The reconstruction of developmental years lived in the arena dominated by National Socialism once again proves itself a valid literary undertaking. The success of Wolf's [Kindheitsmuster] … affirms the durability of this thematic material.

The narrative-time structure of this work … is as complex as it is successful. The focal point is a two-day visit by narrator and family to the small town of her birth—now in Poland—in July 1971. This brief span of hours retrospectively becomes the threshold from which the narrator reenters her early life at that point in 1932 when, at the age of three, she consciously used the word "I" for the first time…. [The] growth of the narrative is painstakingly dated through contrapuntal references to events in Vietnam and Chile and to such dissimilar persons as General Pinochet and Daniel Ellsberg. The account gains further tension through a fourth time dimension, centered upon the narrator's...