Medea. Stimmen (Medea. Voices, 1996, translated into English by John Cullen as Medea. A Modern Retelling, 1998) was East German writer Christa Wolf’s first new fiction to be published after German unification in October 1990. In June 1990, Wolf had published a short text entitled Was bleibt (What Remains), a fictionalised representation of her experiences of being under surveillance by the East German secret police, the Staatssicherheit, which she had written in 1979. This publication became the catalyst for a ferocious media debate during the summer months of 1990, driven above all by the leading West German newspapers the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Die Zeit, about the status of the critical East German writers such as Wolf who had remained in the GDR to the end. Up until 1989, these writers had largely been regarded in the West as dissidents whose work had fostered critical political discussion within the GDR. From the start of the Was bleibt debate, however, the tone changed. Writers such as Wolf, but Wolf pre-eminent among them, were now represented as beneficiaries of the system whose work had propped up the state by virtue of the oblique, imprecise and so compromised style of its political criticisms. As the debate unfolded, Wolf came under further attack as the exemplification of an ‘aesthetics of political conviction’ (Gesinnungsästhetik) held by some critics to have blighted German literature in both West and East in the post-1945 period. Judgements of the value of literature had, it was argued, been guided in this period by authors’ political stance rather than the aesthetic qualities of their work. In January 1993, her post-unification public credibility took a final blow when it became known that she had been an ‘unofficial collaborator’ (inoffizieller Mitarbeiter or IM) with the Staatssicherheit from 1959 to 1962 (albeit with a much larger file as the object of a surveillance operation from 1969 on). While she tried to defuse public disapprobation by publishing her IM file in its entirety, her former standing as the GDR’s most internationally admired writer seemed irrevocably damaged. The publication of Medea. Stimmen in 1996 marked Wolf’s re-emergence as a novelist after three years of almost complete withdrawal from the public scene.