10: 0374269351
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-02-05
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

The stunning final novel from East Germany's most acclaimed writer Three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the writer Christa Wolf began to sort through her newly declassified Stasi files. Known for her defiance and outspokenness, Wolf was not especially surprised to discover forty-two volumes of documents collected by the East German secret police. But what was surprising was a thin green folder whose contents told an unfamiliarand disturbingstory: in the early 1960s, Wolf herself had been an informant for the Communist government. And yet, forty years on, she had absolutely no recollection of it. Wolf's extraordinary autobiographical final novel is an account of what it was like to reckon with such a shocking discovery. Based on the year she spent in Los Angeles after these explosive revelations, City of Angelsis at once a powerful examination of memory and a surprisingly funny and touching exploration of L.A., a city strikingly different from any Wolf had ever visited. Even as she reflects on the burdens of twentieth-century history, Wolf describes the pleasures of driving a Geo Metro down Wilshire Boulevard and watching episodes of Star Treklate at night. Rich with philosophical insights, personal revelations, and vivid descriptions of a diverse city and its citizens, City of Angelsis a profoundly humane and disarmingly honest noveland a powerful conclusion to a remarkable career in letters.

Author Biography

Christa Wolf (1921-2011) was one of the most celebrated German writers of the postwar era. A central figure in East German literature and politics, she was arguably the foremost German-German writer, awarded major literature prizes in East, West, and reunified Germany. Her wide-ranging work—nonfiction, fiction, and hybrids of the two—is marked throughout by rigorous self-examination, political engagement, and committed feminism. Her most important reexaminations of the cultural past and personal memory include Cassandra, a crucial text for Western feminists and a secret social critique for her readers in the East; Patterns of Childhood, a groundbreaking reflection on growing up in Nazi Germany; and City of Angels, a sequel of sorts to Patterns of Childhood that takes place after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Table of Contents

“Finishing [Christa Wolf’s books], the reader is covered by a sense of completeness, of having been taken on a journey in the company of a seer who has stared, with attention, mercy, and courage, into the world’s heart.” —Mary Gordon, The New York Times Book Review