"The rewards of reading Christa Wolf can be very considerable."- The Times Literary Supplement In 1960, East German writer Christa Wolf received a phone call from a Moscow newspaper asking if she would describe her experiences on a single day, September 27, "as precisely as possible." She was intrigued by the request and has continued recording her thoughts and feelings on that day ever since. This book collects forty of these intimate essays, written between 1960 and 2000. Wolf, one of the most important authors of the twentieth century, writes about the demands and rewards of being a wife and mother and contemplates national and global events during the course of that one day a year.
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)
