SOURCE: A review of Was bleibt and Reden im Herbst, in World Literature Today, Vol. 65, No. 1, Winter, 1991, p. 111.

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

Christa Wolf might have subtitled Was bleibt “Ein Tag in dem Leben einer DDR-Schriftstellerin,” for in the brief narrative she tells of the close observation by the East German secret police to which she was subjected in 1979 as a result of her stand on the expatriation of her colleague Wolf Biermann. The work is remarkable for the almost unmediated account it gives of wiretapping, break-ins, and the attempt to undermine a public reading that Wolf gave in East Berlin on the evening in question. Wolf conveys the anxiety, the helpless frustration, and—above all—the nausea that she experienced at the hands of the Stasi.

More important than the book itself is the critical dispute that has grown...