acclaim greeted her first novel, Der geteilte Himmel (The Divided
Heaven), in 1963, which was followed by numerous other works. She
gradually acquired the reputation of a “loyal dissident,” tolerated by
government authorities because of her staunch belief that East Ger-
man socialism held greater promise than Western-style capitalism.
In the revolution of 1989, Wolf along with many other writers and
intellectuals opposed the absorption of the German Democratic Re-
public by the Federal Republic of Germany and advocated a demo-
cratically reformed socialist state. In 1990, she published Was bleibt
(What Remains), a story written in 1979 detailing the extensive MfS
surveillance of her and her husband at that time. In early 1993, how-
ever, it was revealed that she had been recruited as an informer and
was active between 1959–1962 under the code name margarete.
Her defenders pointed out that her thin file contrasted dramatically
with the volumes of information collected about her during nearly
30 years. Meetings with her handlers were infrequent, they insisted,
and no harm came to anyone. Her critics countered that she had been
unwilling to risk her privileged position, had mounted only a sham
critique of the regime, and had posed as a martyr of the system. For
many, the debate went beyond the question of Wolf’s MfS complic-
ity and seemed to symbolize the most problematic aspects of German
reunification. See also ANDERSON, ALEXANDER; KANT, HER-
MANN; MÜLLER, HEINER; SCHEDLINSKI, RAINER.WOLF, FELIX. See RAKOW, WERNER.
WOLF, GISELA and HANS. An Illegaler couple working for the
Verwaltung Aufklärung (VA), Gisela and Hans Wolf were origi-
nally married in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1949.
When they later became covert operatives for the VA, Hans Wolf, an
engineer, assumed the identity of Hans Kälin, a Swiss citizen who
lived in the GDR, while his wife, Gisela, a journalist active in cultural
affairs, took the name Ursula Meisner. Their assignment required the
Wolfs to undergo a legal separation so that a new marriage under
their new identities could take place in Switzerland. They were re-
settled in Zurich in 1967. Although Gisela’s employment as a press
officer at the Sulzer Corporation had no direct military connections,
it provided an effective cover, since the main mission of the Wolfs
498 • WOLF, FELIX