"August" is Christa Wolf's last piece of fiction, written in a single sitting as an anniversary gift to her husband. In it, she revisits her stay at a tuberculosis hospital in the winter of 1946/47, which makes up the closing scenes of her 1976 novel Patterns of Childhood. This time, however, the perspective is a very different one: that of August, a young patient who has lost both parents to the war. He adores the older girl Lilo, a rebellious teenager who holds things together on the wards. Sixty years later, August thinks back on his life and the things that she taught him. Written in taut, affectionate prose, August offers a new entry into Christa Wolf's work and, incidentally, her first and last male protagonist. Yet, it is more than a literary artefact-a perfectly constructed story of a quiet life well lived. For August as for Christa Wolf, the past was never dead.Christa Wolf was one of Germany's most celebrated post-war writers. She grew up during Nazi rule and spent most of her adulthood in communist East Germany, where she increasingly came to question ideologies through her writing. In 1989, she was an instrumental figure in the protests leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall. She has been awarded many prizes, among them the Büchner Prize of the German Academy of Language and Poetry (1980), the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (1985) and the Geschwister-Scholl-Prize of the city of Munich (1987). Christa Wolf died in Berlin in 2011.

---

---

Weiterführende Informationen

• Leseprobe

Serie / Reihe: The German List

Personen: Wolf, Christa Derbyshire, Katy