Writing in The Weekly
Standard, Reason Contributing Editor Michael C.
Moynihan
laments the language used in recent obituaries for German
novelist Christa Wolf. Sample:

[I]t is more appropriate to call Wolf an East German
novelist, a nostalgic for the regime she romanticized and
unofficially served​—​including a three-year stint as Stasi
informant. In 1989, when jubilant Ossies breached the
Berlin Wall and sprinted towards the well-stocked shops of
Kurfürstendamm, Wolf argued that East Germany should continue to
exist.

The American obituarists allowed room for the Stasi controversy,
and a few offered an incomplete précis of her political stupidities
and toadying to party bosses. But these were waved off as
unimportant. The New York Times declared Wolf the “public
conscience of a long-divided people” (a title often applied to
another GDR nostalgic, Günter Grass) and a “loyal dissident.” The
New Yorker insisted that she “spoke out strongly” against
a government that applied brute force to those who did speak out,
strongly or otherwise, while failing to note that she never
resigned her party membership.

If Wolf counts as a “dissident,” if loyalty to a state that
excelled only in terrorizing its subjects counts as possessing an
impressive “conscience,” if releasing a novel critical of the
system after the collapse of communism can be deemed
“strongly” registering complaint, what words are left to eulogize
Václav Havel?

Read the whole thing
here. Moynihan reviewed some Cold War books for Reason
in
November 2009. My report from Havel’s funeral
here.