Christa Wolf Criticism
The literary oeuvre of Christa Wolf stands as a vital exploration of personal identity amidst the political and social upheavals of 20th-century Germany. As a prominent East German novelist, she deftly navigated the oppressive landscapes shaped by both the Nazi and Communist regimes to craft narratives that scrutinize the moral and psychological dimensions of her society. Her works, including The Quest for Christa T., A Model Childhood, and Cassandra, are celebrated for their introspective examination of women's roles and the individual's alienation in rigid social systems. Anna K. Kuhn highlights how Wolf's political and feminist perspectives contributed to her acclaim, albeit later complicated by revelations of her Stasi involvement.
Wolf's skepticism towards technological progress and authoritarianism is poignantly reflected in works such as Divided Heaven and Accident. In Contemplating Chernobyl, Melissa Benn discusses how these narratives critique power dynamics and identity under totalitarian rule, a theme further elaborated by Renate Voris in The Hysteric and the Mimic. Martin Jay's essay, Force Fields, explores the reassessment of her work post-reunification, examining how her past influenced her literary and political legacies.
Her exploration of identity and history extends to her reinterpretation of classical myths, as seen in Medea. Christian Grawe's review, Christian Grawe, highlights how Wolf's engagement with themes of power and truth continues to resonate. Similarly, Ursula Mahlendorf notes her critique of generational complicity in Nazism in the autobiographical A Model Childhood, while Margaret McHaffie points to its complex portrayal of memory against totalitarian backdrops.
As Marilyn French and Rita Terras discuss in their analyses of No Place on Earth, Wolf’s use of historical allegory enriches her exploration of individual and societal constraints. These themes find further elucidation in The Quest for Christa T., where Jack D. Zipes notes Wolf's portrayal of alienation and disillusionment within socialist society, while Ernestine Schlant examines the varied critical responses to her treatment of personal relationships under socialism.
Her intricate weaving of personal and historical narratives is evident in Kindheitsmuster, where B. M. Kane and Peter Graves discuss its psychological depth in relation to Germany's past. Despite W. V. Blomster's critique of potential propagandistic elements, Wolf’s narratives are lauded for their moral integrity, as noted by Stephen Spender and Ann Shearer, who highlight her ability to confront complex historical realities with honesty and depth. Christa Wolf’s legacy remains a profound testament to the power of literature to illuminate and challenge the human condition under oppressive systems.
Contents
- Principal Works
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Wolf, Christa (Vol. 14)
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Growing Pains in the Contemporary German Novel-East and West
(summary)
In the following essay, Jack D. Zipes explores the theme of alienation in Christa Wolf's The Quest for Christa T., highlighting how the protagonist's illness symbolizes the societal malaise in East Germany and examining how the narrative's retrospective exploration of Christa T.'s life serves as a critique of socialist bureaucratic rigidity and personal disillusionment.
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Fiction in the German Democratic Republic during the Past
(summary)
In the following essay, Ernestine Schlant explores how Christa Wolf's works like Moskauer Novelle, Der geteilte Himmel, and Nachdenken über Christa T. highlight personal relationships and individual decisions within the context of socialist society, often facing criticism from both East and West German literary critics for their ideological and artistic implications.
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World Literature in Review: 'Kindheitsmuster'
(summary)
In the following essay, W. V. Blomster examines Christa Wolf's "Kindheitsmuster," highlighting its intricate narrative structure and thematic exploration of individual development amidst historical upheaval, while critiquing Wolf for incorporating propagandistic elements that detract from the work's literary value.
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In Search of the Past: Christa Wolf's 'Kindheitsmuster'
(summary)
In the following essay, B. M. Kane explores Christa Wolf's novel Kindheitsmuster, highlighting its narrative complexity and the way it intertwines personal memories with historical upheaval to examine the psychological impact of Germany's Nazi past on individual and collective identities.
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Reckoning with the Past
(summary)
In the following essay, Peter Graves examines Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster, noting its innovative dual narrative structure that intertwines personal and historical reckonings with the past, while reflecting on the challenges of writing, ultimately praising its moral integrity and its ability to transcend partisan boundaries within German literature.
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Growing Pains in the Contemporary German Novel-East and West
(summary)
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Wolf, Christa (Vol. 150)
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Christa Wolf
(summary)
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.
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Christa Wolf's Cassandra: Parallels to Feminism in the West
(summary)
In the following essay, Pickle examines Wolf's feminist perspective in Cassandra and notes both similarities and differences between Wolf and feminist writers in the West.
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Introduction: Setting the Context
(summary)
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.
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Ansprachen
(summary)
In the following review, Blomster offers a positive assessment of Ansprachen.
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Contemplating Chernobyl
(summary)
In the following review, Benn offers a positive assessment of Accident.
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Morning Becomes Radioactive
(summary)
In the following review, Eder offers a positive assessment of Accident.
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A Blade of Time
(summary)
In the following review, Manos offers a positive assessment of The Fourth Dimension and Accident. Christa Wolf, a citizen of the German Democratic Republic, has achieved international status as one of the leading visionary women writers of our time. Indeed, in her deeply personal, highly experimental novels, notably Cassandra, The Quest for Christa T., A Model Childhood, and No Place on Earth, she appears to have answered in advance the recent call by feminist critics for women writers to forge narrative strategies independent of the male-dominated literary establishment. In The Fourth Dimension, a series of interviews and conversations spanning a decade, Wolf openly discusses what it means to be a woman and a writer, repeatedly insisting that the author must not be absent from her own work. In Accident, her latest novel, she gives us a haunting meditation on the Chernobyl nuclear accident.
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Sommerstück
(summary)
In the following review, Blomster offers a mixed assessment of Sommerstück, a loosely woven recollection of an idyllic Mecklenburg summer, which is Christa Wolf's 1987 reworking of sketches made in 1982 and 1983. The book is clearly a Künstlernovelle, in which the central figure is a no-longer-young writer who experiences a crisis in her relationship to the word, caught up in the contradiction between the desire to create and the consciousness of her own inadequacy.
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Gesammelte Erzählungen
(summary)
In the following review, Blomster discusses the value of the content in Gesammelte Erzählungen.
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The Alienation of ‘I’: Christa Wolf and Militarism
(summary)
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.
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Was bleibt
(summary)
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.
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Force Fields: Who's Afraid of Christa Wolf? Thoughts on the Dynamics of Cultural Subversion
(summary)
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.
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‘A Little Susceptible to the Supernatural?’: On Christa Wolf
(summary)
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.
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The Hysteric and the Mimic: Reading Christa Wolf's The Quest for Christa T.
(summary)
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.
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The Case of Christa Wolf
(summary)
In the following essay, Hutchinson presents an overview of Wolf's literary reputation and ongoing critical controversy surrounding the publication of What Remains.
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Who's Afraid of Christa Wolf?
(summary)
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.
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The Crisis of East German Socialism: Christa Wolf and the Critique of Economic Rationality
(summary)
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.
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‘We Erect Our Structure in the Imagination Before We Erect it in Reality’ (Karl Marx, Das Kapital): Postmodern Reflections on Christa Wolf
(summary)
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.
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The Quest for Christa W.
(summary)
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.
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Rebel within a Cause
(summary)
In the following review of What Remains and The Writer's Dimension, Benn defends Wolf against public condemnation for her socialist beliefs.
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Dance of the Marionettes
(summary)
In the following mixed review of What Remains, Eder discusses Wolf's unique style of prose.
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In the Doghouse
(summary)
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.
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The Silencing of a Voice: Christa Wolf, Cassandra, and the German Unification
(summary)
In the following essay, Postl examines Wolf's attempt to reconcile socialist ideals with Western-style postmodern feminist concerns.
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What Remains and The Author's Dimension
(summary)
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.
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A Bruised Loyalty
(summary)
In the following review, Enright offers a mixed assessment of What Remains and The Writer's Dimension.
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A Woman-Centered Politics of Peace
(summary)
In the following review, Manos offers a favorable assessment of What Remains and The Author's Dimension. She reflects on Christa Wolf's The Quest for Christa T., noting the interplay between self-exploration and self-assertion, and how the novel invites readers to engage in their own process of self-validation.
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The Last Word: Christa Wolf—Moral Force or Farce?
(summary)
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.
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Five Women and One Man
(summary)
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.
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Romanticism as a Feminist Vision: The Quest of Christa Wolf
(summary)
In the following essay, Sayre and Löwy discuss the connections between nineteenth-century Romanticism and Wolf's feminist and anti-capitalist perspective.
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Auf dem Weg nach Tabou
(summary)
In the following review, Knapp offers a mixed assessment of Auf dem Weg nach Tabou, noting that Christa Wolf describes her ideal form of writing as a mixture of subjectivity and objectivity, in which her personal encounters and literary efforts are recorded simultaneously. Accordingly, the collection mixes diverse levels of experience, often leaving the reader to sort out the relevance of one to the other, and to establish the boundaries between the writer's private and public spheres.
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A Scapegoat, not a Sorceress
(summary)
In the following review of Medea, Graves finds Wolf's reinterpretation of the myth “too neat” and ultimately “unpersuasive.”
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Medea
(summary)
In the following review, Grawe discusses Wolf's damaged literary reputation following Was bleibt and her implicit self-defense in Medea. Christa Wolf, formerly everybody's darling in both East and West Germany and a moral as well as a literary authority, was in an excellent position to play an important conciliatory role after the Wendé. Sadly, she failed to do this. In 1990 she published her ill-fated story Was bleibt in which, many critics felt, she had seized upon the first opportunity to portray herself as a Stasi (East German security service) victim. Suddenly Wolf was very controversial indeed. She withdrew from the battleground, accepting an invitation from the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she compared herself with the Jews driven into exile by the Nazis, a comment which gave rise to bewilderment rather than understanding. When she confessed soon after that she had briefly been involved with the Stasi herself in the late fifties and early sixties, she countered the public attacks by publishing her complete and rather innocuous IM Stasi file (1993). Next she published a volume of topical essays, speeches, and letters (Auf dem Weg nach Tabou, 1995) in order to give an insight into her current thinking and feeling. But would she be able to rescue her literary career? Critics and fans alike, I am sure, were eagerly awaiting her first piece of fiction since 1990. In my view, Wolf has written an absorbing and challenging book in her usual somewhat elegiac tone. In a manner reminiscent of Thomas Mann's Joseph tetralogy, which appeared during the Nazi period, she has responded to the provocations of the present by retreating into the distant mythical past, without, however, losing sight of her own time and predicament.
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Velvet Prisons
(summary)
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.
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Reality Broken in Two
(summary)
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.
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The Good Old Bad Old Days
(summary)
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.
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An Allegory from Atlantis
(summary)
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.
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That Stupid Pelt
(summary)
In the following review of Medea, King compares and contrasts Wolf's reinterpretations of the Cassandra and Medea myths.
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Christa Wolf
(summary)
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Wolf, Christa (Vol. 29)
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Kein Ort. Nirgends
(summary)
In the following essay, Rita Terras examines Christa Wolf's Kein Ort. Nirgends, describing it as a novella that imaginatively depicts a fictional meeting between two tormented historical figures, Kleist and Günderrode, using a narrative technique that blends psychological insight with shifts in point of view and language style.
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Establishing the Female Tradition
(summary)
In the following essay, Joyce Crick discusses Christa Wolf's literary evolution and thematic focus on the integrity and fulfillment of the self, highlighting her novel "Kein Ort. Nirgends" as a pivotal work exploring historical and gendered challenges to creativity and proposing Wolf's efforts to establish a feminine literary tradition.
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The Mortal Sin of Our Time
(summary)
In the following essay, Stephen Spender analyzes Christa Wolf's novel "A Model Childhood," emphasizing its exploration of memory, the impact of Nazi history, and the continuity of governmental horrors, while drawing parallels with Elsa Morante's "History" in its portrayal of ordinary lives influenced by larger historical forces.
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Michael Bachem
(summary)
In the following essay, Michael Bachem argues that Christa Wolf's Gesammelte Erzählungen masterfully employs personal experiences and imaginative elements to explore themes of memory, human dignity, and resistance to totalitarian influences, while also engaging the reader through innovative narrative techniques.
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Confronting the Fascist Past and Coming to Terms with It
(summary)
In the following essay, Ursula Mahlendorf examines Christa Wolf's work Kindheitsmuster, highlighting how the protagonist's self-interrogation and journey through childhood memories serve as a broader critique of her generation's complicity in Nazism, while noting the novel's limitations in contextualizing Nazi history and critiquing contemporary fascist tendencies.
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Remembering
(summary)
In the following essay, Ann Shearer examines Christa Wolf's exploration of memory and conscience in "A Model Childhood" and "The Quest for Christa T.," where Wolf re-examines her past under Nazi and East German regimes to understand human dualities and the elusiveness of self in oppressive societies.
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See No Evil
(summary)
In the following essay, Margaret McHaffie examines Christa Wolf's novels "The Quest for Christa T." and "A Model Childhood," highlighting themes of memory's fallibility, the struggle for truth, and the impact of totalitarian regimes, while also noting Wolf's intricate narrative techniques and the novels' exploration of individual resilience against historical and personal adversities.
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No Place on Earth
(summary)
The critic explores Christa Wolf's novella "No Place on Earth," highlighting its imaginative dialogue between Henrich von Kleist and Karoline von Günderrode, emphasizing the work's vivid character portraits and exploration of themes such as personal ambition, philosophical recklessness, and anguished feminism.
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Heinrich von Kleist Could Not Last
(summary)
In the following essay, Marilyn French explores how Christa Wolf's novel "No Place On Earth" dramatizes the tension between individualism and societal conformity through the lives of historical figures, highlighting the universal struggles of identity, freedom, and isolation in a world that prioritizes mercantilism and power over genuine human connection.
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No Place on Earth
(summary)
In the following essay, Amity Shlaes critiques Christa Wolf's novel "No Place on Earth," arguing that while it attempts to address historical and contemporary political themes by exploring a fictional meeting between Heinrich von Kleist and Karoline von Günderrode, its dense allegory and lack of clear details render it too obscure for a broader audience.
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Identical Issues
(summary)
In the following essay, Rex Last explores Christa Wolf's Unter den Linden, highlighting its unconventional narratives, questing narrators, and recurring themes of consciousness and identity, suggesting Wolf's fixation with speculative realms and their reflection on personal and existential inquiries.
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The Discontinuous Self: Christa Wolf's 'A Model Childhood'
(summary)
In the following essay, Judith Ryan argues that Christa Wolf's novel A Model Childhood uniquely addresses the theme of the discontinuous self and the necessity of confronting the past, particularly in the GDR, by blending fictional autobiography with innovative narrative techniques that challenge traditional East German literary conventions.
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Kein Ort. Nirgends
(summary)
- Further Reading