Cassandra

Editor’s note Christa Wolf published Kassandra in 1983 together with the four Frankfurt lectures in which she explained how it came about; the East German edition cut passages from the lectures, the West German one did not. The novel is one long monologue: Cassandra, brought to Mycenae as Agamemnon’s captive, waits at the Lion Gate to be killed and goes back over the Trojan War as she saw it from inside the palace. Wolf wrote it during the missile debate of the early eighties, and Troy’s drift from a trading city into a war camp is meant to be read with that in mind. About 150 pages, and her most translated book.