SOURCE: “The Last Word: Christa Wolf—Moral Force or Farce?,” in Belles Lettres, Vol. 9, No. 1, Fall, 1993, pp. 63–64.

In the following essay, Derr discusses Wolf's literary career and her future as a writer after drawing public condemnation for her admitted collaboration with East German authorities.

As mother, wife, and avowed Marxist, Christa Wolf is one of Germany's best-known living writers. Literary darling of the former East German government, Wolf had an apartment in Berlin, a summer house, and the freedom to travel anywhere. She was a vocal critic of German unification to the very end. But with the collapse of the East, the publication of her short story What Remains, and the revelations about Wolf in the East German secret police files, she has come to represent all that was wrong with the former German Democratic Republic (GDR): opportunism, elitism, and deceit. Once touted among supporters as a leading...