SOURCE: “The Case of Christa Wolf,” in Cross Currents: A Yearbook of Central European Culture, No. 11, edited by Ladislav Matejka, Yale University Press, 1992, pp. 9–22.

In the following essay, Hutchinson presents an overview of Wolf's literary reputation and ongoing critical controversy surrounding the publication of What Remains.

Six months after the opening of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the East German government, an anxious little story called What Remains was published in Germany.¹ In this slender volume Christa Wolf describes her life under the surveillance of the state security police in East Germany. Written in the late seventies but first published in 1990, What Remains caused a great stir in reunified Germany. This single book at once brought Wolf's person and political history under intense scrutiny and instigated a wide-ranging debate among German intellectuals about the moral responsibilities of the writer and the politics of literature and literary...