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Patterns of Childhood

Christa Wolf

Paperback | Pages: 416 pages

Rating: 4.06 | 389 Users | 34 Reviews

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Original Title:	Kindheitsmuster
ISBN:	0374518440 (ISBN13: 9780374518448)
Edition Language:	English
Characters:	Charlotte Jordan, Whiskers Grandma, Nelly, Aunt Dottie, Bruno Jordan
Setting:	Landsberg (Warthe)(Germany) Gorzów(Poland)
Literary Awards:	Bremer Literaturpreis (1978)

Interpretation Supposing Books Patterns of Childhood

I cried while reading this novel. Tears just kept flowing silently, and there was nothing I could do about it.

If you want to know what totalitarian states do to children, this novel will tell you, - without sentimentality, without blame or anger, without self-pity.

For all those emotions are forbidden ground for a child who was taught the dogma of national socialism and Führer personality cult from the age of 4, who believed in the “truth” of what she was told in the same way a child taught the “truth” of Christianity will believe in it, trained to follow the rituals and the patterns, to embrace the cult and its accompanying actions without ever having any choice as no alternatives are presented or accepted.

Waking up from that dream at 16, and realising there are multiple truths in the world, and that the one she has been trained to worship has caused the complete destruction of her own society and immeasurable evil and suffering for millions of innocent people, the narrator loses herself. The words she uses on a daily basis receive a different meaning, the songs she sings are full of ominous hints that she never put into a wider context, her way to greet people with the “German greeting”, referring to Hitler, is not only insulting, it is dangerous as well. Her values turn into vices, but her memory is not adjusted to that. She still thinks in the category of “purity” when she sees a young man, then corrects her own thoughts in shame and confusion. “Purity”, what is that?

If you believe in the superiority of your own country, race, ideology and biology, if you know nothing outside the narrow path of obedience, if you learn to read and write using the party line as a framework, if you study biology with the ideas of racial distinctions, if you participate in sports events to steel your body and mind to honour the deified person who dominates news and dictates thought patterns, how will your personality be shaped?

As opposed to the parent generation, who knew an alternative to Hitler’s Third Reich, the protagonist Nelly grows up with no comparison until her world falls apart, drastically, suddenly, in her teenage years. What happens to a psyche that has been systematically indoctrinated to believe in a system, and then wakes up to learn that it was pure evil? What happens to childhood memories, filled with songs that make another kind of sense once they can be compared to the evidence of the Holocaust, to euthanasia programs, to total war, to destruction of unimaginable dimensions? What happens to a person who has to ask how it could happen that all those people with whom she grew up embraced evil knowingly, willingly and almost automatically?

What happens when fear and shame are the two most dominant ingredients in your emotional cocktail?

Nelly is a writer, and in 1974, with the backdrop of the Vietnam war and her guilt regarding the suffering that never ends in the world, she sets out to make an account of her childhood years in a part of Germany that later became part of Poland. A couple of years earlier, in 1971, she had taken her husband, her brother and her teenage daughter on a trip to revisit the town she left as a refugee in 1945, and her tale moves between the different times and places, reflecting on the child Nelly, who is “she” in the account, and the older visitor travelling down memory lane, reconstructing the past, who is addressed as “you”, and her current writing self, hardly present, but an implied “I”.

There are no bridges between the different layers of identity: before and after 1945 cannot be reconciled. Symptomatic for the complete break is a situation in 1946 when Nelly’s mother picks up her father from the train station. He is returning from a mine in Siberia - a broken man, almost starved to death. She doesn’t recognise him, and he doesn’t recognise her either. They walk past each other, as they are not familiar with the patterns of suffering that have left their marks on their respective bodies and minds.

After years of hoping for the return of the father, Nelly’s family finally welcomes a stranger. Nelly herself is a stranger as well, and has to learn that she lived unknowingly in a dictatorship which she thought of as absolute freedom. Meeting survivors from concentration camps means realising that her reality was a fragile illusion, bound to be destroyed at some point.

And it means never ever allowing oneself to mourn the loss of childhood patterns which turn into symbols of the evil regime she believed in wholeheartedly, but which the older self, the historically educated narrator, abhors and fears. Studying maps, reflecting on the geographical locations of the concentration camps, the narrator has slowly formed a new pattern for those years, one that must have existed simultaneously with her enthusiastic participation in the adolescent program of the local Hitlerjugend. Born a few years earlier, she would have been guilty. A few years younger, she wouldn’t have experienced it. A strange generation.

As a mother, a teacher and a person who grew up in West Germany when the Berlin Wall still stood as a monument for the German 20th century catastrophe, I could not read this book without feeling terrified. I was shaken by every single emotion the protagonist went through - most of all the feeling of being split in two. I imagine my own children growing up in an atmosphere of nationalism and hysterical belief in their own superiority, I imagine them having to submit to a pledge of allegiance to the flag every single morning, I imagine them singing patriotic songs excluding the rest of the world from their perfect home country, and I shiver. Children are impressionable and eager to learn. If I lived with them in a regime like that, would I exclude them from the mainstream cult, and thus put our family at risk?

Wouldn’t I think of my family, my job, my home, my life? Wouldn’t I explain away the worst? I don’t know. I do know that the Third Reich has left patterns in the childhoods of many generations long after the war itself was over. I know it because I can’t suffer the nationalist rhetoric that neo-fascist regimes around the world like to use to get crowds cheering. I know it because I can’t stand CROWDS at all. Mass meetings scare me. People who are moved by loud, populist speakers scare me. Symbols of exclusive clubs scare me. I carry the patterns of the childhoods of German children growing up under that evil flag, and I won’t let my children come near any institution that teaches exclusive rights to a special group of people.

Christa Wolf’s book explains that inherited pain. She talks about the identity crisis, the trauma, the split consciousness, and the fear. The GROWING fear.

It could happen to us, so it can happen to anyone - for we were just normal people - that is the message from the novel to the world. Don’t ever believe it can’t happen to you, because after the Second World War, we know that human beings are capable of anything if they are trained and brainwashed in a specific way.

We can even actively decide what to forget!

But patterns of childhood stick, regardless...

Point Appertaining To Books Patterns of Childhood

Title	:	Patterns of Childhood
Author	:	Christa Wolf
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Deluxe Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 416 pages
Published	:	July 1st 1984 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (first published 1976)
Categories	:	Fiction. Cultural. Germany. European Literature. German Literature

Rating Appertaining To Books Patterns of Childhood

Ratings: 4.06 From 389 Users | 34 Reviews

Evaluation Appertaining To Books Patterns of Childhood

This is primarily the story of Nelly Jordan, growing up in the town of L., Germany in the years 1933-45, at the end of which period she is 16 years old. In concentrating exclusively on the inhabitants of and events in L. during these years, Wolf presents the history of the Third Reich in microcosm. The main events are here, presented on a small scale: the cult of the Führer, the euthanasia of the feeble minded, Kristallnacht, the mobilization for war. These events are presented in a kind of

Thought provoking book. Wolf looks back on her own childhood in east germany before, during and in the aftermath of the second world war from the pov of the adult she is. The book starts in 1932, but is written in the 1970's with the adult returning to her home town for a visit, a town now in Poland and known by a different name.Wolf doesn't make excuses for the child she was, but is very critical of herself, her family and those around her. The discussion with her sixteen year old daughter

What an impressive personal experiment in writing on the boundaries of fiction and memoir. The novel has an intricate structure. A narrator describes, addresses and admonishes her adult self in the second person while detailing the writing process over several years in the early 1970s, including political and private occurrences. Along with her brother, husband and daughter, she visits the village where she grew up under the Nazis, now in Poland. And this visit is interspersed with the narrative

Powerful account of a German girl growing up during the years of the Third Reich, reappraising those years as she visits her hometown after many years. The story is told slowly and introspectively, as it should be, allowing the memories to come back, so as to make some sense of her life and times.It's also a novel about memory and making sense of a divided self. She begins by writing What is past is not dead; it is not even past. We cut ourselves off from it; we pretend to be strangers.Another

It's an intriguing insight into what Nazi Germany would look like through the eyes of a child growing up. But it also asks questions about the validity of memory and the nature of identity. Are we really the same person as the child who became us?

Ich lese durchaus auch gerne mal eine Autobiografie. Viel lieber mag ich allerdings einen Roman und diese Bezeichnung prangt auch auf der dtv-Ausgabe von Christa Wolfs Werk aus dem Jahr 1976. Doch diese literarische Form ist hier nicht anzutreffen. Vielmehr ist es eine Mischung aus Beiden, also eine fiktive Wirklichkeit. Und genauso wie diese beiden Begriffe eigentlich nicht zueinander finden, habe ich nie einen Zugang zu diesem Buch gefunden. Bislang hatte ich noch nie etwas von Christa Wolf

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