The German author Christa Wolf was born as Christa Ihlenfeld in Landsberg ab der Warthe (present-day Gorzów Wielkopolski in Poland). Her father was a grocer. At the end of the war the family fled to Mecklenburg. She took her baccalaureate in 1949 in Bad Frankenhausen when she also joined the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). She left the party in June 1989, six months before the fall of Communism.