This volume is the first anthology of contemporary East German women's writing in English translation. It will introduce scholars and general readers to writers whose voices are essential to an understanding of the situation of women in today's changing Europe. Included are short stories, essays, autobiographical sketches, and excerpts from novels, written between 1974 and 1986 by women of the postwar generation. Their work reflects everyday life in the GDR before the fall of the Berlin Wall with vitality, sympathy, humor, and warmth. This literature has been of great significance within the GDR as a public forum for social-critical discussion, and in the West for its depiction—as the volume title suggests—of universal issues confronting women in modern society: women and work, women and family, women’s self-determination in relation to other people and social institutions. The twenty-five authors represented are Renate Apitz, Irene Böhme, Daniela Dahn, Gabriele Eckart, Christiane Grosz, Monika Helmecke, Helga Königsdorf, Angela Krauss, Katja Lange-Müller, Beate Morgenstern, Irmtraud Morgner, Christa Müller, Doris Paschiller, Helga Schubert, Helga Schütz, Maria Seidemann, Angela Stachowa, Gerti Tetzner, Maxie Wander, Petra Werner, Maja Wiens, Christa Wolf, Christina Wolter, Charlotte Worgitzky, and Rosemarie Zeplin. Notes and biographical introductions are provided for each story.

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Summer 1918. The First World War is drawing to a close when Léon Le Gall, a French teenager from Cherbourg who has dropped out of school and left home, falls in love with Louise Janvier. Both are severely wounded by German artillery fire, are separated, and believe each other to be dead. Briefly reunited two decades later, the two lovers are torn apart again by Louise's refusal to destroy Léon's marriage and by the German invasion of France. In occupied Paris during the Second World War, where Léon struggles against the abhorrent tasks imposed upon him by the SS, and the wilds of Africa, where Louise confronts the hardships of her primitive environment, they battle the vicissitudes of history and the passage of time for the survival of their love.

The Fluger was five meters long, had four thick legs, a body of impenetrable molecular density and numerous teeth capable of chewing diamonds into powder. It was four hundred massive kilos of violence, savagery and hatred. When the Fluger arrived as unlisted cargo in the enclosed city of Olympus, it launched itself on a murderous rampage which couldn't be halted. It presented that terrified utopian community with the problem of how to stop an irresistible force. The only answer seemed to be a hired alien assassin - an outer-space humanoid about whom the citizens of Olympus knew next to nothing except that he was a professional killer who would not quit until his job was done. But when the irresistible force met the immovable object they turned that fragile city in the sky into a raging battlefield, and their 'savior' looked to become as much of a menace as his monster counterpart.