One Day a Year: 2001-2011

by Christa Wolf, Katy Derbyshire (Translator)

Overview

During a 1960 interview, East German writer Christa Wolf was asked a curious question: would she describe in detail what she did on September 27th? Fascinated by considering the significance of a single day over many years, Wolf began keeping a detailed diary of September 27th, a practice which she carried on for more than fifty years until her death in 2011. The first volume of these notes covered 1960 through 2000 was published to great acclaim more than a decade ago. Now translator Katy Derbyshire is bringing the September 27th collection up to date with One Day a Year—a collection of Wolf’s notes from the last decade of her life.

The book is both a personal record and a unique document of our times. With her characteristic precision and transparency, Wolf examines the interplay of the private, subjective, and major contemporary historical events. She writes about Germany after 9/11, about her work on her last great book City of Angels, and also about her exhausting confrontation with old age. One Day a Year is a compelling and personal glimpse into the life of one of the world’s greatest writers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780857424273
Publisher:	Seagull Books
Publication date:	05/15/2017
Series:	German List Series
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Christa Wolf’s (1929–2011) other works include the ground-breaking Cassandra, Patterns of Childhood and The Quest for Christa T. She has been awarded many prizes, among them the Büchner Prize of the German Academy of Language and Poetry the Austrian State Prize for European Literature and the Geschwister Scholl Prize of the city of Munich. Katy Derbyshire is a London-born translator who has lived in Berlin for many years. Her translations of Jan Brandt’s Against the World, Inka Parei’s Shadow-Boxing Woman, What Darkness Was, and The Cold Centre, and Dorothee Elmiger’s Invitation to the Bold of Heart are also published by Seagull Books.

Table of Contents

Note from the Publisher     9
Note from Gerhard Wolf     10
One Day a Year     13
Members of the family of Christa and Gerhard Wolf     619
Bibliography of Christa Wolf's Works Published in English     620

Editorial Reviews

"The book is thronged with detail, but of a careful kind....There are a few more piquant moments as she ages and an appealing harshness and humor enter the pages, but she isn’t writing to know herself or to be known. She has another, more complicated project in mind....The diary can be a way of learning to watch yourself, [Wolf] suggests, instead of watching or imagining yourself being watched. It’s can be a way of reaffirming contact with the self—and then, more radically, finding within its enclosure a more idiosyncratic, more personal way of marking and possessing time before it has its way with us."

New York Times Book Review

"...Brilliant yet deceptively simple formal constraint, as well as a keen eye for the many different facets of existence. She’s able to paint the intimate details of her life against a larger political and intellectual backdrop of which she herself, as the preeminent writer of East Germany, was very much a part.... Rather than finely drawn portraits or expertly crafted anecdotes, the precise geometry of the book lends itself to a compelling way of looking at time, a layering of days that are sometimes barely discernible from one another."

Los Angeles Review of Books

September 27 is in some ways a less-than-eventful day in history: it marks the release of the Warren Commission Report, the anniversary of the birth of Samuel Adams, and the premier of The Tonight Show. But to award-winning German literary critic, essayist, and novelist Wolf (The Quest for Christa T.), September 27 of each year is when she pauses to write a journal entry describing that day. The project began in 1960, when the Soviet government newspaper Izvestiyaextended an invitation to writers to portray "as precisely as possible" the day of September 27. Wolf's entries, created between 1960 and 2000, provide a look into her politics, feminist principles, and family life. They also outline the collapse of the German Democratic Republic and include a domestic component--the annual planning for Wolfe's daughter's birthday celebration on the following day. Some have been previously published, and all are accompanied by extensive footnotes provided by Wolf's husband, Gerhard Wolf, and translator Bangerter. Recommended for literary collections in academic libraries.
—Joyce Sparrow

Library Journal