Christa Wolfs Kurze Reise in Den Mythos(Verpasste) Chancen Des Kassandra-Projekts

Abstract

Christa Wolf's Cassandra Project – her story Cassandraand the series of lectures entitled Voraussetzungen einer Erzählung: Kassandra (Frankfurter Poetik-Vorlesungen) – has tended to be viewed in the scientific debate in the context of contemporary discourse theories and to be described as a ‘mythical (counter-)model’ which, seen from a specifically female angle, yields a critical perspective on mythical traditions informed by male ideologies. According to academic consensus, the Cassandra Project undermines mythological traditions and is itself anything but a myth – it is a new discourse. However, this article endeavours to show that the Cassandra Project – especially when primarily read in the light of the implications of the Voraussetzungen – succeeds to a certain extent in linking the critical position of a female subject to remythicisation. As a result, even Wolf's literary language transcends the level of a discourse. In accordance with her aesthetic, anthropological and ultimately social goals, experiences and perceptions (during her journey to Greece) play a crucial part in this remythicisation. Here she fundamentally parts company with post-structuralist doctrine, in which linguistic discourses predominate, ruling out myth and remythicisation. At the same time, however, in allowing the Cassandra Project to be dominated by the ‘conditioning of suffering’, which corresponds to the dominant (male) Western discourse and history of ‘learning through suffering’, Wolf has let slip an important opportunity. Her manner of remythicisation ultimately fails to make use of the potential – actually referred to in the Voraussetzungen – of the forgotten/repressed myth, discourse and reality of the peaceful, happy and highly female-oriented Minoan culture of ancient Crete, the first ‘cradle of Europe’.