Hines

Getty Research Journal, no. 5 (2013): 203 – 11 © 2013 Thomas S. Hines

203

The recent death of the great German writer Christa Wolf (18 March 1929–1 December

2011) has called up vivid memories of our friendship of eighteen years. My first awareness

of her came in the early 1990s, when I read a review of her work in the New York Times

that emphasized her novel The Quest for Christa T. This convinced me to read the book

itself. As a kind of bildungsroman, it traces the narrator’s friendship with another woman,

“Christa T.,” whose partially fictitious identity mirrors and merges with that of Christa

Wolf herself. I was especially moved by Wolf ’s selection of the book’s epigraph from the

poet Johannes Becher: “What is it—this coming to oneself ?”1 The Quest for Christa T.

would remain my favorite of all Wolf ’s works and would prompt me to continue with her

equally moving Patterns of Childhood and beyond.2

I was thus delighted when I learned shortly after those readings that Wolf would

be spending the 1992–93 academic year in Los Angeles as a visiting scholar at the Getty

Research Institute (GRI).3 Kurt Forster, then director of the institute, later told me that

even as Cold War passions were subsiding, he and the Getty were criticized for inviting

this “East German Communist” to the GRI. Early in that year, I told a mutual friend,

Gwendolyn Wright, also a Getty Scholar, that I would like very much to meet Wolf. I

then suggested—at the time, half seriously—that I would be happy to take her on a tour

of modern Los Angeles architecture, with an emphasis on the Austrian émigrés Richard

Neutra and Rudolph Schindler, about whom I had been writing. I was pleasantly surprised

when I promptly got a phone call from Wolf herself, telling me that she would happily

accept my offer. Her husband, the writer and editor Gerhard Wolf, was visiting her in

Santa Monica, and, joined by Getty Scholar Marco de Michelis and his wife, Agnes Kohl-

meyer, both professors of German cultural and architectural history, we selected a day

and set forth in what Christa would later describe as my “kleine, blaue Honda.”4

We began early on what would turn into an all-day tour, resulting in numerous

photographs of ourselves with famous buildings in the background. Christa was espe-

cially intrigued with Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House (1919–21) for the wealthy

socialist Aline Barnsdall, Neutra’s Lovell Health House (1927–29) for Philip and Leah

Lovell, and Schindler’s own Schindler-Chace House (1921–22), designed for himself

and his wife, Pauline, and their friends Clyde and Marion Chace (fig. 1). Both the Wolfs

were understandably fascinated by the left-leaning propensities of all of those clients,

Christa Wolf and the “Coming to Oneself ”: Reflections on a FriendshipThomas S. Hines

204 gett y research journal, no. 5 (2013)

especially Pauline Schindler, a lifelong radical who was a member in the 1930s and 1940s

of the American Communist Party.

In addition to those landmarks, our tour included such significant but lesser-

known works as Neutra’s Jardinette Apartments (1927)—arguably the first major

structure in America of what would come to be called the International Style. And here

occurred an incident that Christa would recount first in a short story and then in her last

novel, Stadt der Engel; oder, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud.5 After taking in the main street-

facing facades of the apartment building, Marco, Agnes, and Gerhard decided to explore

the back, while Christa and I remained in the front to witness, alas, what at first seemed a

harmless but then suddenly alarming incident. As Marco and the others returned to meet

us, walking jauntily down the middle of the street, a handsome black couple in a sporty

convertible had to swerve and screech to a halt to avoid hitting them. This infuriated the

driver, who then stood up in his seat and shouted an epithet at the white tourist “intrud-

ers” in the predominantly Korean and African American neighborhood. A diplomatic

silence on the part of the visitors would likely have allowed his hostility to subside, but

the irrepressible Marco replied in kind, motivating the increasingly incensed driver to

begin backing up slowly to encounter his antagonist. Since Christa and I had watched the

incident unfold, we quickly saw this as a crisis in the making and intervened to explain our

impetuous friend’s indiscretion. “We are architectural historians,” we explained, “and

we are only here to study that important building,” a sentiment so apparently perplexing

to the driver that, with a bewildered expletive, he and his companion fortunately drove

away. Christa and I later congratulated ourselves, with only slight hyperbole, on possibly

averting a conflict that the press would inevitably label “racial incident.”

Fig. 1. Gerhard Wolf, Christa Wolf, Thomas Hines, Agnes Kohlmeyer, and Marco de Michelis

at Rudolph Schindler’s Schindler-Chace House, West Hollywood, 20 December 1992.

Hines Christa Wolf 205

That evening, the group came back for dinner at my apartment in Westwood, where

we were joined by the German American photographer and film editor Karl Kuehn, who

would make one of the most appealing pictures of Christa during her whole year in Los

Angeles (fig. 2). Just before dinner, the day’s intensity was also happily countered when

Christa discovered a corny movie poster in my bathroom that caused her to laugh louder

than I would ever hear her again and which prompted her to summon Gerhard, who joined

in her hilarious reaction. The poster was for a 1949 RKO Cold War B picture titled I Mar-

ried a Communist, directed by Robert Stevenson and starring Robert Ryan, Laraine Day,

and John Agar. After the poster was designed, negative audience reaction to the title per-

suaded RKO to change it to Beautiful But Dangerous. Luckily, the Wolfs saw the original

poster, which prompted a unique reaction that the studio would not likely have been able

to imagine.

Kuehn himself would later invite us all for dinner at his sprawling house and stu-

dio nestled in the hills just below the Hollywood sign. There, Christa seemed especially

fascinated with the experience of my friend Alan Onoye, a Japanese American business-

man who, following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, had spent four years during the war as

a child with his parents and grandparents in a Colorado internment camp. She had never

actually met anyone who had been, as she put it, in an “American concentration camp,”

although Alan was careful to insist that those demeaning but relatively nonviolent camps

were not to be compared with the deadly concentration camps of the Nazi Holocaust. In

her recounting of this in Stadt der Engel, Christa changed my name to “Bob Rice.” Alan was

disguised only by a shift in spelling to “Allan.”

During Christa’s year in Los Angeles, we continued to explore the area, especially

Santa Monica, where I drove her by the homes of that earlier generation of émigrés:

Fig. 2. Agnes Kohlmeyer, Gerhard Wolf, Christa Wolf, Marco de Michelis, and

Thomas Hines at Hines’s home in Westwood, Los Angeles, 20 December 1992.

Photo by Karl Gernot Kuehn. © Karl Gernot Kuehn.


Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno, and Salka and Bertold Viertel. We also

enjoyed suppers together at beachside restaurants in Malibu, and she came to my house

for a number of small dinners, one of which occurred in the same week her name was

revealed in the German and international press to have been in the files of the Stasi, the

notorious East German secret police. While I was in the final stage of cooking dinner that

night, she came back to the kitchen to talk. “Well, how are you?” I asked. “It’s the worst

week of my life,” she replied. I then asked if, given the situation, she would rather be in

California or in Germany to confront the issue, and she replied that it would be bad in

either place, but that, all in all, she was glad that she was in L.A. The Getty was providing

her both a shelter from the storm and a quiet source of resuscitation and inspiration for

the tasks ahead.

Then, and later in other conversations, she reiterated her long-held commit-

ment to socialism and her continuing belief that the system “could work.” To help make

it “work,” she had long known that she had to participate and to do what she could to

strengthen the arts, especially literature, as an expression of socialism’s highest goals and

programs. As in all political systems, this included serving on panels and review boards

and making difficult choices of certain programs or individuals over others. When she

supported Person A over Person B, for example, as being “better” and “more valuable”

for a particular prize or position, she only slowly came to realize how politically damag-

ing such judgments could be, as recorded in the Stasi files, for the fate of Person B. This

caused her, she told me, to try to make such judgments and recommendations more cau-

tiously and with a more realistic recognition of their potential political consequences.

Her larger and more public responses to the Stasi issue would soon, of course, be widely

discussed and publicized, and she would reiterate them in numerous writings, includ-

ing Stadt der Engel. The Stasi files also revealed that she, herself, had been the subject of

surveillance and investigation—as recounted in the great title story of her collection Was

Bleibt (What remains).6

Yet most of our conversations were less politically focused and centered instead

on issues of philosophy and literature. At that time she was particularly enthusiastic

about the nineteenth-century German novelist Theodor Fontane, and, among her own

contemporaries, Günther Grass, but she also wanted to talk about English and American

literature, including T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, whose poems we would read aloud.

Another time we read from Bertolt Brecht’s “To Posterity” and “The Seven Towers of

Thebes”—she from the German original, I from the English translation.7 “He was a great

poet,” I observed, to which she replied, “Yes, but he was not a nice man.” In the same vein,

when I showed her a pompous nineteenth-century Festschrift to Otto von Bismarck,

lavishly illustrated with portrait engravings of his relatives, friends, and associates, her

reaction was, “I think I don’t like the Germans.”

———

On another evening, the architectural historian and fellow Getty Scholar Jean-Louis

Cohen drove Christa to my house and paraphrased, on the way, a story that I had told him


earlier. Upon arrival, she insisted that I tell the story again “in your own words,” a story

that would ultimately become the subtitle, rendered in English, of Stadt der Engel; oder, The

Overcoat of Dr. Freud. The “coat story,” to which she ultimately gave a heightened literary

significance, concerns Richard Neutra’s lifelong friendship with Sigmund Freud’s son,

the architect Ernst Freud, from their school days in Vienna to their architectural appren-

ticeships in 1920s Berlin and through their periodic reunions in London after Ernst and

his extended family, including his father and his sister Anna, had been forced to flee Nazi

Germany and Austria. On one of those visits after the war, Neutra and his wife, Dione, had

left balmy, semitropical Los Angeles to arrive at the Freud home in cold, rainy London,

whereupon Richard, according to Dione’s memory, confessed to Ernst that he had “not

packed wisely” and wondered if Ernst could “lend him an overcoat.” Ernst quickly replied,

“No, Richard. I will not lend you a coat: I will give you father’s last coat,” which the senior

Freud had bought in England after his immigration in 1938. Since Neutra had been a fre-

quent childhood visitor in the Freud household and a devoted Freudian, he was greatly

excited and honored to own the master’s mantle, which he proudly wore the rest of his life.

Later, in the mid-1990s, on a sunny Los Angeles winter afternoon, I stopped by for

tea with Neutra’s widow, who asked as I started to leave, “Do you need an overcoat?” My

first, unspoken thought was no. I still had a heavy overcoat from my graduate school days

in Wisconsin, but I sensed that I should ask, “Would this be Richard Neutra’s overcoat?”

“Well, yes,” she replied, “Richard wore it the last twenty years of his life, but it was origi-

nally Sigmund Freud’s overcoat.” I happily accepted this mantle of two famous men and

took it to UCLA with the intention of ultimately depositing it in the Neutra Archive, but

first I brought it to my seminar, where my students and, later, certain colleagues clearly

enjoyed trying on the hallowed coat. I then hung it on the back of my office door and went

to Washington, D.C., to serve on a National Endowment for the Humanities panel. When

I returned to UCLA, the coat, alas, was gone, along with my office typewriter—the casual-

ties of a string of burglaries in my building. Our suspicion was that the burglar had used

the coat to cover and conceal the typewriter, after which he probably discarded the coat.

I reported this to the campus police, but the coat was never found. I could never summon

the courage to tell this to Dione Neutra.

“What could have happened to Freud’s overcoat?” Christa asked intently. Had it

maybe been tossed into a Dumpster, we conjectured, to be claimed by some homeless

person as a welcome cover when sleeping under some freeway overpass? “Where is it

now?” she kept asking, and I replied that, of course, I did not know. “I am an historian and

cannot answer that,” I reminded her, “ but you are a novelist and can therefore supply the

answer. I give you this story and I look forward to your explanation.” Ultimately, I was

disappointed that in Stadt der Engel she did not take the story further in that direction

and instead used the mystery of the wayward overcoat chiefly as a symbol of the émigré

condition in midcentury Los Angeles. Later, in 2010, after the book’s publication, when

asked by a journalist about the origins of the book’s mysterious subtitle, she replied only

that she had gotten the idea from “a friend in Los Angeles.”8


———

Throughout the 1990s, after she had left California, we continued to correspond, usually

in the form of brief New Year’s greetings. On 1 January 1994, she wrote: “a new date, a new

year. . . . I am longing for you, for Santa Monica, even for LA—the monster. For the sea, of

course. I don’t know if and when I will return to meet all of you. A lot of obligations here.

A lot of stress. I remember our meeting at Gladstone’s [on Malibu beach]. I hear your

voice reading this poem about the rain.” Here she was referring to Edith Sitwell’s “Still

Falls the Rain,” written during the London Blitz of 1940, whose haunting opening lines

Christa would later quote in Stadt der Engel: “Still Falls the Rain/ Dark is the world of man,

black as our loss/ Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails/ Upon the cross.”9

In the summer of 1999, I attended the ceremonies of the Pritzker Architecture

Prize in Berlin, awarded that year to Sir Norman Foster in recognition of his life’s work,

but particularly for his recent restoration of the old nineteenth-century German Reichstag

(1894) and its retrofitting in the late 1990s as the new home of the national Bundestag.

During my week there, I had three long and pleasant meetings with the Wolfs in Berlin

and Frankfurt an der Oder, impressions of which I paraphrase from rough journal notes:

———

On 8 June 1999, I meet them for dinner at the “Mao Tai” restaurant in Prenzlauer Berg

because Christa says they like the Thai food and especially the exotic cocktails! I sug-

gest that they also like its pun on the name of Chairman Mao. Christa laughs. Students

stop by the table and ask for her autograph. The owner of the Georg Buchner bookstore

across the street comes over to say hello. Christa looks good, having lost weight follow-

ing recent hip surgery, which causes her to walk with a slight limp. Over dinner we talk

about “geography and ideology” and the effect of her family’s wartime flight westward

from Landsberg, in what would become Poland, to the western edge of Mecklenberg. If

they had gone just a bit farther west, she observes, she would have grown up in the West

German Federal Republic. Would this have given her a totally different political ideol-

ogy, I ask, to which she replies, “Of course, but the question I most often wonder about

is: Would I still have become a writer?”10

Two afternoons later, we drive to Frankfurt an der Oder and spend an hour over

coffee and dessert at an outdoor café near the river (figs. 3, 4). We continue talking about

life and politics in the German Democratic Republic, the higher goals of which Christa

says she still supports, though she opposes the current waves of “GDR nostalgia” and

resists giving in to such sentimental longing. An architect friend of theirs stops by our

table to say hello and talk about his new book on Frankfurt native Konrad Wachsmann,

an architect who had worked with Walter Gropius at the Bauhaus and at Harvard and had

spent the last decades of his life in Los Angeles teaching at the University of Southern

California. Because I had known him in L.A., they are interested to hear about this.

We then visit the Frankfurt home and museum of the poet Heinrich von Kleist,

a favorite of the Wolfs, and proceed to Christa’s public reading from her just-published

volume of collected stories, Hierzulande, Andernots (Another Time, Another Place; 1999),


which includes a funny account of a trip to the California desert with a small group of

female friends from Los Angeles. The hall is packed and the appreciative audience fre-

quently breaks into laughter. Since this work is clearly a departure from much of Christa’s

less lighthearted work set in the GDR, someone asks if her stay in Los Angeles caused her

to question received stereotypes of California and America. She replies that, slowly but

surely, her attitudes had changed in a positive direction, with the help of L.A. friends,

including “one who is in the audience.”

The next day, Christa invites me to tea at their home at 7 Amalienpark, Pankow,

in a pleasant ensemble of houses from the late nineteenth century. Their second-floor

Fig. 3. Gerhard Wolf and Christa Wolf, Frankfurt an der Oder, Germany, 10 June 1999.

Photo by Thomas Hines. © Thomas Hines.

Fig. 4. Christa Wolf, Thomas Hines, and Gerhard Wolf by the Oder River in Frankfurt an

der Oder, Germany, with the Polish shore visible in the background, 10 June 1999.


apartment has large windows and very high ceilings and is furnished mostly with plain,

old furniture that gives it a kind of minimalist elegance. On one of the massive bookcases

in Christa’s study, I am pleased to see Karl Kuehn’s photograph of us taken at dinner in my

apartment in Los Angeles (see fig. 2). On this visit to Pankow, I drive out with my friend

and Berlin host, the industrial designer Max Andreas Kant, along with his companion,

Undine, and their young daughter, Hannah. I had earlier recounted to Christa the story

of Max’s arrest in the demonstrations of 1989, when the police officer asked him the same

question I had asked when we had first met in 1985: “Are you a descendant of the great

philosopher Immanuel Kant?” Max’s spontaneous answer was neither yes nor no, but

rather, “At times like this, I don’t think genealogy is important!” This sophisticated reply

so impressed the officer—who assumed mistakenly that such a cool response confirmed

the family kinship—that Max was immediately released! Christa is so delighted with the

story that she insists that Max retell it in his own voice. I wonder if she will record it in

her journal.

———

That afternoon in Pankow was the last time I saw her, but we continued to communicate

in brief annual New Year’s messages. On 21 December 2004, on the back of a postcard

of Brecht’s bedroom in Berlin, she wrote of the passing year: “I am a little bit incon-

tent because I did not work enough—yes my ‘City of Angels’ is not yet finished, but I

hope, I hope, next year will be very busy. Dear Tom, my English vanishes as you see.” On

21 December 2006, she wrote: “We are well, so far—if you don’t pay attention to what

happens in the world. I am working very slowly—yes on ‘Engelstadt.’ It is a very, very dif-

ficult thing.” On 8 December 2007, she enclosed a picture of their house with “a greeting

from Mecklenburg, the landscape where we live in summertime. You see our house, an

old farmer’s house under wonderful trees. . . . I am near the end of ‘City of Angels’ (‘Los

Angeles’) or ‘The Overcoat of Dr. Freud.’ A very difficult thing. I suffered by writing. What

else? We—Gerd and me and our family are o.k.—without my knee suffering by arthritis.

But: in 1½ years I will become 80 years.”11 In 2009, I wrote to congratulate her on reach-

ing that milestone.

Thus in almost every communication after she left California, Christa commented

on the slow and difficult progress of her L.A. book. But on 14 January 2010, with the assis-

tance of her bilingual granddaughter, Jana Simon, she wrote:

I have just recently turned in the 450 pages strong manuscript to my publish-

ing house. . . . As you can see, the story of the lost overcoat has come a long way.

In my book I recall and describe in detail the afternoon when you told us this

story, inspiring me to say I would write a book with that title and you gener-

ously replied: “Use anything you need.” And that’s what I did. So there will be a

revenant of you—naturally very different and adapted for literary “use.” As you

know, writers depend heavily on the “real world” to steal ideas from and trans-

late them into their own literary language. Sometimes this means to re-invent


situations—always based on the intention not to destroy them. . . . I wanted to

tell you about this . . . in advance and underline how grateful I am for your gener-

osity. Such a long time has passed since we spent that afternoon together—it’s

been 16 years!—and that’s how long it took me to deal with this “stuff.”12

Now, as often in human memory, such “stuff ” returns to my consciousness with a col-

lective richness I had not fully appreciated while it was happening. Christa Wolf was

indeed one of the people in my life who best helped me ponder, “This coming to one-

self—what is it?”

Thomas S. Hines is professor emeritus of history and architecture at the University of Califor-

nia, Los Angeles.

Notes I am indebted to the following friends who read this manuscript and made helpful comments:

Marianna Birnbaum, Luisa Ciammitti, Carlo Ginzburg, Michael Heim, and Michael Osman.

1. In German, the Becher quotation reads: “Was ist das: dieses Zu-Sich-Kommen des Men-

schen?” The epigraph appears without a citation in the original German edition., Christa Wolf, Nachdenken

ueber Christa T. (Halle: Mittteldeutscher Verlag, 1968). The English translation also includes this epigraph:

Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T. (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1970).

2. The original German title was Kindheitsmuster (Berlin und Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1976). In

the first English translation, the title was given as A Model Childhood (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux,

1980), to which the author strongly objected. I told her that I rather liked that version with its “clearly

ironic” connotations, a sentiment with which she disagreed, arguing that she had intended no such irony

and even if she had, most readers would not have understood it. In the next edition, the English title

was accordingly changed to Patterns of Childhood (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1984), which she

believed was closer to her intention and to the original German title.

3. At the time, the institute was named the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humani-

ties, and later, the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities. I use the current,

shortened name, Getty Research Institute (GRI), throughout to avoid confusion.

4. Christa Wolf, “Begegnungen Third Street,” Neue Deutsche Literatur 2 (1995): 7–31.

5. For the short story, see Wolf, “Begegnungen Third Street.” For the novel, see Christa Wolf,

Stadt der Engel; oder, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010).

6. Christa Wolf, Was Bleibt (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau, 1990); English translation, What

Remains and Other Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1993).

7. “Who Built the Seven Towers of Thebes?” is the first line and popular title of Brecht’s

poem; the official title is “Questions from a Worker Who Reads” (1935). This poem and “To Poster-

ity” can be found in numerous editions, as in, for example, Bertolt Brecht, Poems, 1913–1956 (New York:

Methuen, 1976), 252–53.

8. Cited in the publicity materials distributed by the publisher.

9. Christa Wolf to Thomas Hines, 1 January 1994. This and the other communications cited

below are in the possession of the author, with copies in the files of the Getty Research Journal. Sitwell’s

“Still Falls the Rain” can be found in many editions, as in, for example, Edith Sitwell, Collected Poems (Lon-

don: Macmillan, 1965), 272–73.

10. The paraphrases here in the first person come from rough journal notes, in possession of the

author and with copies at the Getty Research Institute.

11. Wolf to Hines, 21 December 2004; 21 December 2006; 8 December 2007.

12. Wolf to Hines, 14 January 2010.

Hines

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