The law of chaos is the law of ideas, Of improvisations and seasons of belief.
—Wallace Stevens

Long considered one of Germany’s most important contemporary writers, the novelist and critic Christa Wolf has been showered with literary prizes on both sides of the Wall. The Marxist utopianism, moral agonizing, intense self-scrutiny, and warnings of ecological apocalypse in her fiction gradually earned her an international cult-like following. Yet Wolf, a resident of what used to be called East Germany, did not become a dissertation and academic conference gold-mine until the publication of her novel Cassandra (1983), a feminist reworking of the fall of Troy from the prophetess’s point of view. Because Wolf neither wavered in her belief in Communism nor openly questioned the legitimacy of one-party rule, the SED, Germany’s Communist party, tolerated her work’s oblique criticism and her departure from an early adherence to the doctrine of Socialist Realism. However, the forces of history have now caught up with the political basis of Wolf’s work, dividing a once loyal following between those who believe her idealism a moral force that empowered the oppressed (whether by the SED, industrialized society, rigid bureaucracy, capitalism, or the patriarchy) and those who believe it a dangerous sentimentality that diverted attention from the moral and financial bankruptcy of the East German political system.

Wolf’s image sustained a devastating blow in June 1990, seven months after the demise of the Berlin Wall, when she published “What Remains,” a novella she