The Memory of Complicity, Then and Now: Rereading Christa Wolf in 2026

What does it mean to identify with former East German writer Christa Wolf as scholars in Holocaust studies? Through her elegiac efforts, I argue that we too can begin to confront our complicity in the oppression of others past and present. Focusing on Wolf’s novel Patterns of Childhood, I consider what it has meant for me as an American Jew to see myself mirrored in the life of a former Nazi through Nelly, the Nazi child Wolf’s protagonist once was, a child, like Wolf herself, raised and educated under the Nazi regime. I ask what we might learn about how, at least this one former Nazi child, a writer spent the rest of her life working through her past as it continued to shape an ever-shifting present. To do this, I turn to key moments from chapter 11 of Wolf’s novel, a chapter that begins with the final solution.