Christa Wolf's latest work Kindheitsmuster (1976) is her first attempt to give a comprehensive account of the exceptional and traumatic social upheavals which accompanied the crucial formative years of her childhood…. For Christa Wolf who is anxious not merely to document and give shape to its influence on her own early years, but also to clarify the lingering, ill-defined effects on the present, there also arises the difficulty of narrative method…. The narrative structure devised for Kindheitsmuster offers a complex and ingenious answer to these problems. The novel moves over three different time spans…. Christa Wolf moves effortlessly back and forth between these different time levels, weaving them into a web of association and implication between past and present to produce a novel which is about memory, about journeys actual and metaphorical, about the tantalising pursuit of formative childhood experiences and the influences which have made her and her...