CHRISTA WOLF, THE SEVENTH Max Kade German Writer-in- Residence at Oberlin College, differs in several ways from her predecessors. She is a novelist, while those who came before her were primarily poets, playwrights, and short-story writers. She is also the first East German writer, from whom we hope to gain valuable insight into that other German culture. And she is only the second female guest author to come to Oberlin. Christa Wolf is here with her husband, the critic and author Gerhard Wolf.

As an East German, Christa Wolf has known a life very different from an American’s. Born in 1929 in Landsberg/Warthe (today: Golzów Wielpolski in Poland), about one hundred miles east of Berlin, she spent her childhood years under Hitler and in time of war. When the war finally ended in 1945, she, along with millions of others, fled westward, ending up in what became initially the Soviet Zone and, in 1949, the German Democratic Republic. She worked for some time as the secretary to the mayor of a village in Mecklenburg. In 1949, she moved to Jena and then to Leipzig, where she studied literature, receiving her diploma in 1953. She then became editor for the magazine Neue Deutsche Literatur and for the youth publishing house Neues Leben, and later of the publishing house Mitteldeutscher Verlag Halle, which published her Moskauer Novelle (Moscow Novella) in 1961. For this first work she received the Kunstpreis der Stadt Halle, and for her next, Der geteilte Himmel (Divided Heaven, 1963), the Heinrich-Mann-Preis. The motion picture made from her second book was awarded the Nationalpreis III. Klasse der Akademie der Künste der DDR and was rated “especially valuable” in 1964 by the Wiesbaden (West Germany) film evaluation board because, as the citation read, “no West German film since the war has reacted so sensitively to problems of conscience faced by young people.” Christa Wolf's third book, Nachdenken über Christa T. (The Quest for Christa T., 1968), not only represented a milestone in the development of East German literature, but has become a bestseller in its West German original and paperback edition. Christa Wolf has also published articles and literary criticism.

All three of Christa Wolf's major works concern the inner development of their central character. In all three, a heroine finds herself through increasing self-awareness.