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The ugliness started when Wolf Biermann, the ex-East German songwriter and poet who had been expelled to the West in 1976, used the occasion of his Büchner prize speech in 1991 to attack some of his former colleagues for collaborating with the Stasi. He was toughest on a fellow poet named Sascha Anderson, who had been a cult figure in the Prenzlauer Berg literary scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Anderson was famous for writing supercool, obscure verse that vaguely attacked the system. It turned out, however, that he had also written much clearer lines for the benefit of the Stasi. Upon examining their files a number of his friends discovered that he had been diligently spying on them as a police informer. Biermann had been one of the targets. Now, in his Büchner speech, the singer referred to his former friend as “The untalented bullshitter Sascha-Asshole, a Stasi spy, who is still playing the son of the Muse hoping that his files will never show up.” This blast itself became controversial, with some writers lining up on Biermann’s side, others condemning him for his eagerness to pass judgment. Although few easterners defended Anderson for what he had done, most did not want him to become a poster-boy in the West for two-faced Ossi intellectuals. Thus there were cries of outrage when Western tabloids equated Anderson and other Stasi informers with Gestapo stool pigeons. For his part, Anderson insisted that the Stasi had “never owned me.” He also claimed, inconsistently, that he had been forced to spy or be killed.

Sascha Anderson had never been a major writer, but this was not true of Christa Wolf, whose exposure in 1993 in the German press as a sometime Stasi informer tore the Berlin literary community apart. Wolf had already come under fire three years earlier when she published a short autobiographical novel, Was Bleibt (What Remains), which told of her surveillance by the Stasi. The book had actually been written in 1979, but Wolf chose at that time to put it in a drawer. Its appearance in 1990 occasioned derision from some West German critics, who accused Wolf of delaying publication until it was safe to do so, while putting herself forward as a Stasi “victim.” She was no victim, her critics said, but a “state poet” who had enjoyed all sorts of privileges. In early 1993, while Wolf was living in Santa Monica as a fellow of the Getty Center, Der Spiegel published details from her Stasi file that showed she had served as a police informer in Berlin from 1959 to 1962. Using the code name “Margarete,” she had provided information on dissident writers who, as her Stasi control put it, “don’t support the cultural policies of our party and government, or have succumbed to bourgeois tendencies.” Wolf attempted to defend herself by characterizing the evidence as “thin stuff,” but this hardly convinced her critics. Other writers, however, came to her defense. Günter Grass, though believing Wolf should have been more forceful in her criticism of the SED regime, condemned the attacks against her as a form of political scapegoating. He was also critical of the Gauck commission for leaking information from the Stasi files to the press. In a letter to Wolf, he wrote: “There is recognizably an attempt to use this episode, which lies more than twenty years in the past, to discredit the critical attitude which you demonstrated over decades, and to discredit your literary work along with it.” Such support notwithstanding, Wolf emerged from this affair as severely damaged goods, soiled like the political legacy she still tried to defend. Commenting on the internecine bloodletting in Berlin’s literary community, Peter Schneider opined: “The Wall has never been so high, nor worked so well, nor made everyone so crazy.”