City of Angels

or, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud, A Novel

Christa Wolf, Damion Searls

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780374269357
• eBook ISBN: 9781429942782
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

The stunning final novel from East Germany's most acclaimed writer

Three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the writer Christa Wolf was granted access to her newly declassified Stasi files. Known for her defiance and outspokenness, Wolf was not especially surprised to discover forty-two volumes of documents produced by the East German secret police. But what was surprising was a thin green folder whose contents told an unfamiliar—and disturbing—story: in the early 1960s, Wolf herself had been an informant for the Communist government. And yet, thirty years on, she had absolutely no recollection of it.
Wolf's extraordinary autobiographical final novel is an account of what it was like to reckon with such a shocking discovery. Based on the year she spent in Los Angeles after these explosive revelations, City of Angels is at once a powerful examination of memory and a surprisingly funny and touching exploration of L.A., a city strikingly different from any Wolf had ever visited.
Even as she reflects on the burdens of twentieth-century history, Wolf describes the pleasures of driving a Geo Metro down Wilshire Boulevard and watching episodes of Star Trek late at night. Rich with philosophical insights, personal revelations, and vivid descriptions of a diverse city and its citizens, City of Angels is a profoundly humane and disarmingly honest novel—and a powerful conclusion to a remarkable career in letters.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Notice
• Disclaimer
• Epigraph
• Translator’s Note
• Contents
• To come down to earth
• Telling the story from the end
• The Blind Spot
• Always these ambivalent feelings
• To turn everything upside down yet again
• To look into my own otherness
• The City of Angels, or, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud
• So who could I tell the story to
• Sometimes the past reaches up and grabs at you
• You were there. You survived
• Every line I write from now on will be used against me
• Then I started singing
• You can slave away at the wrong questions too
• I hadn’t started writing yet
• Old age is the time of losses
• We are strangely designed creatures, aren’t we?
• Whether she, the angel, was part of my recovery
• Those books sucked me in
• Washed with all waters
• A journey to the other side of reality
• Entrance into a paradisaical world of wonders
• Note on Sources
• Also by Christa Wolf
• A Note About the Author & Translator
• Copyright