In the summer of 1990 Christa Wolf published a short book entitled Was bleibt. Because of its publication only a few months prior to German reunification, its focus on the political life of a writer in East Germany, and the savage attacks that were immediately directed against it, the book and the debate it gave rise to became a kind of ground zero for German literary reunification, embodying and prefiguring many of the debates that were subsequently to emerge about the complex relationship between literature and politics in Germany. If Wolf's novella was a first attempt to locate the position of the writer politically at the moment of reunification, the attacks on Was bleibt offered a completely different view of the relationship between literature and politics in a reunified Germany. As the novella's title suggested, Wolf seemed to be arguing for an essential continuity between the antifascist political commitment of the postwar past and the possible literary developments of the future.