Novel
They Divided the Sky
Der geteilte Himmel
Christa Wolf · 1963
Synopsis
At the end of August 1961, Rita Seidel, nineteen, regains consciousness in a sanatorium after a collapse, and looks back over the preceding months. Coming from the countryside, she met Manfred Herrfurth, a chemist ten years her senior, at a village dance, and followed him to Halle, where he works and where she is training to become a schoolteacher, with a placement in a brigade at the Ammendorf railway wagon factory. When a machine he has perfected is rejected by the economic officials, Manfred loses faith in the system.
Context
From 1959 to 1962, the author lived in Halle, where she worked for a time in a team at the Ammendorf railway works and, with her husband, ran a circle of worker-writers; the book, published in 1963 by Mitteldeutscher Verlag, draws its setting from this. It combines two time frames, the stay at the sanatorium and what preceded it, with many flashbacks, a form then uncommon in East German literature. A bestseller in the East, and discussed in the West too, it was adapted for the screen by Konrad Wolf in 1964; its title became an image of Germany cut in two.
Who it is for
A short novel that alternates between the present of a convalescence and the past; the language is simple, but the reader must know the situation in 1961.
Prizes and reception
Heinrich Mann Prize; retranslated into French in 2011 and into English in 2013, fifty years after its publication.