SOURCE: “Dance of the Marionettes,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 25, 1993, pp. 3, 17.

In the following mixed review of What Remains, Eder discusses Wolf's unique stye of prose.

It seems impossible right now to write about Christa Wolf's What Remains without writing about Christa Wolf. The author of such luminous accounts of the human spirit as Cassandra and The Quest for Christa T. admitted earlier this year that for three years, three decades ago, she was an informant for the East German security police. She gave them her impressions of the political postures of various fellow-writers and other information about her literary world.

Nothing she told them could have been truly harmful, she says, and by 1962 she had stopped and begun to distance herself from the regime. It is not the business of this review to doubt it. Nor is it a matter, here, of judging an author's...