Citadel of Reason

Abstract

[Christa Wolf's speech on receiving the Buchner Prize in October 1980.] I would like to thank the German Academy for Language and Literature in Darmstadt for awarding me the Buchner Prize this year. Such an occasion tends to increase dramatically a writer's dissatisfaction with her own work; self-doubts continue to grow about one's chosen way of life. I shall pass over my endless agonising on this subject as futile or perhaps even vain. I shall also put aside those pages which reflect the difficulty I feel about speaking here and now. With Buchner's example before me, I feel more uneasy than ever about the undercurrents which weave together writing and living, responsibility and guilt, and which simultaneously bring forth and threaten to tear apart the person who lives by writing, writes by living. These contradictory currents must, I now believe, be not merely endured, but accepted. To be innocent and without responsibility is wishful thinking which arises at times of weakness; it is escapist thinking. There is no room for a state of innocence without responsibility in the concrete circumstances in which we live, write and become maturewhich also implies having one's eyes opened. For these are circumstances in which we intervene, fail, protest anew and become obsessed with new experiences. Here and now! is the order of the day and the masks are torn from our faces as we go. Will our faces come away with them?