Christa Wolf Critical Essay | Critical Review by Wes Blomster

Critical Review by Wes Blomster

SOURCE: A review of Gesammelte Erzählungen, in World Literature Today, Vol. 64, No. 2, Spring, 1990, p. 303.

In the following review, Blomster discusses the value of the content in Gesammelte Erzählungen.

“One has to have attended Christa Wolf's readings in the GDR to realize how her moral authority has grown with the years,” wrote Marlies Menge in Die Zeit in the days following the catastrophic fortieth-anniversary celebration in the author's homeland. “Questions are put to her not as an author but as a prophet.” Read in the light of current events, the seven short narratives collected in Gesammelte Erzählungen (they were written between 1960 and 1971) strike the reader with a cogency that validates Menge's observation. Even in “Blickwechsel,” the 1960 story that touches upon experiences more fully developed in Christa T. (1968) and Kindheitsmuster (1977; see WLT 51:4, p. 611), there is an undertow of troubled discontent that...
(read more)