SOURCE: “The Alienation of ‘I’: Christa Wolf and Militarism,” in Mosaic, Vol. 23, No. 3, Summer, 1990, pp. 73–85.

In the following essay, Marks discusses the conflicted and oppressive social environment of Wolf's youth in Nazi Germany and examines its literary expression in A Model Childhood and Cassandra.

In 1938, witnessing the rise of Fascism and the threat of a second world war, Virginia Woolf wrote Three Guineas to answer the question, “How in your opinion are we to prevent war?” (3). War, Woolf argues, is only a symptom of the competitive, dominating drive fundamental to patriarchal society; it is the rivalry inherent in business, law courts and church hierarchies taken to an extreme and openly violent degree (18–20, 64, 91). Preventing war would seem, then, to require a basic restructuring of society—a difficult task, Woolf feels, especially for women, who are denied any direct political clout. The most reasonable option, she decides, may be to...