THE EVENTS OF 1989/90 OFFERED WRITERS the opportunity not just to comment on the unfolding unification process, but also to review the previous structures that had lasted since 1949 and, only slightly previously, had seemed set in stone. The result was something that became known as the Deutsch-deutscher Literaturstreit (the Intra-German literature quarrel), even though the argument was not principally about literature, but rather politics, and the two sides were not simply East and West Germans. At least the bone of contention was clear: attitudes to the GDR, as adopted by writers and intellectuals in both German states.

The arguments came to a head with the publication in early 1990 of Christa Wolf's story Was bleibt (What Remains). This work, which is clearly autobiographical, describes the surveillance of a GDR writer by the Stasi secret police, something to which Wolf herself was subject almost constantly from 1969 onward. What provoked a storm on the publication of the book was the fact that it had been almost entirely written in the 1970s, but only submitted for publication when political conditions in the GDR had changed. One of the first critics to launch into Wolf was the literary editor of Die Zeit, Ulrich Greiner. He castigated Wolf as the Staatsdichter (state poet) of the GDR, thus associating her by implication with the many sordid features of the Ulbricht and Honecker regimes. Significantly, he did not mention her various difficulties with the GDR authorities, some of which have been referred to earlier in this volume.