In the following essay, Voris examines the construction of female self-identity and aspects of alienation in The Quest for Christa T., drawing attention to the representation of women as creative agents—both biologically and intellectually—and the narrative's appropriation of bildungsroman literary conventions.

In the following essay, Sayre and Löwy discuss the connections between nineteenth-century Romanticism and Wolf's feminist and anti-capitalist perspective.

In the following essay, Postl examines Wolf's attempt to reconcile socialist ideals with Western-style postmodern feminist concerns.

In the following essay, Kuhn discusses Wolf's critical reception and provides an overview of her complex identity as an East German female writer, drawing attention to her interrelated political, feminist, literary, and personal perspectives.

In the following essay, Love identifies aspects of psychic experience and intuitive understanding in Wolf's writings that challenge and transcend the Western concept of rationality.

In the following review of Medea, Watkins provides an overview of Wolf's literary career, thematic preoccupations, and the complex political context of her work.

In the following essay, Resch examines the narrative structure, fictive techniques, and themes surrounding the invention of memory and identity in The Quest for Christa T.

In the following essay, Hutchinson presents an overview of Wolf's literary reputation and ongoing critical controversy surrounding the publication of What Remains.

In the following essay, Love discusses Marxist conceptions of work and economic ideology in East Germany, drawing attention to Wolf's criticism of modern industrial society for its alienating effect on individuals.

In the following essay, Saalmann examines postmodern elements of Wolf's writings, particularly aspects of self-consciousness and indeterminacy, that foreshadow—and perhaps anticipate—the fall of the Berlin Wall and the elimination of binary distinctions between East and West Germany.

In the following essay, Gunew discusses Wolf's humanist perspective, her studies of collective memory, and the social construction of identity, particularly female identity, in A Model Childhood, Cassandra, and other works.

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.

In the following essay, Jay discusses public criticism of Wolf stemming from the publication of Was bleibt and allegations of her complicity with the former East German government.

In the following review, Herf discusses Wolf's disillusionment over the German reunification and criticizes Wolf's failure, or refusal, to acknowledge the inadequacies and transgressions of the former East German government.

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.

In the following review of What Remains and The Writer's Dimension, Hofmann acknowledges Wolf's complicated political commitments and literary context, but is critical of what he considers her naive utopianism and her decision to publish What Remains.

In the following review, Enright offers a mixed assessment of What Remains and The Writer's Dimension.

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.

In the following review of What Remains and The Writer's Dimension, Benn defends Wolf against public condemnation for her socialist beliefs.

In the following essay, Derr discusses Wolf's literary career and her future as a writer after drawing public condemnation for her admitted collaboration with East German authorities.

In the following mixed review of What Remains, Eder discusses Wolf's unique stye of prose.

In the following review, Manos offers a favorable assessment of What Remains and The Author's Dimension.

In the following review of Medea, Graves finds Wolf's reinterpretation of the myth “too neat” and ultimately “unpersuasive.”

In the following review, Eder offers a positive assessment of Accident.

The Quest for Christa T. (re-issued to coincide with the publication of Christa Wolf's more recent novel, A Model Childhood) anticipates many of the themes and preoccupations of the later work: the fallibility of memory and the compulsion to remember, the tension between fiction and fact, the struggle for a form commensurable with experience, writing as a means of self-definition and of understanding others…. Christa T's experiences suggest with admirable economy the large-scale horrors...

In the following review, Grawe discusses Wolf's damaged literary reputation following Was bleibt and her implicit self-defense in Medea.

In the following excerpt, Phillips judges What Remains to be “an uneven volume,” but concludes that it is a welcome collection of Wolf's short fiction.

In the following review, Manos offers a positive assessment of The Fourth Dimension and Accident.

"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 t...

Because [Christa Wolf] is East German, it would be easy to see her work as political protest, and to some degree it is. She grew up in Nazi Germany and described her early life in two brilliant semiautobiographical novels, "The Quest for Christa T." and "A Model Childhood." In "A Model Childhood," published here in 1980, she portrays a child, Nelly, who is an obedient daughter, good student and exemplary member of the Hitler Youth…. Nelly rarely rebels openly...

It is no coincidence that the contemporary German novelists most readily associated with the theme of war-guilt are all from West Germany…. The literature of East Germany [has focused] … overwhelmingly on the present and future, the building-up of socialism and the bright hope it represents….

In the following review, Blomster discusses the critical reception of Was bleibt.

In the following review, Knapp offers a mixed assessment of Auf dem Weg nach Tabou.

In the following review, Benn offers a positive assessment of Accident.

Christa Wolf has an established reputation in both Germanies, and a substantial body of work which gets better and better with every new novel. Her first major novel, Nachdenken über Christa T. (1968), was widely translated, but in Britain we still do not know nearly enough of her. The present collection of her stories from the years 1960 to 1972 [Gesammelte Erzählungen] offers a good occasion to extend our acquaintance of her range, from domestic idyll through childhood reminiscence to dream ...

In the following review of What Remains and The Author's Dimension, the critic finds Wolf's writings “dated” and tainted by her collaboration with East German authorities.

Christa Wolf's latest work Kindheitsmuster (1976) is her first attempt to give a comprehensive account of the exceptional and traumatic social upheavals which accompanied the crucial formative years of her childhood…. For Christa Wolf who is anxious not merely to document and give shape to its influence on her own early years, but also to clarify the lingering, ill-defined effects on the present, there also arises the difficulty of narrative method…. The narrative structure devised for ...

The reconstruction of developmental years lived in the arena dominated by National Socialism once again proves itself a valid literary undertaking. The success of Wolf's [Kindheitsmuster] … affirms the durability of this thematic material. The narrative-time structure of this work … is as complex as it is successful. The focal point is a two-day visit by narrator and family to the small town of her birth—now in Poland—in July 1971. This brief span of hours retrospectively ...

[Moskauer Novelle] is constructed around the pattern: German woman falls in love with Russian man, yet both renounce this love. In this first publication, Christa Wolf has already found the theme that will occupy her exclusively: human, personal relations in juxtaposition to the demands of a socialist society. Der geteilte Himmel repeats this theme, this time applied to the two Germanies. The novel centers on the separation of Rita, who remains in the East, from her boy friend Manfred, who leaves for the We...

In No Place on Earth, Christa Wolf imagines the meeting of two young nineteenth-century German writers—the dramatist Heinrich von Kleist and the poetess Karoline von Günderrode…. In their mysterious encounter, which seems to both writers to be, like Kleist's description of its Rhineland setting, "a sort of poet's dream," they share a utopian vision of their artistic potential…. Both sense that this meeting will be their only one; when the afternoon...

[In Kindheitsmuster] Wolf's protagonist-narrator writes her account from her present ideological perspective of a committed socialist, but she is too alienated from her childhood self, called "Nelly," to write about her except in the third-person singular. Therefore, as an adult she cannot muster a personal identity solid enough to explore and confront her past self in the first person, as "I." Rather, she addresses herself as "you" in a kind of self-interrog...

The theme of alienation in contemporary East German novels is most pronounced in Christa Wolf's The Quest for Christa T. Here, a young woman, as narrator, tries to piece together the life of her friend Christa T., who died of leukemia at the age of thirty-five. (p. 13) In outline form, the story seems trivial. There is nothing outstanding or remarkable about Christa T. But, that is exactly the point. Christa Wolf writes about an average woman in East Germany, and she wants to understand why this woma...

What is this act of re-membering, of recognition? For Christa Wolf, it is a necessity…. For her narrator, there is an added urgency, for she was a child of Hitler's Germany and her East German daughter is owed explanations. The dilemma is the observer's: to remain speechless or to live in the third person. The less unbearable alternative gives A Model Childhood its framework: the narrator revisits her home town—whose name as Polish destination is not what it was as German birthpl...

In the following review, Blomster offers a mixed assessment of Sommerstück.

In the following review, Blomster offers a positive assessment of Ansprachen.

[In A Model Childhood] the narrator—called Nelly—describes her visit, together with her husband (called H), her brother Lutz and her daughter Lenka to her native town, formerly Landsberg but today Grozów Wielkopolski in Poland. The superficial reason for the journey was what is called "tourism to home-towns," but the deeper motivation for Nelly was to recover for herself and lay bare to her daughter the past of her childhood in Landsberg under Hitler and during the war. (p...

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

The material for her stories [in Gesammelte Erzählungen] comes from Wolf's own experience, even though this may be disguised as fantasy, dream, animal satire or even science fiction. In the first story in the collection, "Blickweehsel," the flight of Germans from the advancing Russians at the end of World War II is described from a retrospective of twenty-five years. Here Wolf shares an important insight into her creativeness by describing a state of mind wherein a victim of even...

Unter den Linden, by Christa Wolf, who wrote Nachdenken über Christa T. (1968), is subtitled "Three Improbable Tales", and the subject-matter is certainly out of the ordinary. In the title story, a young woman relives, in a dream, an unhappy affair; in the second, an unusually gifted cat, a descendant of Hoffmann's Kater Murr, eavesdrops—and sceptically comments—on his master dreaming of physical and spiritual happiness; and the third is a report by a volunteer who ...

[Kein Ort. Nirgends] which bears no genre designation, is, it seems, best described as a novella telling the story of a fictitious Christa Wolf 1929– © 1984 Nancy Cramptonmeeting of two well-known figures of the Age of Goethe, Heinrich von Kleist and Caroline von Günderrode, both deeply unhappy and suicidal. They are presented in a circle of well-known German romantics…. The scene is well set: Kleist, the writer a...

Similar to—but far more involving than—Gunter Grass' The Meeting at Telgte, Wolf's novella [No Place on Earth] posits an imaginary colloquy between two German literary figures of the past: the great sensitive, Henrich von Kleist, shown soon after his burning of the manuscript for Robert Guiscard; and the poet Karoline von Günderrode…. Each portrait is vivid and poetic of itself…. And, together, their conversation drills through recklessness of thought, person...