Christa Wolf has an established reputation in both Germanies, and a substantial body of work which gets better and better with every new novel. Her first major novel, Nachdenken über Christa T. (1968), was widely translated, but in Britain we still do not know nearly enough of her. The present collection of her stories from the years 1960 to 1972 [Gesammelte Erzählungen] offers a good occasion to extend our acquaintance of her range, from domestic idyll through childhood reminiscence to dream and satirical fantasy; from the two wry "days in the life of a woman writer", "Dienstag, den 27. September" and "Juninachmittag", through the—for her—relatively straightforward "Blickwechsel", to the dream-tale "Unter den Linden" and on to three brilliant satires on current literary, social-scientific and sexual ideologies….

Her characteristic theme is the integrity and fulfilment of the self, and this determines the characteristic form of her novels: in Christa T. and in her marvellous recent autobiographical novel Kindheitsmuster (1976) it requires the presentation of past experience in terms of present reflection upon it, resulting, in Kindheitsmuster, in the therapeutic re-creation of a self in history….

And now, after this landmark, there comes, long-awaited, a new and important novel, Kein Ort. Nirgends. She has always been a "literary" writer, deeply assimilating and actively using her chosen tradition: Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, the Büchner of Lenz: "without books, I would not be I". Here she turns to two literary historical figures for her overt subject matter: the imaginary encounter between the minor poet Karoline von Günderode and the dramatist Heinrich von Kleist.

They were both productive geniuses, and suicides. They represent an extreme form, historically grounded, of Christa Wolf's recurring theme: how to be productive in social and historical circumstances that do not readily favour the fulfilment of the self. Christa T.'s cry is echoed in Kleist's words, which form the book's title: "No place. Nowhere." It is an elusive work, open and elliptical, compelling the reader, as ever, into active reconstruction. It takes the form of a dual stream-of-consciousness, and an imaginary conversation between Kleist and Günderrode composed of a complex collage drawn from their writings, letters, journals, metaphors: a duet on the importance and vulnerability of creation in dark times, on male and female sensibilities, on death, friendship and hope….

In this novel, and also in her recent editions of Günderrode's writings and Bettina's novel, Christa Wolf is deliberately modifying literary history. In bringing a marginal figure to the centre, she is attempting to establish a feminine literary tradition and to place her own writings in that perspective. And she is rescuing from obscurity a talent that might have been great. Might have been: for Günderrode as a woman laboured under obstacles and inhibitions greater than Kleist's. Christa Wolf's theme of the fulfilment of the self in history is modified here into the fulfilment of woman's self in history, an aspect present in the earlier novels, but much stronger here.

Increasingly she has come to see the possibility of Utopia threatened by the totally rationalized society.