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The Quest for Christa T.

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Christa T. is the story of a woman growing up in post-war East-Germany - under Communist rule. She is not openly hostile to the regime, but she is a woman who does not fit in, a dreamer and a romantic. Her life is not outwardly dramatic: She reads literature at university, works as a teacher, marries a vet and lives far away from the big city, but this intensely private life was in itself an act of rebellion in a country which wanted fervent supporters of Communist doctrine, and which expected writers to celebrate tough workmen. Christa T. is also the story of a woman trying to find the words to write about another woman's life, and this is "The Quest for Christa T." - Christa Wolf ranks among the best authors now writing in German, and the quiet tragedy of Christa T. is one of her most moving books.

Christa Wolf brilliantly succeeds in creating a new literary space, one that surfaces during the interplay and transition between subjectivity and objectivity. Through the course of her novel she writes somewhere between the "I" and the "you"; in this shifting, elliptical state we begin to understand that the self is neither wholly interior nor exterior, and that the quest for self-knowledge can be as lyrical, as immediate, and as maddeningly unreachable as her prose. An incredible book

This is a difficult book to describe. The author is writing about the life of a woman she knew who is destroyed by life under the communist regime in East Germany. It speaks to the reader about the dangers of totalitarianism, the freedom and beauty of the human spirit, and about relationships. The relationship between the author and the title character is in itself interesting. She is trying to keep the memory of Christa alive, and yet the author seems to say at times that she doesn't know if she even really knew Christa. As usual, this novel has alot of Wolf's brilliant examinations of the nature of memory -- memory is a recurring theme in all her novels. Wolf's gifts for language, imagery, and insight are stunning. The translation is well done. This is one of the best books I've ever read. I highly reccommend it.

On the surface, this novel is quite simple. It is the story of the life of Christa T, an unassuming girl who grows up during the Nazi rule of Germany and goes to college in Socialist East Germany. The power of this book is in the heartbreaking and incredibly true-to-life revelations that the character reveals. Christa is not a "non-conformist" in the negative sense. She is simply an individual who wants to keep changing and forming her identity in a society where it is accepted that after a certain point you should stop growing as a person and wait to die.

In a sense, Christa is questing for the infinite, for release from the constraints of physical existence. She lives in the margins, and writes poetry to clear her mind. Christa wants to form herself without historical or existential pressures limiting her. In writing this novel, Christa Wolf is illuminating both a personal struggle for identity and the manner in which we judge those who are "different" or keep to themselves. Christa does not rebel against society in the traditional sense. She tries to have the best and most varied existence that she can, given the limitations of society.

This novel is well worth your time. It will break your heart and change the way you look at the world. An overlooked masterpiece.

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"There are scars which only give pain when one has to go on growing. Should one keep quiet because one's afraid of the pain?"
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"The Quest for Christa T." is a thoughtful and thought-provoking book. It is a story of the life and death of an introspective young woman growing up in Nazi Germany, growing older in Communist East Germany.

"... she had lost the capacity to live in a state of rapture. The vehement overplayed words, the waving banners, the deafening songs, the hands clapping rhythms over our heads. She felt how words begin to change when they aren't being tossed out any more by belief and ineptitude and excessive zeal but by calculation, craftiness, the urge to adapt and conform. Our words, not even false ones--how easy it would be if they were!--but the person speaking them has become a different person. Does that change everything?" [pg 56]

"Nachdenken über Christa T." was banned in East Germany in 1968, a year in which the Western world was exuberantly practing its freedom of speech and right to protest.

Why write this book? Why read this book? Why ban this book?

It easy for Westerners, accustomed to wallowing in and abusing our own freedom of speech, to miss the significance of the civil courage, the daring and the bravery involved in writing and publishing a first-hand account of life in a repressve society.

"Useless to pretend it's for her sake. Once and for all, she doesn't need us. So we should be certain of one thing: that it's for our sake. Because it seems we need her." [pg 5]

Christa Wolf died at age 82 in east Berlin on Dec 1, 2011. She was an extraordinary writer; expressive, serious, and full of hope. Many of the things she wrote in the late 1960s, while contemplating the meaning of Christa T.'s life, come into sharper focus now.

The academic words for a book like "The Quest for Christa T." are "Philosophical Realism" and "Subjective Authenticity." My words are "perfectly beautiful" and "a compelling read."

Kim Burdick
Stanton, DE

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For Christa Wolf's own thoughts on this book visit Signandsight.com -Let's Talk European. In this 2005 interview Wolf said: "The sentence "When, if not now" is the compressed expression of the knowledge that every day is precious. It colours the entire book, which I wrote after the death of my close friend."