Christa Wolf

Christa Wolf's fourth book, The Quest for Christa T. appeared the same year that the 'Prague Spring' was violently suppressed, and had a less than welcoming reception from the ideologically-conformist GDR critics - at the 1969 Writers' Congress the book was even attacked. The author had evidently gone too far, disregarding the prevailing consensus in many respects. She had bravely grasped the nettle and stung herself five years earlier with The Divided Sky, her story about 'Republikflucht' (illegal emigration from the GDR), but this time she was even more determined to go her own way.

Christa T. is not a literary character in the usual sense, and her life is not told in the usual way. The author was a close friend and evidently had many other things in common with her, and on the basis of clues left behind by Christa T. after her death from leukaemia the author tries to fathom the deeper meaning of this strange and yet familiar life, constantly referring back to her own experience.

In doing so she comes up against boundaries which she does not cunningly skirt around, but involves in her reflections. The puzzle of a person always begins at the point where one can no longer make comparisons. Christa Wolf persistently examines those of her friend's comments about life which reflect her unique individuality, and it is her attempts at writing which in the end are most reliable: it becomes clear that Christa T. might similarly have managed the "long, seemingly never-ending way back to her self", if she had not been pre-empted by death.

Unexpectedly the question of the individual's potential for development is combined with questions about the artist in society, and Christa T. becomes more clearly the alter ego of Christa Wolf - but the differences still remain visible. This reflective author clearly identifies as a scandal the way that the socialist GDR society behaves towards difference as a symbol of personality, one which should not be accepted without protest.