The Story Archive

The Quest for Christa T.

Christa Wolf · 1968 CE · Novel · German · Contemporary

A narrator works through the diaries, letters and unfinished sketches of a friend who died at thirty-five of leukaemia, trying to reconstruct a woman who never quite fitted what the young German Democratic Republic asked of its citizens. Schoolrooms, a village teaching post, a marriage and an unfinished house come back out of order and never settle into a life. The first printing was withheld in the GDR, and it made Wolf's name outside it.

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Attributes

Genre
PsychologicalPolitical
Theme
Identity & SelfMemory & TimeIndividual vs Society
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
Everyman
Plot structure
Nonlinear / FracturedFrame NarrativeMeditation
Symbol / motif
The LetterThe HouseThe Book / Manuscript
Conflict
vs Societyvs Self
Mode / tone
ElegiacModernist
Culture / tradition
German

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