The Quest for Christa T.

(1968; The Quest for Christa T.) concerns an ordinary woman who questions her socialist beliefs and life in a socialist state and then dies prematurely of leukemia. Though well received by Western critics, the novel was severely attacked by the East German Writers’ Congress, and its…

(1968; The Quest for Christa T.), a meditation about a dead friend who is, in essence, an alter ego of the narrator. In Flugasche (Flight of Ashes), written in East Germany during the 1970s but not published until 1981 and then in West Germany, Monika Maron…