It is often said of Christa Wolf that she is a writer who has lived in three different Germanies. She was a child in Nazi Germany and a teenager at the end of the war when the events in "Exchanging Glances" take place. During most of her adult life, she lived in Socialist East Germany and since 1989 has resided in the new, unified democratic Germany.

Wolf is too young to have been a full participant in the political or cultural life in Nazi Germany and, therefore, has escaped the pressures to justify her work that writers a decade or two older than she have had to do. She has spent most of her career, except for a few residencies abroad, living and writing in socialist East Germany, and it is in this unique historical context that her work should be understood.

When Nazi Germany surrendered to...