[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-interrogation. Only at the end of the book, when she has relived the child's experiences and worked through those patterns of feeling, thinking and behavior which made her susceptible to Nazism, does she emerge as a person who calls herself "I." Hers is now a self which has been tested in the crucible of an acid self-examination.

The narrator does not consider herself and the child Nelly an isolated case. Rather she takes herself and the child...