"[…] eine Autobiographie nach anderen Gesichtspunkten als denen der äusseren Historie und Chronologie." Christa Wolfs Alltagsprosa als autobiographisches Projekt

This article examines Christa Wolf's shorter prose texts Juninachmittag, Starfall, and Wüstenfahrt as examples of her lasting aesthetic exploration of hybrid autobiographical forms that provide an alternative to classical autobiography and other writing of a confessional nature. It argues that Wolf's discovery of the everyday as a site where the self and the possibility of agency in the modern world are productively explored, provided her with greater self-understanding during periods of intense crises as a writer, and also enabled her to bear witness to her increasing and ultimately irretrievable disillusionment with GDR socialism. The three texts mark turning points in the life of the author which coincided with periods of crisis in GDR history: Juninachmittag was written just before the 11th Plenary 1965, Störfall constitutes a response to the Chernobyl accident that signalled the collapse of the Soviet system in the mid-1980s, and Wüstenfahrt marks Wolf's arrival in the materialist world of Western capitalism.