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“... Granta, which in the end didn’t use either of them. (These things happen.) One of them was by Christa Wolf, an extract, I think, from her book Sommerstück. It was just two pages long, nothing more than a preamble and image, but of a Shakespearean power and amplitude. A group of adults and children (Wolf’s ...”

“... The original title of Christa Wolf’s novel, Kindheitsmuster, could mean something like ‘a pattern of childhood’, but her translators have rightly gone for a more idiomatic expression. In turning the noun into an attributive adjective, they’ve stressed the idea of an exemplary upbringing, and that is wholly apt ...”

“... memory ‘which would have vanished utterly had he not enclosed it in a fortress of words’ (Christa Wolf). Writing is facing the truth, which cannot be unknown but only forgotten: it is ‘the enemy of forgetfulness, of thoughtlessness. For the writer there is no oblivion. Only endless memory.’ This is something Look at Me painfully ...”

“... her last day in Corinth; it culminates in the infanticide and her flight. For the German novelist Christa Wolf, the Greeks are ‘our strange guests who are like ourselves’, but their philosophical dualism is also to blame for getting us into the fine mess which is 20th-century Europe. Wolf’s Kassandra was ...”

“... relayed news from the Kent Evening Post and the Sheerness Times Guardian were Hannah Arendt, Christa Wolf, Max Frisch, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Günter Grass. When, in 1978, Jürgen Habermas asked Johnson for an essay for a book he was editing, provisionally titled Observations on ‘The Spiritual Situation of the Age’, Johnson wrote about ...”

“... West for material unpublishable in the East. Later still, as with the poet-singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann in 1976, the state simply shipped out those writers who had blotted their copybooks or gave cause for concern. I wonder if there has ever been writing so conscious of itself and its market, with such a managed sense of mission. The Great American ...”

“... almost equally well to a Catholic like Heinrich Böll, a Marxist like Brecht or a feminist like Christa Wolf. Moreover, at the very time when he was emphasising the significance of Jewish trouble-makers, his own stance was becoming increasingly conformist. Dissent, in short, should not be confused with descent. It is less a question of ethnic identity ...”

“... ideological doctrine? In a post-feminist age, whose great writers (Ursula Le Guin, Toni Morrison, Christa Wolf) are not women writers but just writers, Atwood does not easily fit some category labelled feminist: The Robber Bride, whose male figures are mostly not even violent but simply inept (the masculine ‘masquerade’, said Lacan, borrowing the ...”

“... but most people outside the Nazi Party also spent the war trying not to be noticed and, as Christa Wolf wrote in the semi-autobiographical A Model Childhood, ‘a person who wants to pass unnoticed soon stops noticing anything.’ Hilde Naumann’s invulnerability didn’t last: she survived the war, along with just under 15,000 other Jews who had ...”

“... the children, undone. Cusk is by no means alone in refusing Euripides’ unrepentant ending. When Christa Wolf in her novel Medea (reviewed in the LRB by Helen King, 12 November 1998) portrays her as the blameless victim of a smear perpetrated by Corinthians intent on covering up their own cult of child sacrifice, she was drawing on sources that predate ...”

“... then at the very least a tone very different from that of Cold War literature, of 1984 or even of Christa Wolf, who (in Was bleibt?) still tries to register the historical and psychic peculiarities of an existence under surveillance, producing as it does endless reveries which all too often ended with the absurd question, What do you want ...”

“... there is no escape route in sight. You feel you are standing at bay. Australia is not a way out.Christa Wolf, CassandraThe city of Sydney has one decent road to the airport because of the Queen’s visit in 1963; the royal nostrils were not to be assaulted by the stink from the tanneries along the slum route through the inner southern suburbs. We ...”

“... in a Chicago suburb in 1974, Rich chose to include it in the 1995 reprint of her book. But it is Christa Wolf’s 1996 retelling which is, for me, the true feminist text. In this version, Medea doesn’t kill her children, or Glauce, or her brother Absyrtus whom, in another strand of the legend, she murdered before fleeing her original home of Colchis ...”