Ying Tang

The Rise and Fall of an Intellectual Woman - Christa Wolf and Her Critics Ying Tang

Christa Wolf, a GDR intellectual, was discredited as a writer after German Unification. How is it possible that one writer's literature is praised universally as "critical" one moment, and denigrated as banal and simply moralistic the next? As a response to the controversy around Christa Wolf, this work attempts to understand Wolf less as an isolated "writer" than as an "effect" of political and cultural discourse about the GDR in the Federal Republic of Germany prior to unification and in united Germany after 1989. However, in this book Wolf's own opinions about her role as intellectual active in the GDR, as well as her explicit pacifist and feminist positions, which she enunciated in both essays and her literature, are also taken into consideration. Thus, the author plays the writer's own 'self-reflective' texts over and against the texts that made Wolf first into the banner of an alternative socialism and second, after the 'Wende', into the target of conservative accusations. The book presents an interdisciplinary approach to a well discussed writer that will not only engage scholars of Christa Wolf, but will also appeal to those with broader interests in cultural politics, feminist theories, especially those concerned with the role of (women) public intellectuals.