SOURCE: “The Quest for Christa W.,” in Nation, April 5, 1993, pp. 454–57.

In the following essay, Paley recounts her personal admiration for Wolf, as well as a meeting with the author, and provides an overview of Wolf's career and writings.

About ten or twelve years ago I visited my friend Marianne Frisch in West Berlin. I asked her if I could somehow meet the writer Christa Wolf. Yes, they were friends, Marianne said, and took me by way of Checkpoint Charlie through the Wall past the taciturn, well, hostile guards into that other country, the German Democratic Republic.

Christa Wolf is the second writer I've ever sought out; the first was W. H. Auden, in New York in 1939, the year, maybe the day, that 10-year-old Christa stood watching the S.S. march through her town, bayonets pointing toward Poland. She remembers that day, sharp as a wood carving, and tells...