This novel, the title of which has also been translated as Reflections on Christa T., focuses upon the title character as a kind of emblem of the individual acted upon by outside forces and finally succumbing to them, yet preserving her uniqueness and integrity.

Christa T. is a young woman who fascinates the other woman who begins the narration of the story. The narrator is impressed by the quirky, non-conformist behavior of Christa, which is thrown into relief by the backdrop of the story's initial phase, the final period of Nazi Germany. What the novel seems to ask is whether it's possible under these harsh external conditions for a person not only to act in an individualistic way as Christa does, but simply to maintain any integrity as a person. The image presented to us of Christa is two-sided. To what extent, we ask ourselves, is Christa the actual woman she's depicted as, and to what extent a creation of her friend telling us the story? Like many other "memory novels," this one moves back and forth in time with a fluidity often difficult to follow. A political message, though veiled, is discernible. Though the author was not an actual dissident in Communist East Germany and apparently, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she opposed the re-unification of Germany, in the novel it's not hard to see a parallel between the Nazi system and the regime which followed it in the East after the war. Christa T. dies of leukemia, but Wolff more than likely uses this as a metaphor of the damage that a restrictive, authoritarian society imposes upon a person's individualism.

Early in the novel a small incident illustrates this point, though in itself it has nothing to do with politics or ideology. In class the teacher addresses Christa with the familiar rather than the formal second-person pronoun, and Christa frowns in reaction. The narrator then wonders if the teacher is going to "put Christa in her place." Yet the incident is ambiguous because the narrator is not even certain if Christa did frown. The message seems to be that even the smallest things can shake the position an individual seeks to establish for herself, but that also, those things in themselves do not always have a definite meaning one way or the other. The same, perhaps, is implied about the elements of life in East Germany during the twenty years after the war. Christa T. is in many ways a latter-day analogue to Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. Both novels are examinations of a sensitive person caught in external events which no one person can control.