Christa Wolf „No Place on earth“

The books in our library deal often with the history of the GDR, the political situation or the situation of the people who lived in the GDR. Often the events of the Fall of the Wall or the Stasi are the topics. But beside these books, there are also books of GDR authors which were translated into English. This time I want to present you the book “No Place on earth”, a novel written by Christa Wolf.

Jan van Heurck translated the novel, which were published in 1979. Christa Wolf designed in it the vision of an imagined meeting between Karoline von Günderrode, a long-forgotten poet, and the writer Heinrich von Kleist. The meeting of the both, placed in summer 1804, shows, that the both are allied in their view, that the world in which they must live isn’t acceptable.

Christa Wolf, born in 1929, was one of the most important authors of the GDR. In 1993 she committed to her work as an unofficial employee of the Stasi 1959-1962 and was facing harsh criticism for her past. Nevertheless Christa Wolf wrote important books about the life in the GDR and so this book, beside others, soon became a bestseller.

The story takes place in an earlier time, but it stands for the criticism of the situation of the artists in the GDR. This criticism was loud in the context of expatriation of Wolf Biermann in 1976 and in this context Christa Wolf wrote her book.

The book was translated in 1982 and published in the same year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The ISBN is 0-374-51775-4.