Christa Wolf, a leading writer from the former East Germany whose novels, stories and essays explored the weight of history on ordinary individuals, especially and controversially including her own struggles with the legacy of Nazism and life in a Communist society, died Thursday in Berlin. She was 82.

Her death was announced by the publishing house Suhrkamp, which did not disclose a cause.

Ms. Wolf, who grew up in Germany under the Nazis, led a philosophically angst-ridden life that played out in her work. In novels like ''Divided Heaven,'' ''The Quest for Christa T.,'' ''Cassandra'' and ''A Model Childhood,'' she wrote about characters, largely women, whose daily lives were deeply colored by the political systems that governed them.

Strongly autobiographical and gravely moral, her books were widely read in both East and West Germany, and over the years she became respected as a kind of public conscience of a long-divided people. Still, she was criticized as being insufficiently outraged by the repressiveness of the East German regime, and her reputation was tainted by her opposition to the dissolution of the German Democratic Republic, as East Germany was officially known, even as the Berlin Wall was coming down.

Another blow to her standing came in 1993, with the revelation that she briefly served as an informant for the East German secret police in the early 1960s.

She was difficult to categorize -- a loyal dissident, a critic of the regime, but a believer in socialist ideals. She argued that ''an intense and radical confrontation'' with the Nazi past was required of Germans of her generation.

She believed that Communism provided the means for the nation to cleanse its people of the residue of fascism, and she continued to live in East Germany even as the repressive elements of life there made her more and more disappointed in the socialist system.

''We in our part of Germany confronted German fascism uncompromisingly and thoroughly,'' she said in 1989. ''Today many of us see that we were in danger of just substituting one doctrine of salvation for another.''

In her work, Ms. Wolf presented everyday human dramas set against threatening backgrounds of war or repression or, in the case of the novel ''Accident/A Day's News,'' environmental apocalypse. The book tells the story of a woman awaiting word about her brother's brain surgery on the same day as the nuclear reactor breakdown at Chernobyl.

She examined issues of individual identity, artistic expression and personal responsibility under totalitarian rule. She addressed male domination and the social roles of women, national guilt, cultural conformity and the meaning of memory.

Her prose, described by the novelist Mary Gordon as ''extremely dense; her structure is an intricately connected web of associations,'' was nonetheless capable of aching emotion.

''Christa T.,'' for example, is about an ordinary young wife and mother who felt revulsion at the shallow materialism of West Berlin, but later grew stultified and alienated in the arid collectivism of the German Democratic Republic.

In an early passage of the novel, the narrator, a college friend, begins a search for meaning in her friend's life after Christa has died of leukemia:

''She's disappearing. No ears now to hear complaints with; no eyes to see tears with; no mouth with which to answer reproaches. The complaints, tears and reproaches are still with us, and they are useless. Finally we're shown the door and we try to find consolation in the oblivion people call memory.''

The book was criticized by the Communist Party as ''a pessimistic attempt to replace Marx with Freud,'' and published only in a limited edition in East Germany before gaining wider release in West Germany. This was a fall from grace for Ms. Wolf, whose previous book, ''Divided Heaven,'' about a family broken apart by the division of the Germanys, won a national prize.

Her work in the 1970s and '80s earned her a reputation as a subtle but confirmed dissident, using her fame and the freedom that came with it to work within the system. Besides ''Accident/A Day's News,'' her books in those decades include ''A Model Childhood'' (also known as ''Patterns of Childhood''), an account of being indoctrinated into Nazism as a child; ''Cassandra,'' a history of the Trojan War as seen through the eyes of the doomed prophetess; and ''No Place on Earth,'' a meditation on artistic freedom set in the early 19th century.

After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, however, her dissident credentials were challenged. She was among the German intellectuals who argued for the perpetuation of the German Democratic Republic -- she was attacked as a ''poetess of the state'' -- and in 1993, when secret files of the state police, known as the Stasi, were opened, it was revealed that between 1959 and 1962 she had been an informal collaborator -- talking to the Stasi about other writers and their ''bourgeois'' or ''unstable'' tendencies.

In advance of the information becoming public, she made the confession herself, writing in a newspaper article that she had ''absolutely no hope'' of clarifying to the public the reality of her life at that time.

Christa Margarete Ihlenfeld was born on March 18, 1929, in Landsberg, which was renamed Gorzow when it was incorporated into Poland after World War II. Her father, Otto Ihlenfeld, a grocer who had been a Social Democrat before Hitler took power, joined the Nazi Party. She herself was a member of the girls' version of the Hitler Youth.

After the war, the family was expelled from their home. In ''A Model Childhood'' Ms. Wolf described a refugee life of sleeping outdoors or in attics and of being rescued from that fate by the Russians and the German Communists who had taken over East Germany.

She joined the Socialist Unity Party in 1949 and studied German literature at universities in Jena and Leipzig.

Amid the attacks on her in the 1990s Ms. Wolf retreated into silence, which she maintained for nearly three years. She spent more than a year in California, where the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities granted her a fellowship that resulted in her book ''Medea,'' a feminist defense of Euripides' protagonist.

She was married to the writer Gerhard Wolf, and they had two daughters, Annette and Katrin. Complete information about survivors was unavailable.

''What Remains,'' a novella written in the late 1970s, chronicles a day spent by a novelist under the Stasi's scrutiny. Ms. Wolf did not publish the book until 1989, and she was criticized for the delay, waiting until the Communist state was clearly faltering, her detractors said, rather than bringing it out when it would have been a brave act of dissent.

In 1994, however, she experienced something of a renaissance, and when she made her first public reading since the opening of the Berlin Wall, to a packed Semper Opera House in Dresden, she cited the title of that controversial novella. The subject of her talk was national identity. Going forward, she said, there are three questions for all Germans.

''What was? What remains? What will be?''