Christa Wolf dies at 82 in Berlin

Christa Wolf died in Berlin today at the age of 82.

Wolf was born in Landsberg on the river Warthe, now Gorzow in Poland, in 1929. She decided to live in the former GDR where she was respected as one of the State's foremost writers.

For a number of years prior to 1962 she worked for the Stasi as an IM - an informal worker, but not employed by them - a snitch in other word. After 1962 she grew more and more distant from the leadership of the GDR but remained a convinced socialist. Was she a convinced communist?

With the fall of the Wall she was opposed to the unification of the two German states.

The works of Christa Wolf and Maxi Wander were the staple diet of Germans, east and west in the 1980s.

Christa Wolf in so many ways encapsulated the pain and hurt, the contradiction, the arrogance and the gentleness of the GDR, a state that never worked. But she was also inseparable from the Federal Republic.

She was a German, born in a Germany that is now Poland, spent 50 years of her life in a German state that no longer exists and was opposed to the Germany in which she died.

Heinrich Böll told Wolf that once a Catholc or a communist you can never rid yourself of your Catholicism or communist.

Christa Wolf was born and died a communist. Heinrich Böll was born and died a Catholic, even if the institutional church did want want to give him a Catholic burial.