The reader and the writer: Essays, sketches, memories

by Christa Wolf

German

222 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Novelist, short-story writer, essayist, critic, journalist, and film dramatist Christa Wolf was a citizen of East Germany and a committed socialist, and managed to keep a critical distance from the communist regime. Her best-known novels included “Der geteilte Himmel” (“Divided Heaven,” 1963), addressing the divisions of Germany, and “Kassandra” (“Cassandra,” 1983), which depicted the Trojan War.

She won awards in East Germany and West Germany for her work, including the Thomas Mann Prize in 2010. The jury praised her life’s work for “critically questioning the hopes and errors of her time, and portraying them with deep moral seriousness and narrative power.”

Christa Ihlenfeld was born March 18, 1929, in Landsberg an der Warthe, a part of Germany that is now in Poland. She moved to East Germany in 1945 and joined the Socialist Unity Party in 1949. She studied German literature in Jena and Leipzig and became a publisher and editor.

In 1951, she married Gerhard Wolf, an essayist. They had two children. Christa Wolf died in December 2011.

(Bloomberg News)

Reviews

[Dale Pobega · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good "self interview" on the writing of "The Quest for Christa T" - one of my favourite books - certainly her best. Some moving memoirs relating to WW2 with Wolf's family as refugees caught between American and Russian lines. There are long essays on Anna Seghers and other German writers largely unavailable in translation so I tended to skip them. Interesting insight into Wolf's hopes for the nascent GDR through essays written in the 60s and 70s. Didn't take long for disillusionment to set in and for the whole rotten edifice to collapse. Nonetheless, I'm fascinated by Wolf's politics and art. A great German writer.