MANY LITERARY CRITICS label Christa Wolf a moralist. For example, Tageszeitung correspondent and Wolf biographer Jörg Magenau, in his negative review of her final novel, calls the author “die große Moralistin” (the great moralist) and notes the irony that such a moralist was found to have been an informant for the East German secret police, known as the Stasi, from 1959 to 1962 (Magenau). In the same vein, Jürgen P. Wallmann notes that Wolf had been regarded as an “untadelige Moralistin” (irreproachable moralist) (Wallmann). Marko Martin claims that Wolf was a hypocritical moralist and places her in contradistinction to Václav Havel, whom he calls “ein wirklicher Moralist” (a real moralist) (Martin). Such statements tend to focus on Wolf's biography and, more specifically, the scandals surrounding, first, the belated publication of her novella Was bleibt (1990; What Remains, 1993) and, second, the discovery in January 1993 that she had briefly been an informant for the Stasi. As such, these statements fail to depict with any subtlety the larger picture of Wolf's complex epistemo-ethical project. Regardless of whether one sees moralism in literary texts (or in general) as praiseworthy or condemnable, Wolf is no simple moralist, as she explained in the conversation with Hans Kaufmann from which the epigraph for this chapter was excerpted. Indeed, Wolf, like the narrator in Was bleibt, as described by Stephen Brockmann, “does not have either the certainty or the self-righteousness for absolute moral condemnation or approval. She lives in a world of gray, not in a world of black and white” (79). A few scholars have demonstrated perceptively that Wolf's morality is far from simple. Marilyn Sibley Fries states that Wolf's work has an “undeniable moral impulse,” but then quickly and correctly adds that this impulse is productive and instigates self-reflection in the reader (30). Myra Love demonstrates that Wolf's morality is dynamic and contextual rather than static: “For Wolf … morality is a historical project as well as a historical problem” (52–53).