Christa Wolf was East Germany’s most prominent writer and, to many, its moral conscience. From the 1950s onward, her novels The Divided Heaven, The Search for Christa T., No Place on Earth, Patterns of Childhood, and Cassandra chronicled women’s historical struggle to define their own beliefs and ideals. Initially a loyal defender of institutionalized socialism, Wolf gradually became a literary dissident. East Germany’s sudden 1989 collapse nonetheless left her pondering “What remained”—of her g