“Unsere Freunde, die Maler.” Zum Verhältnis von Text und Bild in Christa Wolfs Sommerstück

Abstract

Christa Wolf’s Sommerstück was published in March 1989, just in time to celebrate the 60th birthday of the author in both East and West Germany. In the years after 1989, different paperback editions followed. Interesting to note is that pictures by Hartwig Hamer were included only in the original edition by Aufbau. Accordingly, I would like to focus in this paper on paratextual elements – using the term coined by Gérard Genette in his work Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation – before I turn my attention to the word-image relationship between Christa Wolf’s text and Hartwig Hamer’s pictures.