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 birthplace—together with her daughter, brother and husband, to refind Nelly, that self who was the child not just of her parents but her generation….

And it is in the brilliant juxtaposition of a child's perceptions and an adult's understanding that the question becomes not 'How could they?' but 'How could they not?'

In the irony which is the observer's blessing as well as...