SOURCE: A review of Ansprachen, in World Literature Today, Vol. 63, No. 2, Spring, 1989, p. 304.

In the following review, Blomster offers a positive assessment of Ansprachen.

When Gerhart Hauptmann and Thomas Mann—the two major literary representatives of Germany in the first half of this century—celebrated their sixtieth birthdays, each had received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Such Olympian heights are less easily scaled by today's writers, and when Christa Wolf turns sixty this year (i.e., 1989), she will look upon an assembly of significant yet comparatively minor prizes. Still, Ansprachen, a modest volume of eight brief “addresses”—two are in reality letters and one a magazine article—makes clear that no writer, East or West, approaches Wolf as the representative figure in German literature today. She has achieved this station through an artistic and personal integrity encountered otherwise only in works of fiction.

The entries in the book...