Normalization came to the German literary scene with the alacrity and clarity of a proclamation. In June of 1990, with the almost simultaneous publication of articles by Frank Schirrmacher in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Hajo Steinert in the Zurich Weltwoche, and Ulrich Greiner in Die Zeit (followed somewhat later by Hellmuth Karasek's article in Der Spiegel) the great Literaturstreit, or what was more popularly known as the Christa Wolf debate, broke onto the scene. In retrospect, one of the chief instigators of the controversy would claim that it was not really about Christa Wolf, over whom so much vitriol had been poured, but rather about a flawed approach to Vergangenheitsbewältigung itself. German intellectuals failed to judge aesthetically in considering works of East German literature, Greiner argued, because they were locked into a spurious binary response to Nazism. Specifically, the West German Left, because of its adherence to the Marxist view of fascism “as nothing but a murderous result of capitalism” (G, 66) made itself into apologists for socialism, including its literature. “One was either communist or anticommunist, fascist or antifascist,” he proposed, “the experience of National Socialism did not allow for a third way” (G, 67).