SOURCE: “A Bruised Loyalty,” in Times Literary Supplement, July 2, 1993, p. 11.

In the following review, Enright offers a mixed assessment of What Remains and The Writer's Dimension.

“Our uprising appears to have come years too late,” Christa Wolf lamented when receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Hildesheim (West Germany) in January 1990. That is, it should have come before things had grown too bad to be redeemed, and abuses of power had discredited the values in whose name the abuses were committed. No suggestion here that the values in any way condoned, let alone created, the abuses. In itself the East German uprising was fine, but what would happen next? “Our society” has had no time “to develop an immunity against the economic slogans of Western nations,” and many East Germans “are disoriented and are sinking into depression.” And what has happened to art? Books which “met with...