Kein Ort. Nirgends. / Der Schatten eines Traumes. / Karoline von Günderrode - ein Entwurf.

by Christa Wolf

Genres: Fiction, German Literature

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Novelist, short-story writer, essayist, critic, journalist, and film dramatist Christa Wolf was a citizen of East Germany and a committed socialist, and managed to keep a critical distance from the communist regime. Her best-known novels included “Der geteilte Himmel” (“Divided Heaven,” 1963), addressing the divisions of Germany, and “Kassandra” (“Cassandra,” 1983), which depicted the Trojan War.

She won awards in East Germany and West Germany for her work, including the Thomas Mann Prize in 2010. The jury praised her life’s work for “critically questioning the hopes and errors of her time, and portraying them with deep moral seriousness and narrative power.”

Christa Ihlenfeld was born March 18, 1929, in Landsberg an der Warthe, a part of Germany that is now in Poland. She moved to East Germany in 1945 and joined the Socialist Unity Party in 1949. She studied German literature in Jena and Leipzig and became a publisher and editor.

In 1951, she married Gerhard Wolf, an essayist. They had two children. Christa Wolf died in December 2011.

(Bloomberg News)

Reviews

[Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

Literaturtheorie in Form von Literatur!

[Simmi · Rating 5 out of 5]

June of 1804. Germany. Of magical seeming beauty, this fictitious meeting of two of the most desperate writers in the history of German literature: Heinrich von Kleist und Karoline von Günderrode. Both do not find a place. Never to be understood. Not an easy read but stylistically one of the best reads of my life as Christa Wolf is the author and able to mesmerize the reader with every word.