Accident, incident, malfunction, (power) failure?
You could translate Störfall in all of these ways. Accident seems a small word to contain the enormity of it. Christa Wolf brings together two major incidents, personal and political, local and global, in her tiny book, the story of one day. When an East German writer, a woman, is waiting to hear how her brother’s brain surgery has gone, she hears some other news. The reactor at Chernobyl has malfunctioned and the nuclear fallout can be felt a thousand miles away.
Christa Wolf is was writing from East Germany, and her Störfall. Nachrichten eines Tages came out in 1987, under a year after Chernobyl. It’s fiction, but written at a short distance from the facts. What was it possible to say about another socialist state, living from the inside? Wolf says a lot by sticking to the news on the radio and the things she sees and hears and feel right outside her front door.
Why come back to it now? It is more than worth reading nearly forty years later. I came across it in a list of books about solitary living (yes, in the Guardian, thank you Daniel Schrieber). I had been meaning to read more Wolf for a while. My very tenuous connection is that a good friend used to sublet her flat in Mitte, Berlin on a pre-1989 lease in the early 2000s. This was when all the buildings round there were being done up and the rents were going up. I never met her, but living in that place and time when Berlin’s two halves were still being knit back together was very important to me.
Though it’s over in a moment, living through this book with Wolf is an intense experience. Reading it after Covid-19 lockdowns added another layer of meaning. The strong sense of isolation and fear that any everyday object or foodstuff might be fatal, because it might be touched, cursed, poisoned, but nobody is sure how that works. The need to be connected, to call repeatedly, to listen to the news. The lack of certainty about the news: who is telling us what, why, (how) do they know, whose advice should we follow? The battery of new vocabulary that just yesterday was the preserve of technical specialists: half-life, reaction time, exposure. The sense of environmental crisis, that what we’ve done to the earth we are now doing to ourselves. The fear that something as innocent as a dandelion leaf or as healthy playing in the sandpit must be avoided like the plague. The new meanings for hackneyed phrases – remember going viral being a good thing?
Heike Schwarzbauer and Rick Tavorian translated Störfall into English as Accident: A Day’s News. It was published by University of Chicago Press in 2001, the year of another major incident. Even if you’ve read it already, or had to for school or college, in 2024, why not read it again?
Translator, editor, writer, reader
found in translation 
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