SOURCE: “Introduction: Setting the Context,” in Christa Wolf's Utopian Vision: From Marxism to Feminism, Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 1–19.

In the following essay, Kuhn discusses Wolf's critical reception and provides an overview of her complex identity as an East German female writer, drawing attention to her interrelated political, feminist, literary, and personal perspectives.

In the twenty-six years since her emergence as a writer of imaginative literature, Christa Wolf has become one of the leading figures of German letters and the foremost female voice of the German-speaking world. Inherently political, her writing is both subtle and subversive. As she has matured, her themes have become more complex and the problems she addresses broader. The increasing universality of her writing, the immediacy and compelling relevance of her most recent works have helped earn her the international reputation she enjoys today. The East German writer of the early 1960s has evolved into...