Wolf was born Christa Ihlenfeld on March 18, 1929, in the village of Landsberg an der Warthe (now the Polish city of Gorzow Wielkopolski). After attending school in Landsberg, Wolf fled with her family, which consisted of her parents, who were grocers, and younger brother, to Mecklenberg in 1945, when Russia's Red Army invaded her homeland during the final months of World War II. Having been born too late to be implicated in the horrors of Hitler's regime, Wolf has remained in Germany her entire life, and was a resident and supporter of East Germany's Socialist regime until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. When she was studying German literature at universities in Jena and Leipzig, Wolf met and married fellow student and writer Gerhard Wolf. Their two daughters were born in 1952 and 1956.

Wolf published her first major work in 1961. Her reputation continued to grow both in Germany...