Download or read book Cassandra written by Christa Wolf and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1988-05 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Retells the story of the fall of Troy ... from the point of view of the woman whose visionary powers earned her contempt and scorn. Written as a result of the author's Greek travels and studies, Cassandra speaks to us in a pressing monologue whose inner focal points are patriarchy and war. In the four accompanying pieces, which take the form of travel reports, journal entries, and a letter, Wolf describes the novel's genesis."--Cover p. [4].
Download or read book No Place on Earth written by Christa Wolf and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1983-09 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Historical, hypothetical, but marvelously intense: a fascinating short novel by one of Europe's most consistently haunting novelist." - Kirkus Reviews
Download or read book Eulogy for the Living written by Christa Wolf and published by Seagull Library of German. This book was released on 2022-08-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fragmentary work that stands as a testament to Wolf's skill as a thinker, storyteller, and memorializer of humanity's greatest struggles. Christa Wolf tried for years to find a way to write about her childhood in Nazi Germany. In her 1976 book Patterns of Childhood, she explained why it was so difficult: "Gradually, over a period of months, the dilemma has emerged: to remain speechless or to live in the third person, these seem to be the options. One is impossible, the other sinister." During 1971 and 1972 she made thirty-three attempts to start the novel, abandoning each manuscript only pages in. Eulogy for the Living, written over the course of four weeks, is the longest of those fragments. In its pages, Wolf recalls with crystalline precision the everyday details of her life as a middle-class grocer's daughter, and the struggles within the family--struggles common to most families, but exacerbated by the rise of Nazism. And as Nazism fell, the Wolfs fled west, trying to stay ahead of the rampaging Red Army.
Download or read book The Quest for Christa T written by Christa Wolf and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1979-11 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When The Quest for Christa T. was first published in East Germany ten years ago, there was an immediate storm: bookshops in East Berlin were given instructions to sell it only to well-known customers professionally involved in literary matters; at the annual meeting of East German Writers Conference, Mrs Wolf's new book was condemmed. Yet the novel has nothing eplicity to do with politics.
Download or read book Medea written by Christa Wolf and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 1998-03-17 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medea is among the most notorious women in the canon of Greek tragedy: a woman scorned who sacrifices her own children to her jealous rage. In her gripping new novel, Christa Wolf expands this myth, revealing a fiercely independent woman ensnared in a brutal political battle. Medea, driven by her conscience to leave her corrupt homeland, arrives in Corinth with her husband, the hero Jason. He is welcomed, but she is branded the outsider—and then she discovers the appalling secret behind the king's claim to power. Unwilling to ignore the horrifying truth about the state, she becomes a threat to the king and his ruthless advisors. Then abandoned by Jason and made a public scapegoat, she is reviled as a witch and a murderess. Long a sharp-eyed political observer, Christa Wolf transforms this ancient tale into a startlingly relevant commentary on our times. Possessed of the enduring truths so treasured in the classics, and yet with a thoroughly contemporary spin, her Medea is a stunningly perceptive and probingly honest work of fiction.
Download or read book Divided Heaven written by Christa Wolf and published by . This book was released on 1965 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book City of Angels written by Christa Wolf and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2013-02-05 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The stunning final novel from East Germany's most acclaimed writer Three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the writer Christa Wolf was granted access to her newly declassified Stasi files. Known for her defiance and outspokenness, Wolf was not especially surprised to discover forty-two volumes of documents produced by the East German secret police. But what was surprising was a thin green folder whose contents told an unfamiliar—and disturbing—story: in the early 1960s, Wolf herself had been an informant for the Communist government. And yet, thirty years on, she had absolutely no recollection of it. Wolf's extraordinary autobiographical final novel is an account of what it was like to reckon with such a shocking discovery. Based on the year she spent in Los Angeles after these explosive revelations, City of Angels is at once a powerful examination of memory and a surprisingly funny and touching exploration of L.A., a city strikingly different from any Wolf had ever visited. Even as she reflects on the burdens of twentieth-century history, Wolf describes the pleasures of driving a Geo Metro down Wilshire Boulevard and watching episodes of Star Trek late at night. Rich with philosophical insights, personal revelations, and vivid descriptions of a diverse city and its citizens, City of Angels is a profoundly humane and disarmingly honest novel—and a powerful conclusion to a remarkable career in letters.
Download or read book They Divided the Sky written by Christa Wolf and published by University of Ottawa Press. This book was released on 2013-01-26 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1963, in East Germany, They Divided the Sky tells the story of a young couple, living in the new, socialist, East Germany, whose relationship is tested to the extreme not only because of the political positions they gradually develop but, very concretely, by the Berlin Wall, which went up on August 13, 1961. The story is set in 1960 and 1961, a moment of high political cold war tension between the East Bloc and the West, a time when many thousands of people were leaving the young German Democratic Republic (the GDR) every day in order to seek better lives in West Germany, or escape the political ideology of the new country that promoted the "farmer and peasant" state over a state run by intellectuals or capitalists. The construction of the Wall put an end to this hemorrhaging of human capital, but separated families, friends, and lovers, for thirty years. The conflicts of the time permeate the relations between characters in the book at every level, and strongly affect the relationships that Rita, the protagonist, has not only with colleagues at work and at the teacher's college she attends, but also with her partner Manfred (an intellectual and academic) and his family. They also lead to an accident/attempted suicide that send her to hospital in a coma, and that provide the backdrop for the flashbacks that make up the narrative. Wolf's first full-length novel, published when she was thirty-five years old, was both a great literary success and a political scandal. Accused of having a 'decadent' attitude with regard to the new socialist Germany and deliberately misrepresenting the workers who are the foundation of this new state, Wolf survived a wave of political and other attacks after its publication. She went on to create a screenplay from the novel and participate in making the film version. More importantly, she went on to become the best-known East German writer of her generation, a writer who established an international reputation and never stopped working toward improving the socialist reality of the GDR.
Download or read book Understanding Christa Wolf written by Margit Resch and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Resch explores central questions about Wolf's life and work that have been raised by scholars and readers alike: why Wolf, who enjoyed unrestricted travel privileges, remained in the East when she could easily have defected; how she was able to survive artistically in an authoritarian regime; which qualities in her writing earned the respect of major critics on both sides of the Wall; why she has chosen not to identify with the feminist movement; and what she has contributed to German and world literature.
Download or read book August written by Christa Wolf and published by German List. This book was released on 2019-09-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christa Wolf was arguably the best-known and most influential writer in the former East Germany. Having grown up during the Nazi regime, she and her family were forced to flee their home like many others, nearly starving to death in the process. Her earliest novels were controversial because they contained veiled criticisms of the Communist regime which landed her on government watch lists. Her past continued to permeate her work and her life, as she said, "You can only fight sorrow when you look it in the eye." August is Christa Wolf's last piece of fiction, written in a single sitting as an anniversary gift to her husband. In it, she revisits her stay at a tuberculosis hospital in the winter of 1946, a real life event that was the inspiration for the closing scenes of her 1976 novel Patterns of Childhood. This time, however, her fictional perspective is very different. The story unfolds through the eyes of August, a young patient who has lost both his parents to the war. He adores an older girl, Lilo, a rebellious teenager who controls the wards. Sixty years later, August reflects on his life and the things that she taught him. Written in taut, affectionate prose, August offers a new entry into Christa Wolf's work and, incidentally, her first and only male protagonist. More than a literary artifact, this new novel is a perfectly constructed story of a quiet life well lived. For both August and Christa Wolf, the past never dies.
Download or read book Patterns of Childhood written by Christa Wolf and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1984-07 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Returning to her native town in East Germany forty years later, accompanied by her inquisitive and sometimes demanding daughter, Wolf attempts to recapture her past and to clarify memories of growing up in Nazi Germany. This novel is a testament of what seemed at the time a fairly ordinary childhood, in the bosom of a normal Nazi family in Landsberg."--
Download or read book Christa Wolf written by Sonja E. Klocke and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-03-19 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interest in Christa Wolf continues to grow. Her classics are being reprinted and new titles are appearing posthumously, becoming bestsellers, and being translated. Energetic scholarly debates engage well-known aesthetic and political issues that the public intellectual herself fore-fronted. This broad-ranging introduction to the author, her work and times builds upon and moves beyond such foundational interpretative frameworks by articulating the global relevance of Wolf’s oeuvre today, also for non-German readers. Thus, it brings East German culture alive to students, teachers, scholars and the general public by connecting the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the lived experiences of its citizens to nations and cultures around the world. The collection focuses on topical matters including the search for authenticity, agency, race, cosmopolitanism, gender, environmentalism, geopolitics, war, and memory debates, as well as movie adaptations and Wolf’s film work with DEFA, marketing, and international reception. Our contributions – by senior and emerging scholars from across the globe – emphasize Wolf’s position as an author of world literature and an important critical voice in the 21st century.
Download or read book The Author s Dimension written by Christa Wolf and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1995-12-08 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spanning the past three decades, these essays focus on the roles of the writer and literature today. In the first half of this series of witty, probing essays on reading and writing, Wolf examines the individual's, in particular the writer's, relationship to society. The final sections, "On War and Peace and Politics" and "The End of the German Democratic Republic," demonstrate the ways in which Wolf's political thinking has evolved and cast light on the political situation in East Germany prior to reunification. "An important publication, ably served by the editing of Alexander Stephan; the knowledgeable translation by Jan Van Heurck; and Grace Paley's sisterly introduction, which . . . claims at least the later Christa Wolf for a pacifist feminism."—Peter Demetz, New York Times
Download or read book What Remains and Other Stories written by Christa Wolf and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1995-12 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What Remains collects Christa Wolf's short fiction, from early work in the sixties to the widely debated title story, first published in Germany in 1990. Addressing a wide range of topics, from sexual politics to the nature of memory, these powerful and often very personal stories offer a fascinating introduction to Wolf's work. What Remains and Other Stories . . . is clear and farsighted. The eight heartfelt stories in the book show why she has been respected as a serious author since her 1968 novel, The Quest for Christa T. . . . Wolf uses her own experiences and observations to create universal themes about the controls upon human freedom.—Herbert Mitgang, New York Times Christa Wolf has set herself nothing less than the task of exploring what it is to be a conscious human being alive in a moment of history.—Mary Gordon, New York Times Book Review The simultaneous publication of these two volumes offers readers here a generous sampling of the short fiction, speeches and essays that Wolf has produced over the last three decades.—Mark Harman, Boston Globe
Download or read book One Day a Year 1960 2000 written by Christa Wolf and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author, a novelist who lives in East Germany, describes her daily life on Sept. 27 each year from 1960 to 2000.
Download or read book One Day a Year written by Christa Wolf and published by Seagull Library of German Literature. This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During a 1960 interview, East German writer Christa Wolf was asked a curious question: would she describe in detail what she did on September 27th? Fascinated by considering the significance of a single day over many years, Wolf began keeping a detailed diary of September 27th, a practice which she carried on for more than fifty years until her death in 2011. The first volume of these notes covered 1960 through 2000 was published to great acclaim more than a decade ago. Now translator Katy Derbyshire is bringing the September 27th collection up to date with One Day a Year--a collection of Wolf's notes from the last decade of her life. The book is both a personal record and a unique document of our times. With her characteristic precision and transparency, Wolf examines the interplay of the private, subjective, and major contemporary historical events. She writes about Germany after 9/11, about her work on her last great book City of Angels, and also about her exhausting confrontation with old age. One Day a Year is a compelling and personal glimpse into the life of one of the world's greatest writers.
Download or read book What Remains written by Gerald Fetz and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2022-06-10 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguably the most important—and influential—German woman writer of the last century, Christa Wolf was long heralded as "die gesamtdeutsche Autorin," an author for all of Germany; but, after 1989 in unified Germany, Wolf found herself suddenly embroiled in controversies that challenged her integrity and consigned her to an ideologically suspect identity as "DDR Schriftstellerin” (GDR writer) or “Staatsdichterin” (state poet). What Remains: Responses to the Legacy of Christa Wolf asks the question of what truly remains of her legacy in the annals of contemporary German culture and history. Unlike most of what appeared in the wake of Wolf’s death, however, the contributions to this international volume seek neither to monumentalize her nor to dismantle her stature, but to employ a range of methodologies—comparative, intertextual, psychoanalytic, historical, transcultural—to offer sensitive assessments of Wolf’s major literary texts, as well as of her lesser known work in genres such as film and essay.
