Christa Wolf: Cassandra: Frankfurt Lectures onAesthetics Rekha Kamath-Rajan In 1983 Christa Wolf, the celebrated East German author of two major novels, made her mark on the German literary scene once again with the narrative "Cassandra" and with the Frankfurt Lectures on Aesthetics which she calls "Prolegomena To A Narrative : Cassandra".1 The figure of Cassandra is taken from Greek mythology and has been handed down, among others, by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus in the "Orestes". Cassandra is the daughter of King Priamos and Queen Hekabe, the rulers of Troy. She has the power to foretell the future, given to her by Apollo. Since she offends him, he rules that her forecasts of the future will not be believed by the people. Cassandra alone foretells Troy's disaster in the war against the Greeks, but no one wants to believe her, and she is considered to be mad. After the fall of Troy she is taken as a captive by the Greek King Agamemnon to his castle Mykenae. Here too she foretells the murder of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra, and knows that she too will die at the hands of the Queen. The foretelling of disaster has been associated with the figure of Cassandra, and one talks of the Cassandra call, meaning the foretelling of impending disaster. In the face of the threat of nuclear destruction, Christa Wolf turns her attention to the figure of Cassandra the 'prophet of destruction. While trying to understand the material, she undergoes various thought processes, which she reconstructs systematically in the Prolegomena To A Narrative: Cassandra In her introduction to these lectures, however, she makes it clear that she cannot (or does not wish to?) offer the audience an aesthetic system. She asks the audience—here the reader—to follow her on a journey in a literal as well as a Journal of Arts and Ideas 79