SOURCE: “‘We Erect Our Structure in the Imagination Before We Erect it in Reality’ (Karl Marx, Das Kapital): Postmodern Reflections on Christa Wolf,” in Germanic Review, Vol. LXVII, No. 4, Fall, 1992, pp. 159–66.

In the following essay, Saalmann examines postmodern elements of Wolf's writings, particularly aspects of self-consciousness and indeterminacy, that foreshadow—and perhaps anticipate—the fall of the Berlin Wall and the elimination of binary distinctions between East and West Germany.

Until the Wende, or turning point, of 1989, West and East Germany functioned as models of putatively unshakable identities dependent upon schemes of division. Postmodernism may well be responsible for their demolition. If we indeed dismantle our structures in the imagination before we do so in reality, to reverse Marx's dictum, then the annus mirabilis of 1989 suggests that the decline of socialism is in fact a postmodern phenomenon with its uncontested privileging of the present (Lock 442).¹ Given this premise...