BORN IN 1929 IN LANDSBERG AN DER WARTHE, now Gorzów (Poland), Christa Wolf grew up in fascist Germany and was strongly influenced by her family's Prussian values as well as by the Hitler Youth. When the teenager learned about the crimes of the Nazi regime in 1945, she welcomed the GDR's foundational antifascist project, to which she remained committed all her life. Starting with her novel Der geteilte Himmel (1963; Divided Heaven, 1965), Wolf became internationally known for her fictional and her essayistic texts, both of which interrogate the effect of historical and political events on individuals. After the Eleventh Plenum of the SED Central Committee in 1965, she adopted the role of a “loyal dissident” and became increasingly critical of the government. When the socialist state imploded, Wolf was without doubt the most significant GDR author. Her speech delivered on Alexanderplatz (Berlin) on November 4, 1989, and “Aufruf für unser Land” (Appeal for Our Country), which she published together with thirty other authors in November 1989, corroborate her political beliefs. Wolf was one of the leading intellectuals who campaigned for what was called the “third way,” a democratic socialist alternative to a capitalist society with a market-driven economy.

As was typical for her, Wolf, who had a history of reacting to political events in the form of physical maladies, responded physically to the GDR's demise. Numerous entries in Ein Tag im Jahr 1960–2000 (2003; One Day a Year 1960–2000, 2007)—a compilation of her personal reflections on every year—recount the author's suffering from a variety of ailments over the years. The journal also points towards her increasingly skeptical attitude toward conventional medicine, which Wolf accuses of ignoring the “Geistkörperseele” (484: the unity of mind, body, and soul; 480). In her essay “Krebs und Gesellschaft” (1991; “Cancer and Society,” 1997), a speech delivered at a German Cancer Society conference, Wolf developed a topic that is central to her oeuvre: physical illness as a manifestation of psychological injury and the way this reflects on individual and societal well-being. In this essay, she asks: