Christa Wolf Books

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Parting from Phantoms is a window into the soul of the most prominent writer of the German Democratic Republic and its most famous export, Christa Wolf. The essays, diary entries, and letters in this book document four agonizing years in Wolf's personal history and paint a vivid portrait of the cultural and political situation in the former German Democratic Republic. This collection stands as an important testimony to the personal and cultural costs of German reunification. "The works in this book constitute an essential document of the history of reunified Germany, and this alone recommends it to scholars and those interested in current European events."— Publishers Weekly "Christa Wolf was arguably the most influential writer of a nation that no longer exists. . . . Parting from Phantoms traces the fever chart of her anguish. . . . In some ways, the rawness of the present volume is its greatest contribution, and its bona fides—testifying to the human cost of deception and self-deception."—Todd Gitlin, Nation "A thrilling display of ideological soul-searching."—Ilan Stavans, Newsday, Favorite Books of 1997

"August" is Christa Wolf s last piece of fiction, written in a single sitting as an anniversary gift to her husband. In it, she revisits her stay at a tuberculosis hospital in the winter of 1946/47, which makes up the closing scenes of her 1976 novel "Patterns of Childhood." This time, however, the perspective is a very different one: that of August, a young patient who has lost both parents to the war. He adores the older girl Lilo, a rebellious teenager who holds things together on the wards. Sixty years later, August thinks back on his life and the things that she taught him. Written in taut, affectionate prose, "August "offers a new entry into Christa Wolf s work and, incidentally, her first and last male protagonist. Yet, it is more than a literary artefacta perfectly constructed story of a quiet life well lived. For August as for Christa Wolf, the past was never dead."

Cassandra, daughter of the King of Troy, is endowed with the gift of prophecy but fated never to be believed. After ten years of brutal war, Troy has fallen to the Greek army, and Cassandra is now a prisoner of war, shackled outside the gates of a foreign fortress, Agamemnon's Mycenae. Through memories of her childhood and reflections on the long years of conflict, Cassandra pieces together the legendary fall of her city. A woman living in an age of heroes, Cassandra reveals the untold personal story that has been lost among the triumphs of Achilles and Hector.

During a 1960 interview, East German writer Christa Wolf was asked a curious question: would she describe in detail what she did on September 27th? Fascinated by considering the significance of a single day over many years, Wolf began keeping a detailed diary of September 27th, a practice which she carried on for more than fifty years until her death in 2011. The first volume of these notes covered 1960 through 2000 was published to great acclaim more than a decade ago. Now translator Katy Derbyshire is bringing the September 27th collection up to date with One Day a Year--a collection of Wolf's notes from the last decade of her life. The book is both a personal record and a unique document of our times. With her characteristic precision and transparency, Wolf examines the interplay of the private, subjective, and major contemporary historical events. She writes about Germany after 9/11, about her work on her last great book City of Angels, and also about her exhausting confrontation with old age. One Day a Year is a compelling and personal glimpse into the life of one of the world's greatest writers.

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.

A fragmentary work that stands as a testament to Wolf's skill as a thinker, storyteller, and memorializer of humanity's greatest struggles. Christa Wolf tried for years to find a way to write about her childhood in Nazi Germany. In her 1976 book Patterns of Childhood, she explained why it was so difficult: "Gradually, over a period of months, the dilemma has emerged: to remain speechless or to live in the third person, these seem to be the options. One is impossible, the other sinister." During 1971 and 1972 she made thirty-three attempts to start the novel, abandoning each manuscript only pages in. Eulogy for the Living, written over the course of four weeks, is the longest of those fragments. In its pages, Wolf recalls with crystalline precision the everyday details of her life as a middle-class grocer's daughter, and the struggles within the family--struggles common to most families, but exacerbated by the rise of Nazism. And as Nazism fell, the Wolfs fled west, trying to stay ahead of the rampaging Red Army.