Christa Wolf

Wolf was born in what is now Poland and fled west with her family as a child in 1945, settling eventually in the new East German state, whose socialist project she joined as a believer, becoming a member of the ruling SED party and an editor and critic within its literary establishment. Divided Heaven (1963), her novel of a couple split by the Berlin Wall, first made her name inside the GDR's cultural apparatus.

The Quest for Christa T. (1968) unsettled the same apparatus by insisting on an individual, unquantifiable inner life against socialist collectivism, and its distribution was restricted. She herself was placed under Stasi surveillance for decades, a fact revealed after reunification alongside the more startling discovery that she had briefly acted as an informal Stasi collaborator in the 1950s. She kept writing after reunification (Medea, Cassandra) and died in Berlin in 2011.