Books by Christa Wolf

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.

Medea is among the most notorious women in the canon of Greek tragedy: a woman scorned who sacrifices her own children to her jealous rage. In her gripping new novel, Christa Wolf explodes this myth, revealing a fiercely independent woman ensnared in a brutal political battle.Medea, driven by her conscience to leave her corrupt homeland, arrives in Corinth with her husband, the hero Jason. He is welcomed, but she is branded the outsider-and then she discovers the appalling secret behind the king's claim to power. Unwilling to ignore the horrifying truth about the state, she becomes a threat to the king and his ruthless advisors; abandoned by Jason and made a public scapegoat, she is reviled as a witch and a murderess.Long a sharp-eyed political observer, Christa Wolf transforms this ancient tale into a startlingly relevant commentary on our times. Possessed of the enduring truths so treasured in the classics, and yet with a thoroughly contemporary spin, her Medea is a stunningly perceptive and probingly honest work of fiction.With an Introduction by Margaret Atwood. Translated from the German by John Cullen.

Dramatizes a hypothetical meeting between two early-nineteenth-century German poets, who later both committed suicide.

These essays, diary entries, and letters document four agonizing years in the personal history of German writer Christa Wolf, and paint a vivid portrait of the present cultural and political situation in the former German Democratic Republic. The most prominent writer of the German Democratic Republic and its most famous cultural export, Wolf was called East Germany's "Mother Confessor" and treated by the West German press as emblematic of GDR intellectuals. After reunification, Wolf published a novella titled What Remains, which was bitterly attacked by the press as a belated attempt to establish herself as a victim of the Stasi (the GDR's secret police). The criticism discredited Wolf as a cultural hero in the eyes of many Germans and plunged her into a deep personal crisis. Parting from Phantoms shows Wolf coming to terms with her ambiguous past and an unforgiving present. In a review of the German edition of "Parting from Phantoms", the Vienna Volksstimme wrote that "Wolf's personal crisis ...stands in the closest relation to the social crisis in her country", and that this book "reflects the larger social distress from the point of view of an exemplary victim". Among the most compelling writings gathered here are discourses with Jurgen Habermas and Gunter Grass, a series of diary entries, and a critical account of Berlin one year after unification titled "Whatever Happened to Your Smile: Wasteland Berlin 1990". In addition, Wolf defends herself from the extraordinary media campaign waged against her in Germany since 1990. The truth about the GDR, she argues, is to be found in its literature, not in the security files so eagerly used to discredit the GDR's culture. "Partingfrom Phantoms" will be indispensable reading for those who have come to know Christa Wolf through The Quest for Christa T., Cassandra, and her many other books. The collection stands as an important testimony to the personal and cultural costs of German reunification. "This is a wonderful personal account of the days that made history in Berlin 1989, a book of self-investigation and subtle attack against the self-righteousness of the victors. Even where I disagreed I couldn't stop reading. A great book of a great German author". -- Peter Schneider, Author of the Wall Jumper and Coupling

This is an account of the author's years growing up in Nazi Germany, as seen through the prism of a trip back to her native town with her husband and daughter, who inevitable asks certain unavoidable questions about the past. After the trip, Wolf returns home to write about the the experience, about her childhood (adopting the role of an external narrator), and about the difficulties of writing her story with any sort of objectivity and clarity. "Pattern of Childhood" is no sentimental journey; it is a plea to remember and learn from the past.

A young, sensitive woman tries to find freedom and self-realization in a socialist society.

In her prose and dramatic writing, Bachman, one of German literature's most important figures of the Post-World War II period, infuses a sense of humor and irony into the seriousness of her themes.