Photo Gallery Remembering Christa Wolf
Christa Wolf delivers a speech in Lübeck in 2010 upon receiving the Thomas Mann Prize: Wolf was one of the most important German-language writers of the postwar period and is viewed as a great chronicler of life in the former East Germany and the country's division.
Her last work. In June 2010, Wolf presented her most recent book, "Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud" at Berlin's Academy of the Arts. Wolf and her family were expelled from their home in what would become part of Poland after World War II. The family resettled in the eastern city of Mecklenburg. Wolf would go on to study literature at the University of Jena and the University of Leipzig.
Wolf in 1989: She joined East Germany's ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) in 1949 and left it in June 1989.
Wolf receives a prize from the city of Dortmund for her work. After briefly working as an informant for the Stasi, East Germany's dreaded secret police, Wolf became critical of the regime and monitored by the Stasi for years. The revelation in the early 1990s that she had worked with the Stasi triggered a public uproar.
Famed writer Günter Grass hands Wolf the 2002 German Book Prize for lifetime achievement: Wolf advocated against German reunification. Instead, she actively championed the continued existence of East Germany in order to create "a truly democratic society." After numerous statements, speeches, open letters, readings and interviews, Wolf retreated from daily political life.
Culture Commissioner Christa Weiss hands Wolf a book of 15,000 poems against the war in Iraq: Georgina Paul, an expert in East German literature at Oxford University, told the news agency Reuters, that "Wolf was an enormously significant figure, regarded until 1990 as someone who carefully and delicately expanded the boundaries of what could be said in East Germany."
Munich Mayor Georg Kronawitter awards Wolf the "Geschwister-Scholl-Preis" in 1987: Prior to her death, Wolf lived in Berlin and also in the town of Woserin in the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Speaking of death in an interview with SPIEGEL in June 2010, Wolf said: "I think a lot about death, and I am conscious almost every day that I do not have that much time left. As I write, I sometimes thought: So, perhaps you'll let me still write this one until it is complete."
