Four decades worth of brilliant essays are collected here, starting during the period of the early years of the then newly formed state of GDR and the last essays as it was collapsing and Germany reunified. Most of the essays are Christa Wolf's thoughts on literature and politics and how both are enfolded, and inform each other.

Christa Wolf was a child when the Nazi party came into power in Germany and personally experienced how people, including herself, could be swept up in fascism and fear for the "enemy", and the horrifying measures taken for the enemy's destruction. So after the Second World War, the newly formed socialist GDR worked to permanently crush fascism within its borders, and individuals like Wolf worked to destroy whatever might have remained of fascism so that history wouldn't repeat itself. Wolf has written about this in her fiction and in these essays, and was even accused of being obsessed with the past for examining how people are seduced by authority and the dangers of it. There are also essays on feminism and gender equality, those that condemn war and the existence and manufacture of nuclear weapons, how fascism never really disappeared in Germany, among other subjects.

A few of the quotes I liked from the collection:

"Nothing that we do or leave undone is without its consequences, and one day we cannot help having to confront them."

"What people suppress, they come to fear"