SOURCE: “In the Doghouse,” in London Review of Books, May 27, 1993, pp. 13–14.

In the following review of What Remains and The Writer's Dimension, Hofmann acknowledges Wolf's complicated political commitments and literary context, but is critical of what he considers her naive utopianism and her decision to publish What Remains.

In the wall-month of November 1989 I translated two pieces from an anthology of East German writing for the magazine, Granta, which in the end didn't use either of them. (These things happen.) One of them was by Christa Wolf, an extract, I think, from her book Sommerstück. It was just two pages long, nothing more than a preamble and image, but of a Shakespearean power and amplitude. A group of adults and children (Wolf's habitual, occasionally irritating, panti-social ‘we’), driving in rural East Germany, stop by a beautiful old farmhouse that is in the process of being vandalised by...