GERMAN LITERARY giant Christa Wolf, who has died after a long illness aged 82, dedicated her writings to the moral dilemmas of life in East Germany.
Readers on both sides of the Iron Curtain embraced her critical literary treatments of the socialist regime which, to get past the censors, were framed by what she termed “subjective authenticity”.
“I write to get to know myself better,” she said in a recent interview. “On this journey there are many warning signs saying – ‘this far and no further’.”
Born in 1929 in a part of eastern Brandenburg now in Poland, she was an optimistic supporter of the East German state in her breakthrough novel Divided Heaven.
The 1968 novel Reflections on Christa Tmarked a disillusioned shift from the official party line. A decade later, she fell foul of the authorities again by protesting against the expulsion of the dissident songwriter Wolf Biermann.
By 1989 she was a leading light of the civil rights movement that brought about the end of East Germany. Like many in the movement, however, she favoured reform rather than reunification.
Wolf’s reputation as a moral instance suffered a setback with revelations in 1993 that she had worked as a Stasi informer for three years until 1962.
“I was shocked myself at this small file, particularly that I had forgotten all about it,” she said later. “On the other hand, I saw it as an impulse to go back to that time and ask: how did it happen that I spoke to them?”
Western German critics attacked the subsequent book, What Remains, for her apparent refusal to condemn East German authoritarianism.
Other literary figures respected her defence of her East German experience. “Heinrich Böll once said to me that anyone who had ever been a communist or a Catholic could never get it out of their system.”