The old place - Kolchis in the novel - had crumbled and died in the brutal showdown of an all-powerful male ego. Medea seems to be her catharsis, her way of writing herself out of the pain of not having a place to call home anymore. It is brutally wild!Īfter her experience of the breakdown of East Germany, Christa Wolf wrote this novel retelling of the ancient myth of Medea in the early 1990s, after some years of depression and silence due to the shock of the loss of her country and the following witch hunt that hit her unexpectedly from an increasingly arrogant West German journalism and literary criticism. And how bizarre that I thought it was milder than Euripides and Seneca the first time I read it, a long time ago. The political human being as a narcissistic monster who projects its crimes on the victim! In 1951, she married Gerhard Wolf, an essayist. She studied German literature in Jena and Leipzig and became a publisher and editor. She moved to East Germany in 1945 and joined the Socialist Unity Party in 1949. 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.”Ĭhrista Ihlenfeld was born March 18, 1929, in Landsberg an der Warthe, a part of Germany that is now in Poland. ![]() ![]() ![]() She won awards in East Germany and West Germany for her work, including the Thomas Mann Prize in 2010. 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. 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.
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