After World War II, Christa Wolf studied at the universities of Jena and Leipzig and became an editor for the East German Writers’ Union magazine. She was a rare writer from East Germany to attain international fame. Her first novel, Moscow Novella, was published in 1961; she wrote a dozen more. “I was completely unprepared for this,” Wolf said in a statement in 1993 after learning she had been used by the Stasi from 1959 to 1962 as an informal collaborator. City of Angels, her final novel, was based on a period of research she undertook at the Getty Foundation in Los Angeles at the time of the Stasi revelations. Wolf died in Berlin in 2011. “At a time when East and West was bristling with weapons,” said Günter Grass at her memorial service, “she wrote books that crossed and overcame this divide, books that have lasted.”