ABSTRACT
The debate surrounding the German question is just beginning,” predicted Ulrich Greiner in Die Zeit already in December 1989. The literature debate was sparked by Christa Wolf’s story Was bleibt and was given further life by the Stasi entanglements of authors of the autonomous literary scene of the eighties. People recognize the “insignificance of their existence”, the (East) German full of neuroses and lacking in deed. Those, who like Luisa in Christa Wolf’s Sommerstuck, are forced to mimetically become like any common person, see their identity disappear into an external appearance. No East German author accused himself more ruthlessly of prolonging the catastrophe as a “social romantic” than Volker Braun in his dialog prose text, Der Wendehals. The function of literature as social memory remains irreplaceable, however. Particularly the literature being written in the eastern part of Germany will be recognizable as such, at least for the generation of Christoph Hein.
