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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.

Women authors, German --- Christa Wolf. --- GDR literature. --- German literature. --- Literatur / DDR. --- LITERARY CRITICISM / General. --- German women authors --- Wolf, Christa --- Volf, Krista --- Ihlenfeld, Christa Margarete --- Criticism and interpretation.

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Rooted in Enlightenment rationalism, modernity tends to privilege masculine-connoted characteristics - conscious subjective agency, rational control and self-containment, the subjugation of nature - and has generated a conceptualization of human subjectivity emphasizing these qualities. Yet the costs of this conception of human selfhood are high, and at modernity's most acute moments of historical crisis writers and artists can be seen turning to feminine-connoted figurations - nature, tradition, myth and spirituality, intuition, relationality, flux. In recent decades studies have examined the cultural crisis of German modernity, notably at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, as a crisis of masculinity. Feminist critiques, meanwhile, have viewed cultural history as male-generated and 'phallocentric,' in need of a feminine corrective. The innovation of this book is to examine these two gendered perspectives side by side, investigating the culturally symbolic significance of gender in post 1945 German language literature via a sequence of paired readings of major, thematically related texts by male and female authors, including Ingeborg Bachmann's novel 'Malina' (1971) and Max Frisch's 'Mein Name sei Gantenbein' (1964); Frisch's 'Homo Faber' (1957) and Christa Wolf's 'Störfall' (1987); Elfriede Jelinek's 'Die Klavierspielerin' and Rainald Goetz's 'Irre' (both 1983); and Heiner Müller's 'Die Hamletmaschine' (1977) and Christa Wolf's 'Kassandra' (1983). Finally, Barbara Köhler's eight-poem cycle 'Elektra. Spiegelungen' (written 1984-85; published 1991) is considered as offering a way past the 'impasse' of the male and female viewpoints. Georgina Paul is University Lecturer in German at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St. Hilda's College.

German literature --- Sex (Psychology) in literature. --- Identity (Psychology) in literature. --- History and criticism. --- Littérature allemande --- Sexualité (psychologie) --- 1945-1990 --- Histoire et critique --- Dans la littérature --- Christa Wolf. --- Elfriede Jelinek. --- Feminist. --- Gender Perspectives. --- German Literature. --- Heiner Müller. --- Human Subjectivity. --- Ingeborg Bachmann. --- Masculinist. --- Max Frisch. --- Rainald Goetz. --- Littérature allemande --- Sexualité (psychologie) --- Dans la littérature

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Christa Wolf (1929-), Ingeborg Drewitz (1923-1986), and Grete Weil (1906-1999) occupy very different positions in postwar German literature, yet all three challenge readers to consider how individuals understand their roles in history and how they negotiate their personal responsibilities based on those roles. These three are, of course, by no means the only German writers to have dealt with such questions in the wake of the Third Reich. But Wolf, Drewitz, and Weil ground their projects in the family, an institution often left out of such inquiries, giving them a different starting point for moral reflection. Before looking closely at the three writers' views of the individual's role and responsibility, the book devotes a chapter to the examination of individual and collective memory, then a chapter to how feminist ethicists view moral responsibility. Chapters on the three writers' literary approaches to the questions follow: Wolf enacts a process of historical and geographic triangulation; Drewitz constructs concentric historical and social circles; Weil seeks to repair the historical ruptures of the Holocaust, creating new historical narratives and exploring the limitations of traditional bourgeois morality. Each of the three attempts to map a geography of morals that begins within the structures of the extended family but interrogates individual responsibility in an increasingly globalized environment. Michelle Mattson is Associate Professor of German at Rhodes College, Memphis, Tennessee.

German literature --- German fiction --- Literature and morals --- Ethics in literature. --- Literature --- Morals and literature --- Ethics --- Women authors --- History and criticism. --- History --- Influence --- Moral and ethical aspects --- Wolf, Christa --- Drewitz, Ingeborg --- Weil, Grete, --- Jockisch, Grete --- Dispeker, Margarete Elisabeth --- Volf, Krista --- Ihlenfeld, Christa Margarete --- Criticism and interpretation. --- Weil, Grete --- Jockisch, Grete, --- Dispeker, Margarete Elisabeth, --- Christa Wolf. --- German literature. --- Grete Weil. --- Ingeborg Drewitz. --- Postwar German Women's Fiction. --- Third Reich. --- bourgeois morality. --- family. --- feminism. --- feminist ethics. --- historical narratives. --- history. --- individual responsibility. --- memory. --- moral reflection.

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Demographers say that by the year 2060, every seventh person in Germany will be aged eighty or older, and every third person over sixty-five. The prediction for other Western countries is scarcely different. Indeed, the aging society is seen by some as a graver threat than even global warming, with potentially unmanageable tensions relating to intergenerational relationships, work and benefits, and flows of people. This book explores the representation and performance of aging in recent "late-style" German-language fiction. It situates the authors chosen as case studies -- Günter Grass, Ruth Klüger, Christa Wolf, and Martin Walser -- in their biographical and social contexts and explores the significance of their aesthetic figuring of aging for debates raging both in Germany and internationally. In particular, the book looks at gender, generations, and trauma and their impact on how writers "narrativize" aging. Finally, it examines the "timeliness" of these different representations and late-style performances of aging in the context of the shift of social, political, and economic power away from the declining societies of the West to the ascendant societies of the East. Stuart Taberner is Professor of Contemporary German Literature, Culture, and Society at the University of Leeds.

German literature --- Old age in literature. --- Aging in literature. --- Older people in literature --- History and criticism. --- Grass, Günter, --- Klüger, Ruth, --- Wolf, Christa --- Walser, Martin, --- Volf, Krista --- Ihlenfeld, Christa Margarete --- Angress, R. K. --- Criticism and interpretation. --- Grass, Günter --- Грасс, Гюнтер --- גראס, גינטר, --- Ґрас, Ґюнтер --- Gras, Gi︠u︡nter --- Girās, Gūntir --- Grās, Gūntir --- گونتر، گراس, --- Aging. --- Christa Wolf. --- Germany. --- Günter Grass. --- Intergenerational Relationships. --- Late Period. --- Martin Walser. --- Old-Age Style. --- Ruth Klüger. --- Social, Political, Economic Power. --- Trauma. --- Western Countries.