[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.]

When The Quest for Christa T. was published in 1970, I recall discussing with friends the brilliance of this new “girl” writing in Germany. Her jacket photograph seemed to depict a teenager. It is with some surprise one realizes that Christa Wolf is sixty-four today, the author of seven books, and that the new photographs resemble Golda Meir. What Remains purports to collect her short fiction, from the early work in the 1960s to the title story, recently published in Germany and the subject of some debate there. (Strangely missing from this collected stories is “Divided Heaven,” Wolf's long story published in 1963, about a working woman who prefers East Germany to the supposedly more easy life in West Berlin.) In addition to that omission, the editors and/or translators have not provided dates for the eight collected pieces, which span thirty years. Dates would be of especial interest in the case of a writer so engaged in social and political commentary.

What Remains is an uneven volume, but collectively it poses questions about survival and existence. The best story, “Unter den Linden,” is a leisurely, almost rambling, tale of self-discovery which occurs on a walk down the famous strasse, and begins, “I have always liked walking along unter den Linden. And most of all, as you well know, alone …” The story is a mixture of dream, reverie, and revelation. At the conclusion the narrator realizes the woman she has encountered on her stroll is herself: “It was I. It had been myself, none other than myself, whom I had met …” She had been intended to find herself once and for all, and the revelation is totally self-liberating for the repressed narrator. The story is at once fine fiction and a feminist tract.

“Exchanging Glances” is another admirable story, also about liberation, but an entirely different kind. An older woman writer engages in memories of the day Germany was liberated by the Allies in 1945. Wolf captures all the uncertainty, confusion, relief and humiliation: “The world consisted of the victors and the defeated. The former were free to express their emotions. The latter—us—had to lock them inside ourselves from now on. The enemy should not see us weak.” The story poses questions of the need to specify exactly what one has been “liberated” from, and to what purpose as well.

The third important story, or so it seems to me, is the apparently autobiographical title piece. It concerns a writer's frame of mind when she knows she is under surveillance by the secret police. The tone veers from frustration to despair to high humor: “I still regretted the fact that I hadn't followed my first impulse right away back then when it started, on those cold November nights, and brought them down some hot tea.” As her personal history unfolds, so does the history of the city of Berlin: “The city had turned from a place into a non-place, without history, without vision, without magic, spoiled by greed, power, and violence. It divided its time between nightmares and senseless activities …,” like the three men who sat in a car every day watching her apartment. For Wolf those secret police came to symbolize the new Berlin.

Other stories are less successful, particularly Wolf's efforts at speculative fiction. In “A Little Outing to H.,” the narrator visits Herotown, where ordinary residents wear orange badges inscribed with the letter P (for Person), while those who wear no badges at all are Heroes. It barely works. “Self-Experiment” is a witty fantasy in which a woman subjects herself to a sex change, only to reverse the procedure when she discovers she was not able to shed the sensations of womanhood when she became a man. She comes to be homesick for the absurdities of being a woman. While the plot allows for some neat satire on the sexes—and the sexism of males—it remains decidedly slick. (But not so slick as another story, narrated by a cat.)

Despite lapses, it is good to have Christa Wolf's shorter fiction in one volume and in English. The translation by Heike Schwarzbauer and Rick Tavvorian is bright and fluent. One wishes they had provided a few intercultural notes, such as one to explain why the narrator of “What Remains” finds it so hilarious that a “Jewess” be named “Elfi.”