In the course of a literary career that stretched from the publication in 1961 of Moskauer Novelle (Moscow Novella), a short text exemplary of the socialist-realist mode dominant in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) at the time, to the more characteristically modernist novel examined in this chapter, Stadt der Engel (City of Angels, 2010), Christa Wolf rarely succeeded in satisfying either her East German political masters or her critics in West Germany. She proclaimed neither unquestioning loyalty to the communist state nor an unambivalent rejection of its forty-year experiment. Not that she ever aspired to please those in authority in the GDR or to pander to those West Germans who, she felt, failed to understand the compromises and complexities of life in the East. For this she was routinely pursued by the GDR state apparatus from the mid-1960s until its collapse in 1989 and by conservative west German journalists up to her death at the age of 82 in December 2011.

Wolf's literary work challenged the requirement of ideological conformity imposed by the GDR's ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) almost from the very beginning. The ideologically sound depiction of the love affair between Vera and her Russian interpreter in Moskauer Novelle gave way only two years later to what Renate Rechtien describes as the “ambiguities, contradictions and often subtle slippages of meaning” that characterize Der geteilte Himmel (Divided Heaven, 1963).