Through a Glass Darkly

WHAT IS THE FUNCTION of memory in ressurrecting the children we once were, the personalities we abandoned long ago? In A Model Childhood, Christina Wolf struggles with this question as she tries, in graceful, stirring prose, to reconstruct her youth in Nazi Germany. Writing after a brief trip back to her native town in 1971, Wolf succeeds in raising distrubing questions about the relationship of the past to the present, but the lofty, stream of consciousness style which so effectively creates the feeling of memory ultimately precludes any real clarity of vision. Although in a work such as this, a strong focus would surely ring false, the length of the book makes the lack of direction frustrating and forces the overall themes to be obscured at times by trivial detail.

Attempting to gain perspective in relation to her child-self, Wolf plays with a kaleidoscope of vignettes, willing them to meld into a coherent, valid design. The pieces never fall exactly together. Wolf writes as an external narrator, emphasizing the detachment she feels from the girl she was, while reiterating the elusive nature of her memory:

It hurts to admit that the child is inaccessible to you. You're not only separated from her by forty years: you are hampered by your own unreliable memory. You abandoned the child, after all...Now, in spite of all impossibility, the adult wishes to make the child's acquaintance.

The child Nelly, growing up in a pro-Nazi family, joins the Hitler Youth organization as a matter of course. Her religion class in school emphasizes racial purity, and the burning of the synagogue on her street evokes not pity but rather fear of alien beings. Neither does the euthanasia program provoke an outcry from the child or the parents, even when it claims the life of Nelly's feeble-minded Aunt Dottie. As Wolf makes clear, a child's morality is wholly dependent on that of the parents. A child cannot make moral judgements about the actions of her world, she must merely accept.

Only the adult Nelly can judge the actions of her childhood, and attempt to reconcile her present values with the ethical tenets of her youth. Spurred by her own daughter's probing questions today, Nelly is driven to explain how it is possible for people to ignore evil, to photograph a murder rather than stop it, to walk past a starving begger, eyes carefully averted. The questions are never answered--there are no answers--but out of the explanations come profound observations about the nature and meaning of time. "What is past is not dead, it is not even past. We cut ourselves off from it; we pretend to be strangers," Wolf writes. Thus A Model Childhood becomes above all a plea to reconnect ourselves with our past, and teach our children the lessons of history as best we can--not to perpetuate guilt, but rather to promote sensitivity in the present.

BECAUSE WOLF relies so heavily on a patchwork style to convey the sketchiness of memory, trivial events are interspersed with important ones, and connected by observations both in the present, and in the context of the 1971 trip. Although for the most part, Wolf's style succeeds in evoking a feeling for the vicissitudes of memory, the lack of focus is often frustrating, and ultimately detracts from the book's power. Unlike other autobiographies, the author claims no inherent literary value in the author's childhood per se, thus the insignificance of many of the memories becomes cloying. The attempt to focus on the memory of the childhood, rather than the childhood itself, creates a problem of focus that Wolf never adequately resolves. The book never succeeds in striking a balance between accuracy and impact.

Wolf's impressionistic style and persistent self-analysis ultimately challenges the adage that we must not forget because to forget is to be doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. Father, A Model Childhood is dedicated to the difficulty of remembering, of separating what was from what is, while preserving a sense of relevance. Is it, Wolf wonders, "impossible to escape the mortal sin of our time: the desire not to come to grips with one's self?" The existence of the book seems to prove that it is not impossible; at least it underlines the value involved in the attempt to face one's past. Sifting through the jumble of memories with the author is sometimes hard and frustrating, but the reward--a stronger sense of our own relation to our childhood and our history--makes the effort well worthwhile.