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For Diane C.
Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster, published in English as Patterns of Childhood, takes very little for granted-least of all the question of beginnings. The novel literally opens with the words of another: "Das Vergangene ist nicht tot; es ist nicht einmal vergangen," a slightly altered translation of a line from Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." 1 Lacking a proper opening and haunted by the specter of an unmastered and perhaps unmasterable past-of a "model childhood" spent in the East Prussian town of L. during the Third Reich, the text begins by questioning the very possibility of a clean break and a fresh start. This insistent question, raised in a variety of ways throughout the novel, is posed at the outset as a kind of textual stutter, as a perseverating question rehearsed from the beginning-and in lieu of simply beginning-as a series of false starts, as repeated attempts to start over, as a desperate struggle to restart a narrative paralyzed by the anticipation of difficulties still to come. "You lay aside stacks of tentatively filled pages, insert a fresh sheet in the typewriter, and start once again with Chapter 1. As in so many times during the last eighteen months, when you were forced to learn: the difficulties haven't even begun [die Schwierigkeiten haben noch gar nicht angefangen]." 2 The temporal structure of this passage, found in the second paragraph of the novel, is worth commenting upon, for here the difficult question of how to begin seems to be folded back on itself, turned inside-out, as it were, and reposed as a question of difficulties that apparently have not yet even started. Indeed, only in a text that stammers from the start and begins by beginning over and over again could it be said both that the difficulties have already started and that they have not yet even begun.
Already/not yet: such is the split temporal framework of a difficult encounter, of an encounter with difficulties that will never have been confronted as such. 3 The language of confrontation, of squaring off face-to-face, is particularly inappropriate in this context since, as we will see, the difficulties that force "you," the writer, to begin again are not...