Female voices in divided lands: Han Kang and Christa Wolf and literary memory

The essay attempts to bring two writers, two female voices – apparently far away – closer, breaking down physical, temporal, and social distances to flow into the world of literature, which has always been a breeding ground to redefining identity, to bring awareness about the reality or a means through which analyzing society and conveying memories. Memory and its use indeed are the “meeting point” between Han Kang, a South Korean writer born in Gwangju in 1970, and Christa Wolf, a writer born in 1929 who lived in what was called the German Democratic Republic or East Germany. The first common interest that binds the two writers is, undoubtedly, the resonance that their works have had both in their homelands and abroad, and whose peculiarity is the incisive representation of reality, a reality that both writers break down and investigate and in which complex but free female characters – born of their needs to give voice to their respective torments, constantly in search of answers – are often included. If Han Kang, through her pen filled with raw and violent tones, has brought to life stories about current issues of the society she belongs to, Christa Wolf as well has filled her novels with both the acceptance and the criticism that dominated her whole life as a woman and an intellectual of the German Democratic Republic. But – as can be seen from the novels with which they turned the tide of literature and that are the main subject of this essay – Han Kang’s Human Acts and Christa Wolf’s Cassandra allowed them to make a journey and confront memories, building a bridge between past and present.