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“... trying to exorcise his memories of World War One: the excellent English of the translator, Leila Vennewitz, supports and strengthens this comparison. The longest story, ‘The Casualty’, has a familiar ring, to British ears: a soldier is blissfully travelling home, through Rumania, on a comfortable train, having suffered a desirable wound ...”

“... settlement, the founding of baby Nato (with just 12 members) and the two rival German states. Even Leila Vennewitz’s English translation is half a century old now (it dates from 1970). Not that the story is at all forward-looking. Rather, it straightaway beetles back even further, back and away, to wartime, to late 1943 and the Nazi effort to prop up ...”

“... The original title of Christa Wolf’s novel, Kindheitsmuster, could mean something like ‘a pattern of childhood’, but her translators have rightly gone for a more idiomatic expression. In turning the noun into an attributive adjective, they’ve stressed the idea of an exemplary upbringing, and that is wholly apt. The career of Nelly Jordan is normative, within a certain German (though here specifically Nazi) tradition ...”