FRED WANDER (1917–2006) IS AN AUTHOR whose distinctive contribution to twentieth-century life writing in German is only just beginning to be recognized. He attracted some initial attention in the GDR — as an Austrian exile living there on a long-term visa — when his largely autobiographical cycle of Holocaust stories, Der siebente Brunnen (The Seventh Well), was published in East Berlin in 1971. A West German paperback edition followed, but not until 1985, enjoying a more muted measure of esteem than might have been expected in the decade when the Holocaust finally became a major focus of cultural activity there. A first translation into English, in a series generally viewed as an outlet for East German propaganda, made no perceptible impact at all. When Wander left the GDR, in the early 1980s, as disillusioned as most of his literary contemporaries there had become by the stagnation of the socialist experiment, there was a real risk that he would fade into obscurity as a one-book author. Back in his native Austria, unable to establish a cultural foothold there, he remained largely in the shadows until he was rediscovered in his late eighties by an enterprising German publishing house, the Wallstein Verlag in Göttingen.

Wallstein's new edition of Der siebente Brunnen (2005) included a supportive afterword by Ruth Klüger, author of the highly praised Holocaust memoir weiter leben (Still Alive) of 1992. Klüger's endorsement made reference to Wander's subsequent autobiographical writing, notably Das gute Leben (The Good Life) of 1996, but it was essentially a tribute to Der siebente Brunnen as an original and discrete contribution to Holocaust literature. She referred to his years in the GDR and his close relationship with East Germany's best-known author, Christa Wolf, but without considering the extent to which Wander's breakthrough work had emerged from a society in which life writing had taken on special importance as a mode of resistance to the official cultural doctrine of socialist realism. Wander had, however, been closely associated with Wolf since the 1960s and was involved in the East German cultural debates about the importance of “subjective authenticity” to literary credibility that preceded the publication of Der siebente Brunnen.