‘Literature isn't a matter of life and death, it is more important than that.’ In a discussion of public debates about literature and the literary market place in Germany since the Wende (the fall of the Berlin Wall), it is tempting to rework the deliberately ironic view of soccer attributed to a redoubtable manager of Liverpool Football Club. Literature in the Berlin Republic, as this chapter will show, matters very much indeed. Some of the major controversies of the 1990s and beyond have been sparked off by, and coalesced around, arguments about or between writers, their aesthetic and political views, as well as the succès de scandale of individual works. So piercing has the volume of debate been that it has attracted considerable national and international attention from professional critics and academics. Moreover, as a measure of perceived importance, many of the key texts published in the course of these high-profile literary battles – Literaturstreite – and associated, more broadly framed skirmishes, have been swiftly anthologised.

The first of these literary flashpoints ignited around the figure of Christa Wolf. Until unification in 1990, Wolf was acknowledged as one of post-war Germany's most significant authors in both the GDR, where she resided, and the FRG. She was the recipient of a host of literary accolades, including West Germany's prestigious Büchner Prize, and her works enjoyed high recognition abroad, had given rise to an admiring body of scholarship and had entered the canon of literature studied in institutions of higher learning around the world.