Author Guide · German Literature
Books Written by
Christa Wolf was born in 1929 in Landsberg an der Warthe, a German town that is now Gorzów Wielkopolski in Poland. In 1945 her family fled west ahead of the Red Army, and she grew up to become the best-known writer of East Germany, a state she criticised from the inside and never left. Her first big book, Divided Heaven (1963), is set in the summer the Berlin Wall went up. Her later books turned to memory, Greek myth and her own conscience, and in 1990 one short story set off the fiercest literary dispute of reunified Germany. This guide covers her ten key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 10 key books · 1963–2010 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Christa Wolf’s best-known books are Cassandra (1983), Patterns of Childhood (1976), The Quest for Christa T. (1968), Divided Heaven (1963) and Medea (1996). Start with Cassandra: it is short, it stands on its own, and it shows her retelling a myth from the side of the woman nobody believed.
Where to Start with Christa Wolf
If you want her defining book
→ Cassandra (1983) — the Trojan War told by Cassandra on the day of her death.
If you want her great novel of memory
→ Patterns of Childhood (1976) — a childhood under National Socialism, revisited thirty years on.
If you want life in East Germany
→ Divided Heaven (1963) — a love story split by the summer of 1961.
If you want her late reckoning with herself
→ City of Angels (2010) — Los Angeles, 1992, and the Stasi file.
10 Christa Wolf Books, in Order
Divided Heaven
German Der geteilte Himmel. Rita, nineteen, and Manfred, a chemist ten years older, live in Halle in 1961; when Manfred’s work is rejected he leaves for the West, and Rita, after visiting him, comes back. The book was a bestseller in the GDR and was filmed by Konrad Wolf in 1964. Translated as Divided Heaven by Joan Becker (1965) and as They Divided the Sky by Luise von Flotow (2013).
The Quest for Christa T.
German Nachdenken über Christa T.. A narrator pieces together the life of a school friend who died of leukaemia in 1963, from memories, letters and notes: a woman who never quite fitted the life the new state expected of her. East German officials attacked the book while Western critics praised it. Translated by Christopher Middleton (1970).
Patterns of Childhood
German Kindheitsmuster. A woman returns to her hometown, now in Poland, about thirty years after the war, with her husband, brother and daughter, and remembers herself as Nelly Jordan, a girl in the League of German Girls whose family fled west in 1945. It follows Wolf’s own visit to Gorzów in 1971. Translated by Ursule Molinaro and Hedwig Rappolt, first as A Model Childhood (1980).
No Place on Earth
German Kein Ort. Nirgends. An imagined meeting between the poets Heinrich von Kleist and Karoline von Günderrode at a tea party in Winkel on the Rhine, and the long walk they take afterwards. Both later took their own lives, she in 1806, he in 1811. Translated by Jan van Heurck (1982).
Cassandra
German Kassandra. The Trojan prophetess, taken as a prize to Mycenae, waits at the gate where Clytemnestra will kill her and looks back on Troy, Priam, Aeneas and the war. Wolf developed it alongside her 1982 Frankfurt poetics lectures, published with it in English as Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays, translated by Jan van Heurck (1984).
Accident
German Störfall. Nachrichten eines Tages. A single day in April 1986: a woman follows the news of the Chernobyl disaster while her brother undergoes an operation on a brain tumour. Translated by Heike Schwarzbauer and Rick Takvorian (1989).
What Remains
German Was bleibt. One day in the life of a woman writer in East Berlin who is being watched by the Stasi. Wolf wrote it in 1979 and published it only in June 1990, which set off the Literaturstreit, the German literary dispute about her and other writers who had stayed in the GDR. Translated by Heike Schwarzbauer and Rick Takvorian in What Remains and Other Stories (1993).
Medea
German Medea. Stimmen. Medea, Jason and figures around the court of Corinth speak in turn, and the sorceress of the myth becomes a refugee from Colchis whom the city turns into the scapegoat it needs. A companion to Cassandra. Translated by John Cullen as Medea: A Modern Retelling (1998), with an introduction by Margaret Atwood.
In the Flesh
German Leibhaftig. A woman lies seriously ill in an East Berlin hospital in the late 1980s, and her failing body runs in parallel with the failing state outside. Translated by John Smith Barrett (2005).
City of Angels
German Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud. A first-person account of 1992–93, when Wolf was a visiting scholar at the Getty in Los Angeles and the German press reported her brief Stasi past; the narrator follows the news from a distance and tries to understand what she forgot. Translated by Damion Searls (2013).
In What Order to Read Christa Wolf
None of her books continue one another, so you can begin anywhere. Read in order, they follow the history of East Germany: the hopeful 1960s of Divided Heaven, the turn inward of Christa T. and Patterns of Childhood, the myths of the 1980s, then the years after 1989.
The two myth books, Cassandra and Medea, work as a pair. Read What Remains and City of Angels together too: the first is the story that started the 1990 dispute, the second her late answer to what came after.
A reading path
1. Cassandra (1983)
2. Patterns of Childhood (1976)
3. The Quest for Christa T. (1968)
4. Medea (1996)
5. City of Angels (2010)
Everything Else Christa Wolf Published
Beyond the 10 key books: 6 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Fiction
3
3 books · 1961–2012
- 1961Moskauer Novelleher first book, a novella set in Moscow; not translated into English
- 1989Sommerstücka novel, not translated into English
- 2012Augusta posthumous novella, translated by Katy Derbyshire (2014)
Essays and diaries
3
3 books · 1972–2003
- 1972The Reader and the WriterLesen und Schreiben, essays, translated by Joan Becker (1977)
- 1994Parting from PhantomsAuf dem Weg nach Tabou, texts from 1990–1994, translated by Jan van Heurck (1997)
- 2003One Day a YearEin Tag im Jahr, her record of every 27 September from 1960 to 2000, translated by Lowell A. Bangerter (2007)
The years · 1929–2011
Quick facts about Christa Wolf
- Known for
- Writing from inside East Germany about memory, conscience and the lives of women, and retelling Greek myth from the side of Cassandra and Medea.
- 1929
- Born in Landsberg an der Warthe
- 1963
- Divided Heaven
- 1983
- Cassandra
- 1990
- The Was bleibt dispute
- 2011
- Dies in Berlin, aged 82
- Born
- 18 March 1929, Landsberg an der Warthe, now Gorzów Wielkopolski, Poland
- Died
- 1 December 2011, Berlin
- Education
- German literature at Jena and Leipzig, 1949–1953
- Married
- The writer and editor Gerhard Wolf, in 1951
- Politics
- Member of the SED from 1949 until June 1989
- Honours
- Georg Büchner Prize (1980), German Book Prize (2002), Thomas Mann Prize (2010)
The red mark is 1983: Cassandra, her retelling of the fall of Troy.
How Christa Wolf Writes: Memory Against Forgetting
Wolf called her method “subjective authenticity”, a phrase from her essays of 1972: the writer does not hide behind a neutral narrator but puts her own memory and doubt into the text. In The Quest for Christa T. the narrator admits what she cannot know about her friend; in Patterns of Childhood she splits herself into a “you” in the present and a “Nelly” in the past because she cannot say “I” about the girl she was.
Her favourite form is the inner monologue under pressure, often compressed into one day: Cassandra at the gate of Mycenae, the narrator of Accident on a day in April 1986, the writer of What Remains watching the car outside. The sentences circle, correct themselves and ask questions, which is why her books read slowly and reward rereading.
She returned to myth when the present could not be written directly. Cassandra and Medea take the two most disbelieved women in Greek legend and ask who told their stories and why, turning the myths into books about war, power and scapegoating.
Frequently asked questions about Christa Wolf’s books
How many books has Christa Wolf written?
Ten key works of fiction are on this page, from Divided Heaven (1963) to City of Angels (2010). The bibliography adds three more works of fiction and three books of essays and diaries, and further letters and diaries have appeared since her death in 2011.
What are Christa Wolf’s books in order?
Divided Heaven (1963), The Quest for Christa T. (1968), Patterns of Childhood (1976), No Place on Earth (1979), Cassandra (1983), Accident: A Day’s News (1987), What Remains (1990), Medea (1996), In the Flesh (2002) and City of Angels (2010).
Where should I start with Christa Wolf?
Cassandra (1983). It is short, needs no knowledge of East Germany, and shows her method at its clearest: a famous myth retold from inside the head of the woman nobody believed. If you would rather start with her own life, read Patterns of Childhood.
What is Christa Wolf’s most famous book?
Internationally, Cassandra (1983). In Germany Divided Heaven (1963) made her name, and The Quest for Christa T. (1968) and Patterns of Childhood (1976) are often counted as her most important novels.
What was the Was bleibt dispute, and was Christa Wolf a Stasi informant?
In June 1990 Wolf published Was bleibt (What Remains), a story about Stasi surveillance she had written in 1979. Critics led by Ulrich Greiner in Die Zeit and Frank Schirrmacher in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung argued that publishing it only after the fall of the Wall cast her as a victim, and called her a state writer of the GDR; Günter Grass and Walter Jens were among those who defended her. In January 1993 Wolf disclosed in the Berliner Zeitung that from 1959 to 1962 she had been registered as an unofficial informant, under the name “Margarete”. Schirrmacher later wrote that she had incriminated no one in her reports, and the Stasi then kept her under surveillance for nearly thirty years. She wrote about the episode in City of Angels (2010).
Is Christa Wolf still alive?
No. She died in Berlin on 1 December 2011, aged 82, and is buried in the Dorotheenstadt cemetery.
Has any Christa Wolf book been filmed?
Yes. Divided Heaven was filmed in East Germany in 1964 as Der geteilte Himmel, directed by Konrad Wolf. The Swiss composer Michael Jarrell also set Cassandra as a work for speaker and ensemble.
Did Christa Wolf ever leave East Germany?
No. Unlike many East German writers, she stayed in the GDR until it ended. In 1976 she and her husband signed the protest against the expatriation of the singer Wolf Biermann, and she left the SED in June 1989.
What prizes did Christa Wolf win?
Among others the Heinrich Mann Prize (1963) for Divided Heaven, the Georg Büchner Prize (1980), the first German Book Prize for lifetime achievement (2002), and the Thomas Mann Prize and Uwe Johnson Prize (both 2010).
Why does Patterns of Childhood have another title?
The first English edition, translated by Ursule Molinaro and Hedwig Rappolt, appeared in 1980 as A Model Childhood; that title was widely criticised, and from 1984 the book has been published as Patterns of Childhood, closer to the German Kindheitsmuster.
Footnotes
- Christa Wolf — Wikipedia
- Wolf, Christa — Neue Deutsche Biographie
- Christa Wolf — Encyclopædia Britannica
- Günter Grass on Christa Wolf: What Remains — The New York Review of Books, 2012
- Patterns of Childhood — Wikipedia
- Christa Wolf — Suhrkamp Verlag
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“It was here. This is where she stood. These stone lions looked at her; now they no longer have heads.”
— Christa Wolf, Cassandra (1983), the opening lines, translated by Jan van Heurck
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