Wolf, Christa

(German, 1929– )

Born in Poland, Wolf moved to East Germany in 1945 where she joined the Communist Party. She spent three years working in a factory, believing that the experience would ground her fiction in contemporary society. Her first novel, Divided Heaven (1963), is a Marxist exploration of the working class in a divided Germany. Wolf received huge international success with her mythological novel, Cassandra (1983). Captured by Agamemnon, the eponymous seeress awaits her fate in Mycenae. Through her diary entries and letters, a broader narrative unfolds which questions, among other things, the role of women throughout the ages, male domination, and nuclear war. Set in a small East German village, Accident: A Day's News (1987) is a thought-provoking meditation on the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. Although Wolf left the Communist Party in 1976, she has remained a committed socialist.

Günter Grass, Virginia Woolf.

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