It is no coincidence that the contemporary German novelists most readily associated with the theme of war-guilt are all from West Germany….

The literature of East Germany [has focused] … overwhelmingly on the present and future, the building-up of socialism and the bright hope it represents….

It is against this background that the measure of Christa Wolf's achievement in her new work, Kindheitsmuster, must be judged. "What is past is not dead", she begins provocatively, "It is not even past. We separate ourselves from it and pretend to be strangers." The past that she then proceeds to evoke is her own, those years from 1932 to 1946 when, between the ages of three and seventeen, the "patterns of childhood" to which the title refers were formed….

[The narrative of the fictional-autobiographical family], however, occupies barely half of the book, for parallel with it runs an account of a two-day visit in...