This novel contemplates the connection between destruction and desire and is written by the author of "The Quest for Christ T." and "No Place on Earth".

Accident / A Day's News

Literature & Fiction

christa-wolf

Literary

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

In this volume, the distinguished East German writer Christa Wolf retells the story of the fall of Troy, but from the point of view of the woman whose visionary powers earned her contempt and scorn. Written as a result of the author's Greek travels and studies, Cassandra speaks to us in a pressing monologue whose inner focal points are patriarchy and war. In the four accompanying pieces, which take the form of travel reports, journal entries, and a letter, Wolf describes the novel's genesis. Incisive and intelligent, the entire volume represents an urgent call to examine the past in order to insure a future.

Cassandra (English and German Edition)

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

What Remains collects Christa Wolf's short fiction, from her early work in the sixties to the recently published title story, which was widely debated when it appeared in Germany in 1990. These powerful and often very personal stories examine a wide range of topics, from sexual politics to the nature of memory. In "What Remains," an East German writer who is under observation by the secret police traces the way in which this almost constant surveillance gradually destroys every shred of normalcy in her life. In "Exchanging Glances," a woman remembers, from a far distance in time, place, and politics, the flight of her family from the advancing Russian Army during World War II. And in the biting and very funny satire "The New Life and Opinions of a Tomcat," we meet Max the cat, the devoted pet of a professor of applied psychology who is working on the realization of TOHUHA (Total Human Happiness), or the abolition of tragedy. What Remains offers a fascinating introduction to Wolf's work.

What Remains and Other Stories

Short Stories & Anthologies

"Historical, hypothetical, but marvelously intense: a fascinating short novel by one of Europe's most consistently haunting novelist." - Kirkus Reviews

No Place on Earth

Contemporary

First published in 1963, in East Germany, They Divided the Sky tells the story of a young couple, living in the new, socialist, East Germany, whose relationship is tested to the extreme not only because of the political positions they gradually develop but, very concretely, by the Berlin Wall, which went up on August 13, 1961.
The story is set in 1960 and 1961, a moment of high political cold war tension between the East Bloc and the West, a time when many thousands of people were leaving the young German Democratic Republic (the GDR) every day in order to seek better lives in West Germany, or escape the political ideology of the new country that promoted the "farmer and peasant" state over a state run by intellectuals or capitalists. The construction of the Wall put an end to this hemorrhaging of human capital, but separated families, friends, and lovers, for thirty years.
The conflicts of the time permeate the relations between characters in the book at every level, and strongly affect the relationships that Rita, the protagonist, has not only with colleagues at work and at the teacher's college she attends, but also with her partner Manfred (an intellectual and academic) and his family. They also lead to an accident/attempted suicide that send her to hospital in a coma, and that provide the backdrop for the flashbacks that make up the narrative.
Wolf's first full-length novel, published when she was thirty-five years old, was both a great literary success and a political scandal. Accused of having a 'decadent' attitude with regard to the new socialist Germany and deliberately misrepresenting the workers who are the foundation of this new state, Wolf survived a wave of political and other attacks after its publication. She went on to create a screenplay from the novel and participate in making the film version. More importantly, she went on to become the best-known East German writer of her generation, a writer who established an international reputation and never stopped working toward improving the socialist reality of the GDR.

They Divided the Sky: A Novel by Christa Wolf (Literary Translation)

University of Ottawa Press

Der Geteilte Himmel

European Schoolbooks

More Classics to Modern: Book 5

Music Sales Ltd

Christa is a young girl in Hitler's Germany; she survives to embrace the new order but her idealism withers as crass materialists corrode its dream. Her story is the story of a whole generation, and a celebration of the unique value of each human being and all human life.

The quest for Christa T (Virago modern classics)

Virago Press Ltd.

A recreation of the myth of Cassandra, journeying to her foreseen death and reflecting on her own history, is accompanied by essays that touch on such diverse issues as nuclear war and the role of women, linking them to the interpretation of Cassandra

Cassandra

Virago Press

The author should not disappear into her own work, says Christa Wolf, but should stand up and be counted. In this series of interviews and conversations spanning more than a decade, Christ Wolf does precisely that. Here, one of the greatest contemporary novelists discusses the origins of an inspirations for her best known works. Often taking as her starting point events from the past, her novels, she explains, remain fictions of the present, whether her concern is to reassess the experiences of growing up in Nazi Germany, as in A Model Childhood, or to attempt to trace the roots of the contradictions in which our civilisation is now trapped, as in Cassandra. These conversations, however, take her far beyond the purely literary. She talks openly about what it means to be both a writer and a woman in East Germany today, and concludes that literature is no longer territorially defined. We are not so much divided by boundaries between East and West as united in our common experience of highly organized patriarchal society, she says, which has brought us to ‘the verge of annihilation’. It is the author’s voice, according to Christa Wolf, which provides ‘the fourth dimension’ of modern prose. In these pages her own voice emerges more loudly and clearly than ever.

The Fourth Dimension: Interview With Christa Wolf

Hilary Pilkington

Karin McPherson

Essays & Correspondence

Verso

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Books by christa-wolf