Wie sind wir so geworden, wie wir heute sind?l Christa Wolf poses this question precisely in the middle of Kindheitsmuster (1976), and later in that novel she suggests a possible response: Eine der Antworten widre eine Liste mit Buchtiteln (239). Literary history has always maintained considerable importance for Wolf, and quotations from previous texts invariably inform her work, with the story Kein Ort. Nirgends (1979) providing the most obvious example. In Stdrfall (1987), Wolf's reflection on the Chernobyl accident as well as attempt to discern how we became the way we are today, literary reference and citation continue to constitute essential structural and thematic elements, and Wolf cites a fairy tale as a Grundmuster dieses Tages.2 In this paper I examine some forms and uses of in St6rfall.3 I employ the word intertextuality advisedly and broadly, fully aware that critics as diverse as Bakhtin, Bloom, Derrida, Genette, Kristeva, and Riffaterre, among others, have proposed different definitions and theories of intertexts. For our purposes, we can remember Kristeva's insight that, in Thais E. Morgan's paraphrase, an intertextual citation is never innocent or direct, but always transformed, distorted, displaced, condensed, or edited in some way in order to suit the speaking subject's value system.4 At the same time, Morgan asserts, it appears that even as the literary text carries out a polemical transposition-to use Kristeva's termor at least a dialogue with the other texts it noticesto employ Bakhtin's image-it never fully assimilates or controls the language and ideology of the previous text (33). This lack of assimilation and control generates a tension that in turn creates effects such as irony or multivalent ambiguity. To speak with Harold Bloom, text and intertext lock in a revisionist struggle, and it is the concept of revision that governs my reading of Stoirfall, for my analysis centers on the fashion in which Wolf alters patriarchal plots and pre-texts in order to advance her feminist agenda. Curiously, feuilletonists in East and West paid scant attention to Wolf's feminist project in Stbrfall, although she situates the story in her line of thinking whichas stated programmatically already in her 1973 story Selbstversuchargues that Western civilization has excluded women and is hence plagued by immaturity, emptiness, inability to love and, at its core, a desire for death.5 To be sure, as William Rey thoroughly and convincingly demonstrates, in Stiirfall the female narrator probes her own blind spot (blinder Fleck), discovering within herself