“Christa Wolf: (1929-2011) German novelist and essayist. Wolf’s major theme is the individual damaged and crippled by society. Der geteilte Himmel (1963; tr Divided Heaven, 1983), a critical account of East German society, established her as a major writer. Her highly acclaimed novel Nachdenken uber Christa T. (1968; tr The Quest for Christa T, 1970), both a requiem for a dead friend and an analysis of the limits of individual development set by society, caused a debate about new modes of narration in East German literature. The novel Kindheitesmuster (1976; tr Patterns of Childhood, 1984) is an attempt to come to terms with the National Socialist past. In Kein Ort Nurgens (1979; tr No Place on Earth, 1982), Wolf Depicts a fictional meeting between Kleist and Karoline von Gunderrode, two alienated individuals, both poets and both suicides, who longed for a different society. With this and other works, Wolf contributed to a reevaluation of Romanticism in the German Democratic Republic. Reverting to mythological sources in Kassandra (1983; tr 1984), Wolf finds in the story of Cassandra a foreshadowing of what was to become reality for subsequent centuries: the exclusion of women as subjects of history. Written in the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe, Storfall, Nachrichten eines Tages (1987; tr Accident. A Day’s News, 1989) deals with Western civilization’s potential for destruction. Wolf’s short story, Was bleibt (1990; tr What Remains and Other Stories, 1993) led to a controversy about the status of literature by former East German authors. Selections in English of Wolf’s other writings include The Reader and the Writer: Essays, Sketches, Memories (1977), and The Author’s Dimension: Selected Essays (1993).”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
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