Christa Wolf

Post-Wende social constellations and the experiences that grew out of them for Christa Wolf created a connection between the scapegoat motif, which has stamped the traditional story of Medea since Euripides, and contemporary events, which Wolf’s book takes as its starting-point. The upheaval of autumn 1989, one of whose beginnings was in the attempt of intellectuals and artists to make use of the opportunities afforded by a free, democratic development, led to the delegitimation of the GDR and to the exclusion of its culture and the representatives of this culture. The Medea theme turns out to be a paradigm of the exclusion of the stranger, the Other, in the form of a woman, whose earliest probable embodiment presented her a healer and magician before she was denounced as a witch, poisoner and child-murderer.

Christa Wolf – Biography

© Aus dem Klappentext

Christa Wolf entered literature and said ‘I’. [...] Her subject in Auf dem Weg nach Tabou is the epochal rupture of 1989, when ‘actually existing socialism’ came to an end, first in Germany and then in all Europe. This book is not a detached description. It is a self-enlightenment with the disadvantages and advantages of much literature: it reaches the saving bank of the river, leaving the distress of the desperate behind it. What has assailed the author in recent years, and is part of the existential crises that people have been living through, is calmly composed in diction, sentence structure and analysis. Letters and diary-like texts – three with the date September 27th – lift the curtain on the dark hours of Christa Wolf.

Christa Wolf – Biography

Werner Liersch: „Die Not des Bedrängten bleibt draußen"
© Berliner Zeitung, 18.03.1994

[Did] Christa Wolf conduct herself too tactically, too cautiously, too faint-heartedly, as has been charged against her, especially in the West? Her book Im Dialog is the author’s first coming to grips with this question, though not the first time she has posed it to herself. But now the question has become inescapable for Christa Wolf. [...] Im Dialog is surely not her last word in this matter. [...] ‘We have not been granted a pause for reflection and self-examination; from an extreme psychological state of emergency, we have had to pass judgement on a future that we haven’t even been able to consider’. For Westerners, it is of course easy to stand by and view this as a spectator.

Christa Wolf - Biography

Helmut Schmidt: „Nicht die Chance verpatzen. Auf dem Weg zur deutschen Einheit haben wir schon viel Porzellan zerschlagen“
© Die Zeit, 09.03.1990