ABSTRACT
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall many aspects of life in the GDR have come under critical scrutiny as more and more has been revealed about the unwholesome consequences of the SED’s dictatorial rule. Literary and cultural life have been no exception to this development. As early as 1990, what was quickly dubbed the deutsch-deutsche Literaturstreit (the German-German literature dispute) broke out. The immediate cause was the publication of Christa Wolf’s text Was bleibt (Something Remains) (1990).1 This recounted in the first person a day in the life of a writer, recognisable as Wolf herself, who is under surveillance by the Stasi. What was considered especially objectionable was that Wolf had waited until the end of the GDR to publish a work whose origins were much earlier and which had largely been completed a decade before. This was taken as an act of cowardice that was typical of many GDR writers in general and Wolf in particular.
