SOURCE: “Who's Afraid of Christa Wolf?,” in Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 3, 1992, pp. 213–21.

In the following essay, Juers discusses Wolf's concept of “subjective authenticity” and her abiding moral authority as a critic and author despite controversy surrounding Was bleibt.

The title of Christa Wolf's latest work, Was bleibt, is conspicuously without a question mark—that form of punctuation, or as she has deployed it in her writing, anti-punctuation, which has become a significant feature of her literary signature. ‘Was bleibt’ could mean ‘what remains’ in the sense of ‘what remains to be done,’ or more pitifully, ‘what else could we have done’ (‘was blieb uns übrig’). Or perhaps more exactly, ‘what is/will be left’ (in the sense of ‘when this whole mess is cleaned up’); or it could mean something more positive, an abbreviation of ‘etwas bleibt’ (‘etwas muss bleiben’), to suggest that out of the chaos—that...