Reckoning at a Remove
City of Angels or, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud
“Time does what it can. It passes.”
The East German writer Christa Wolf spent a year in Los Angeles as a writer-in-residence in the early 1990s, soon after the collapse of the GDR. Her novel, City of Angels, or, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud, is set during her residence there, a vantage point that allows her to look back at the various Germanies that shaped her life: the Nazi Germany of her childhood, the socialist GDR of her adulthood, and the disorienting Germany that emerged from their ruins.
Die Wende, or the Turn, as the events of 1989 were labelled, is the locus of Wolf’s consequent moral inquest. “What, she asks, actually turned?” What happened was a people’s uprising: small discussion groups became political movements; election fraud was challenged; citizens occupied the streets; the old power structure eroded. “For a few weeks, we could feel that history was going our way.” But the exhilaration did not last. The utopian alternative collapsed, and Wolf eventually had to learn “how to live without alternatives.”
Her distance from Germany is not only geographic. It leaves her suspended between two worlds: a foreigner in the USA, and increasingly a foreigner in relation to her own country. At one gathering she is asked the inevitable question: “What about Germany?”, a question she fears, and believes means: how can you explain the burning asylum-seeker residences, anti-Semitic slurs and racist violence in reunified Germany? She can only answer: “I don’t know either. I can’t understand it myself.”
The reunification therefore brought no happy ending. The West German system arrived with its own assumptions about property and ownership, morality and history. Former owners reclaimed land and houses under the principle of “restitution rather than compensation”; East Germans who had lived there for decades would experience this restoration of justice as dispossession. The riots against asylum seekers cleaved the country, revealing what Wolf believes is a chronic pathological condition infecting Germans: Contempt for Humanity, one that hibernated during normal times, but exploded during every crisis.
Wolf is objective in her examination of die Wende: she does not deny Stalinism; she does not romanticise the GDR; and she does not accept the post-1989 simplification of Communism into mere criminality. “Communism was a tremendous hope,” she writes, one arising from an “insane over-estimation of human beings” and a belief that human beings might construct a more just society.
That balance is missing when it comes to capitalism: when an acquaintance calls it the best-performing socioeconomic system, while declaiming Marx as an incompetent economist, she chooses to leave that argument unchallenged. Capitalism comes with its own challenges, income inequality, conspicuous consumption and job insecurity — challenges that East Germans were already dealing with, and challenges that Wolf does not pursue.
American interest in the events of Germany, though, was superficial and simplistic. The Rodney King violence in 1992, which created its own moment of reckoning, as the streets of Los Angeles boiled over, was equated with the events in Europe. Describing the burning and violence that gripped the city, an American assumes Wolf would understand this better, since she has been through similar riots in Germany. Wolf reacts: “You call them riots? You mean 1989? Some people called it a revolution. Our peaceful revolution.” Implicit in this is the question: who gets to decide whether an eruption of popular anger is called a riot, revolt, unrest, disturbance or revolution? And who assigns it legitimacy?
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She extends her scrutiny to her current country of residence: a country marked by racism, economic inequality, colonialism, private property, and historical blind spots. Every society, Peter Gutman observes, must block out parts of its history to preserve the confidence necessary to live. Germany has its blind spots; America has them too.
Germany and America are not, for Wolf, or her companions, exceptions. Every country is tested in its own way, with its own problems. What determines its endurance is how sturdy and solid the floor that civilization stands on is, and how many lives with no prospects, shattered and senseless, it can bear before it cracks somewhere or other, splits at the joints.
The world that Wolf inhabits is a place that has lost its shine. “If someone had showed me a picture of the world of today, I would not have believed it, although my visions of the future were certainly gloomy enough. Whatever residual innocence I must still have been endowed with then has left me.”
Wolf’s despair, though, is untethered from argument. She asserts that the world has lost its shine without asking whether it was ever as whole as her earlier self believed. The “residual innocence” she mourns may be more an inability to reorient her view of the world away from the communist, totalitarian lens through which she was accustomed to examining. The loss she describes may be less about the world than about the disappearance of a vantage point from which the world made sense to her.
The release of the dreaded Stasi files creates, for Wolf, a moment of personal catharsis. During one of her visits to a library, Wolf is handed a file that claims she is a Stasi informer. She recalls being approached by the secret police in 1959; but little more. What she believes was a benign encounter turns to a dossier containing a report in her handwriting, records of meetings and a code name. Her defence is subtle, almost disingenuous. She does not say that she was innocent. She asks us to consider the person she was then: a young socialist convinced that the society she inhabited was imperfect but capable of becoming something better. She remembers that only a few years later she would have refused such contacts outright. The morality of an action, she argues, cannot always be separated from the historical context of the person who performed it.
Yet here the novel occasionally becomes defensive. Wolf is persuasive about the clinical efficiency of the Stasi files: their bureaucratic language reduces human relationships to evidence. “An insect collector who wants to pin his find has to kill it first.” But the novel is less convincing when she begins to extend the inadequacy of the records to an implicit exoneration. The more interesting possibility that Wolf herself may not have fully understood what she once did, or what she once believed, is hinted at, but is left unexplored. The result is a less than satisfactory explanation or justification of her actions, leaving in question her real position on the Regime.
The book’s form is both its strength and its weakness. Wolf writes associatively, moving from Los Angeles to Brecht, from Brecht to Germany, from Germany to 1945, the GDR, the Stasi and back again. The method is intellectually appropriate, but it becomes digressive. City of Angels reads like an extraordinarily intelligent writer thinking aloud.
The characters suffer from this. Peter Gutman, Francesco, Lutz, Ruth and the others are stimulating interlocutors, but they exist principally to supply positions that Wolf can affirm, modify or rebut. There is something almost Huxleyan about the device: people as vehicles for ideas and debates, intellectual counterpoints who serve to validate her view rather than genuinely challenge it, never quite performing as autonomous characters in their own right.
The dreams, a means of escaping the constraints of rational narrative, feel contrived — a literary device imposed upon material already rich enough without it.
The book is ultimately a story of resets: revalidating what one believed, why one believed it, when it ceased to be true, and how difficult it is to know the precise moment when history has changed.
City of Angels is most persuasive where Wolf’s account stays honest about what she cannot explain — the misnamed riot or the gaps in her memory. It falters where harder confrontations are avoided: an acquaintance’s case for capitalism goes unchallenged, her characters serve to validate her view rather than confront it, and her own Stasi file slides from explanation to exoneration. These evasions leave unanswered the harder question of what she once really believed, and what she is willing to test against real opposition.
August 29, 2026
