SOURCE: “Velvet Prisons,” in Nation, November 3, 1997, pp. 28–30.

In the following review of Parting from Phantoms, Gitlin discusses Wolf's despair over her condemnation in the popular press, her disdain for Western capitalism, and her efforts to come to terms with post-Cold War realities.

Christa Wolf was arguably the most influential writer of a nation that no longer exists, the German Democratic Republic, where Soviet troops implanted a forty-four-year dictatorship to succeed the twelve-year catastrophe of the Thousand-Year Reich. In 1989, aged 60, this strong, subtle writer of melancholic conscience found herself suddenly released from dictatorship for the first time in her adult life. When she found out that the police had not fired on an antigovernment demonstration in Leipzig that year, it was, she told me in 1992, “the happiest moment of my life.”

But Christa Wolf's post-Communist years have turned out to be wrenching in ways she did not anticipate and...