Christa Wolf (1929–2011)
Author of Cassandra
About the Author
Christa Wolf was born on March 18, 1929, in Landsberg, which is now Gorzow, Poland. Her father joined the Nazi Party and she became a member of the girls' version of the Hitler Youth. In 1949, she joined the Socialist Unity Party and studied German literature at universities in Jena and Leipzig. show more She wrote numerous novels during her lifetime including The Divided Heaven, The Quest for Christa T., A Model Childhood, and Cassandra. She won several awards including the Heinrich Mann Prize in 1963 and Thomas Mann Prize for literature in 2010. She died on December 1, 2011 at the age of 82. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: Christa Wolf, 1963. Foto von Irene Eckleben. (Deutsches Bundesarchiv Bild 183-B0509-0010-006)
Series
Works by Christa Wolf
Erzählungen 3 copies
Cassandra (Tascabili e/o Vol. 1) 2 copies
Incident 2 copies
Notícias sobre Christa T 1 copy
Избранное 1 copy
Wolf Christa 1 copy
In diesen Jahren 1 copy
Der geteilte Himmel Erzhlung 1 copy
Erään naisen elämä 1 copy
Funció d'estiu 1 copy
2008 1 copy
August 1 copy
Wolf, Christa Archive 1 copy
Akademische Feier anlässlich der Verleihung der Ehrendoktorwürde an Christa Wolf am 31. Januar 1990 (1990) 1 copy
I djetinjstvo zar ne 1 copy
Model de copilarie 1 copy
Kassandra, Erzählung, und Voraussetzung einer Erzählung: Kassandra, Frankfurter Poetik-Vorlesung (1999) 1 copy
Podijeljeno nebo 1 copy
Associated Works
A History of Women in the West, Volume V: Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century (1992) — Contributor — 232 copies, 2 reviews
Die Sammlung der Nationalgalerie : 1945-1968 : Der geteilte Himmel : die Dokumentation einer Ausstellung (2014) — Contributor — 6 copies
Daughters of Eve: Women's Writing from the German Democratic Republic (European Women Writers) (1993) — Contributor — 4 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Wolf, Christa
- Legal name
- Wolf, Christa Ihlenfeld
- Other names
- Ihlenfeld, Christa (birth name)
- Birthdate
- 1929-03-18
- Date of death
- 2011-12-01
- Gender
- female
- Education
- University of Jena
University of Leipzig - Occupations
- editor
lecturer
journalist
literary critic
novelist
essayist - Organizations
- German Writers' Union
Verlag Neues Leben
Mitteldeutscher Verlag
Neue deutsche Literatur - Awards and honors
- Georg Büchner Preis (1980)
Austrian State Prize for European Literature (1984)
American Academy of Arts and Letters (Foreign Honorary ∙ Literature ∙ 1990)
Heinrich Mann Prize (1963)
Thomas Mann Prize for literature (2010)
Schiller Memorial Prize (1983) (show all 11)
Geschwister-Scholl-Preis (1987)
Elisabeth Langgässer Prize (1999)
Nelly Sachs Literature Prize (1999)
Deutscher Bücherpreis (2002)
Großer Literaturpreis der Bayerischen Akademie der Schönen Künste (2010) - Relationships
- Wolf, Gerhard (spouse)
- Short biography
- Christa Wolf, née Ihlenfeld, was born in Landsberg an der Warthe, Germany (present-day Gorzów Wielkopolski, Poland). At the end of World War II, her family fled the advance of the Red Army and settled in Mecklenburg, in what would become the German Democratic Republic (GDR) or East Germany. She went to high school in Gammelin, near Schwerin, and studied literature at the University of Jena and the University of Leipzig. At age 20, she became a member of the Socialist Party. In 1951, she married Gerhard Wolf, a writer and fellow student. After graduation, she worked for the German Writers' Union and as an editor for a publishing company.
She first made her mark as a writer with the novel Der geteilte Himmel (Divided Heaven) in 1963. Her subsequent works included Nachdenken über Christa T. (The Quest for Christa T., 1968), Kindheitsmuster (Patterns of Childhood, 1976), Kassandra (Cassandra, 1983), Störfall (Accident, 1987), Medea (1996), Auf dem Weg nach Tabou (On the Way to Taboo, 1994), and Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud (City of Angels or The Overcoat of Dr. Freud, 2010).
By the 1980s, her realistic style and her feminism, as much as her open criticism of the GDR, had made her well-known in West Germany and internationally. She received numerous awards for her work, including the Heinrich Mann Prize (1963), the Georg Büchner Prize (1980), the Schiller Memorial Prize (1983), and the Geschwister-Scholl-Preis (1987). After German reunification, she was awarded the Elisabeth Langgässer Prize (1999) and the Nelly Sachs Literature Prize, and became the first recipient of the Deutscher Bücherpreis (German Book Prize) in 2002 for lifetime achievement. In 1993, the release of documents compiled by the GDR secret police known as the Stasi showed that she had informed on fellow authors from 1959 to 1962. - Nationality
- Germany
- Birthplace
- Landsberg an der Warthe, Province of Brandenburg, Germany (now Poland)
- Places of residence
- Berlin, Germany
Landsberg an der Warthe, Germany
Mecklenburg, Germany - Place of death
- Berlin, Germany
- Burial location
- Dorotheenstadt Cemetery, Berlin, Germany
- Map Location
- Polen
- Associated Place (for map)
- Germany
Members
Reviews
This is a book that already works brilliantly well if you simply take it at face value as a description of the experience of being sick and in hospital, the way the sacrifice of control over your own body radically alters your perception of your relationship with your body and with the surrounding world, and so on. There's a lot of very clever juggling of first and third-person narration, the stream-of-consciousness technique mixing dreams seamlessly with direct experience of the hospital show more environment. It's only when you get quite a long way into the book that you realise that there's a lot more going on, and that the narrator's illness is also an extended metaphor for the experience of living in a corrupt, collapsing political system. This is the sort of thing that could so easily be overdone, but Wolf keeps it at a very subtle, indirect level, forcing the reader to look for the parallels without more than a few very indirect hints. Beautifully done. show less
This is one of Wolf's most famous works - it takes the form of a first-person monologue set within the foreground timeframe of Cassandra's appearance in Aeschylus's Agamemnon. Expanding (a good deal) on her speeches in the play, Cassandra looks back on her life in Troy, the war and fall of the city, and the circumstances that have led to her impending murder by Clytemnestra. Although there's no formal metrical structure, and the narrative is basically a stream-of-consciousness mixing show more memories of different time-periods quite arbitrarily, Wolf does use a declamatory style that is at least "rhetorically aware" - it echoes the feel of the play, and this is a book you certainly have to imagine being read aloud.
For a feminist writer, the character of Cassandra is just a gift that keeps on giving. She's known above all as a woman doomed not to be listened to, and - as we know from Aeschylus - that was a punishment for saying "no" to sex with Apollo. And there are other traditions that she was a rape-victim and was forced into a political marriage by her father. But she's possibly also the first woman in literature who is there because of the work she does and not because of who her father or her husband is. And for Wolf, she's above all a representative of the transition from the matriarchal societies of the Minoan tradition to the hard new patriarchal culture of the Achaeans.
Cassandra's Troy, in Wolf's account, is being turned into a militaristic police-state by a Himmler-like figure called Eumelos who is fond of the "those who are not with us are against us" version of binary logic; those who still seek to follow the old ways and respect the mother-goddess are being forced underground.
Wolf is such a capable writer that none of this sounds like strident cliché when we meet it on the printed page, and Cassandra is a much more complex character than we might expect. She has a complex relationship with Aeneas, for instance, which seems to be there not for any obvious political reason but simply because Wolf found him an interesting character and wanted to work out for herself what he might be doing in the story. Definitely worth the effort. show less
For a feminist writer, the character of Cassandra is just a gift that keeps on giving. She's known above all as a woman doomed not to be listened to, and - as we know from Aeschylus - that was a punishment for saying "no" to sex with Apollo. And there are other traditions that she was a rape-victim and was forced into a political marriage by her father. But she's possibly also the first woman in literature who is there because of the work she does and not because of who her father or her husband is. And for Wolf, she's above all a representative of the transition from the matriarchal societies of the Minoan tradition to the hard new patriarchal culture of the Achaeans.
Cassandra's Troy, in Wolf's account, is being turned into a militaristic police-state by a Himmler-like figure called Eumelos who is fond of the "those who are not with us are against us" version of binary logic; those who still seek to follow the old ways and respect the mother-goddess are being forced underground.
Wolf is such a capable writer that none of this sounds like strident cliché when we meet it on the printed page, and Cassandra is a much more complex character than we might expect. She has a complex relationship with Aeneas, for instance, which seems to be there not for any obvious political reason but simply because Wolf found him an interesting character and wanted to work out for herself what he might be doing in the story. Definitely worth the effort. show less
I confess I have a soft spot for Medea; in fact, she is my favourite mythological heroine. Medea the childkiller. Her own children. What Sophie's choice, what earth-mothering, what holy self-sacrifice, what tears for the crucified son, what gut and womb-love--fuck this show, I hear Medea saying, fuck your archetypes, struggle for survival, societal imperatives, gender roles and tender babes. Medea refuses to be a mother. Medea deletes that dimension of her self; Medea opts for monsterhood. show more We all sort of expect men to be lousy parents, as they are lousy partners and lovers--but whither humanity and the entire Greatest Show On Earth without mother-love? Medea is the greatest criminal in the universe. Medea is worse than Satan.
Well, not Christa Wolf's Medea, who is an intelligent, loving, courageous woman, tragically scapegoated, damned if she does and damned if she doesn't--the type and fate depressingly too frequently encountered in reality. It's a necessary counter-weighing retelling of the myth, but not very interesting in execution, to me at least, with it's undifferentiated chorus of first-person voices each bringing a tile of the too-flat mosaic. show less
Well, not Christa Wolf's Medea, who is an intelligent, loving, courageous woman, tragically scapegoated, damned if she does and damned if she doesn't--the type and fate depressingly too frequently encountered in reality. It's a necessary counter-weighing retelling of the myth, but not very interesting in execution, to me at least, with it's undifferentiated chorus of first-person voices each bringing a tile of the too-flat mosaic. show less
Trigger warning: Mild references to suicide
This short novel is an account of a fictional meeting between German writers Heinrich von Kleist and Karoline von Günderrode in 1804. Although it is possible that these two met, as they moved around similar circles, nothing is known about a possible meeting. The other people appearing in the story are real, though, too - among them famous writers Clemens von Brentano and Bettine von Arnim.
These writers and associates meet in a small town on the show more Rhine river where they drink, discuss their art and other topics, and socialize.
Kleist and Günderrode both feel like outsiders at the gathering, and the story is told alternating between each of their perspectives, while sometimes adding other paragraphs or sentences. The style is very poetic, sometimes truly like a poem, and every sentences carries meaning.
While Kleist and Günderrode first just observe each other and their interaction with the other guests, they later have a conversation during a walk outside. The conversations both at the party and during the walk touch upon many different topics: Psychology, the self, the role of art and artists, writing, expectations of life, gender, emancipation etc.
Kleist and Günderrode are connected in their despair because they cannot adjust to what is expected of them - Kleist as a man in the Prussian state who has a very different idea of life than those surrounding him, Günderrode as someone who would like to do much more than is possible for a woman of her time and who is patronized by male writers when they read her poetry. The title of the novel refers to the feeling that they cannot find any place where they can really be themselves, and there are allusions to the only way out they are able to see, which is suicide. In fact, both writers committed suicide, Günderrode in 1806 and Kleist in 1811.
Wolf was one of the most important writers of the GDR and many passages of this text can be seen in this light: The difficulties of writers living under that regime. To me, this political interpretation was not as relevant, though, and I concerned myself rather with the individual circumstances and with the feelings of the characters, and the parallels to today's society. show less
This short novel is an account of a fictional meeting between German writers Heinrich von Kleist and Karoline von Günderrode in 1804. Although it is possible that these two met, as they moved around similar circles, nothing is known about a possible meeting. The other people appearing in the story are real, though, too - among them famous writers Clemens von Brentano and Bettine von Arnim.
These writers and associates meet in a small town on the show more Rhine river where they drink, discuss their art and other topics, and socialize.
Kleist and Günderrode both feel like outsiders at the gathering, and the story is told alternating between each of their perspectives, while sometimes adding other paragraphs or sentences. The style is very poetic, sometimes truly like a poem, and every sentences carries meaning.
While Kleist and Günderrode first just observe each other and their interaction with the other guests, they later have a conversation during a walk outside. The conversations both at the party and during the walk touch upon many different topics: Psychology, the self, the role of art and artists, writing, expectations of life, gender, emancipation etc.
Kleist and Günderrode are connected in their despair because they cannot adjust to what is expected of them - Kleist as a man in the Prussian state who has a very different idea of life than those surrounding him, Günderrode as someone who would like to do much more than is possible for a woman of her time and who is patronized by male writers when they read her poetry. The title of the novel refers to the feeling that they cannot find any place where they can really be themselves, and there are allusions to the only way out they are able to see, which is suicide. In fact, both writers committed suicide, Günderrode in 1806 and Kleist in 1811.
Wolf was one of the most important writers of the GDR and many passages of this text can be seen in this light: The difficulties of writers living under that regime. To me, this political interpretation was not as relevant, though, and I concerned myself rather with the individual circumstances and with the feelings of the characters, and the parallels to today's society. show less
Lists
German Literature (10)
Short and Sweet (1)
1980s (1)
Female Author (3)
Awards
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Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 115
- Also by
- 17
- Members
- 5,599
- Popularity
- #4,434
- Rating
- 3.8
- Reviews
- 104
- ISBNs
- 499
- Languages
- 22
- Favorited
- 22
