IT IS HARD TO IMAGINE that anyone carrying out research into East German literature at any time over the last three decades would be other than hugely appreciative of the long-term commitment of Wolfgang Emmerich to the task of providing a concise, yet comprehensive, overview of the constantly changing cultural landscape in which it has evolved. The three versions of Emmerich's steadily expanding Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR —the original volume of 1981, the “erweiterte Ausgabe” of 1989, and the “erweiterte Neuausgabe” of 1996 — have, in turn, been essential guides to a distinctive corpus of postwar German literature, each of them marking what has turned out to be a highly significant moment in its development. In the early 1980s the first version recorded the crisis after the hopes of the GDR's reformist intellectuals of contributing to the creation of a German model of “socialism with a human face” suffered what proved to be a fatal blow. In the late 1980s the second edition was able to take stock of the growing alienation that preceded the final collapse of the GDR. With the third major revision, completed some five years after German unification, came irrefutable evidence of a cultural reality that some of the West German participants in the “deutsch-deutschen Literaturstreit” of 1990 who had challenged its right to survive would have found inconceivable: the continuity of a broadly defined East German literature as a valid subject for critical analysis for the foreseeable future.