SOURCE: “Rebel within a Cause,” in New Statesman and Society, April 23, 1993, pp. 29–30.

In the following review of What Remains and The Writer's Dimension, Benn defends Wolf against public condemnation for her socialist beliefs.

Angry citizens may have pulled Lenin from his plinth in an orgy of symbolic fury, but the reputations of far more subtle figures have suffered in the post-communist reckoning. Most saddening, perhaps, are the attacks currently directed at the east German novelist and essayist Christa Wolf. Before 1989, Wolf occupied an ambiguous but unique position of prominence both within the GDR and the west; since 1989 she has been castigated, particularly in West Germany, for both her actions and inaction. What should be made of this reversal of fortune?

Criticism of Wolf has turned on two distinct, rather sensational accusations: first, that the delay in publishing Was bleibt—her autobiographical tale of surveillance by the Stasi, the...