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Introduction to:
Christa Wolf, Cassandra (1983)
Guides to the text:
- Assignment page
- Introduction to the text
- Guide to who and what
This is a modern, East German, psychological, stream-of-consciousness novel. In this work converge several of the artistic and social themes we have been developing through this course. Cassandra has the added benefit of looking back to the first piece of literature you read this semester, Aeschylus’s Oresteia.
We last saw Cassandra standing silently in Agamemnon’s chariot outside the Lion Gate at Mycenae. A priestess of Apollo at Troy and a princess of the royal household (the daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba), she is now enslaved as a prisoner of war. As Agamemnon trampled the sacred red carpet and entered the citadel to be murdered by Clytemnestra, the Myceneans urged Cassandra to descend from the chariot. But she did not move. Nor did she speak (until line 1075).
Christa Wolf tells us what she was thinking. Cassandra had the gift of being able to see the future; but the curse that no one would believe her. Now the future she sees is her own death, and in the chariot, knowing that the moment she steps down (and she must step down), she will be murdered just like Agamemnon. Cassandra is about the character confronting her own fear and her own mortality.
We are all mortal also. We stand before death, just like Cassandra. But, not seeing the future, we assume that death is far away, and we try not to think about it. Cassandra does not have that luxury.
The book is not allegorical. Ancient events do not correspond to modern events. Nevertheless, bear several things in mind:
- Christa Wolf is East German, European, but on the other side of the Iron Curtain from us.
- She wrote this book in the early 1980s, when there was no end in sight to the cold war.
- East Germany stood under the domination of the Soviet Union, just as West Germany stood under the domination of the United States.
- She is a woman.
- Cassandra is a survivor of military defeat.
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