"What is past is not dead," writes Christa Wolf in A Model Childhood; "it is not even past. We cut ourselves off from it; we pretend to be strangers."… [This] estrangement from the past is deliberately cultivated in the GDR, though at a cost to the psychological need to come to terms with experience under nazism. In her … novel [A Model Childhood], Christa Wolf addresses precisely this issue of the discontinuous self. In her "Workshop Interview," she takes issue with the tendency of the GDR, still prevalent when the novel appeared, to appropriate as its antecedents the anti-fascists and resistance fighters and to ignore the fact that the majority of its members, no less than the citizens of West Germany, were in need of a therapeutic reckoning with the past and an exploration of their own involvement in guilt. This is the gap that A Model Childhood sets...