Shifting Perspectives

First treatment of a conspicuously East German feature in today's German literature, that of autobiographical writing -- and rewriting. A striking feature of today's German literature is the survival of an East German subculture characterized by its authors' self-reflexive concern with their own lives, not only in texts labeled as autobiography but also those in the more ambiguous territory of what Christa Wolf has called "subjective authenticity." Dennis Tate provides the first detailed account