Tale of 2 Dissidents

The death notices for Christa Wolf, one of Germanyâ??s most celebrated novelists, were telling. The German feuilletons heaved with tributes and mild dissents, steering debate away from the quality of her literary outputâ??â??â??it was variableâ??â??â??to the political controversies she engendered. Wolf was, a critic once spat, the â??state poetâ? of the deformed and misnamed German Democratic Republic. Indeed, it is more appropriate to call Wolf an East German novelist, a nostalgic for the regime she romanticized and unofficially servedâ??â??â??including a three-year stint as Stasi informant. In 1989, when jubilant Ossies breached the Berlin Wall and sprinted towards the well-stocked shops of Kurfürstendamm, Wolf argued that East Germany should continue to exist.