Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic

Book excerpt: An account of fraught and complex cross-cultural literary exchange between two highly distinct - even uniquely opposed - reading contexts, Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic has resonance for all newly global reckonings of the cultural Cold War. Working from the extraordinary records of the East German publishing and censorship regime, the authors materially track the production and reception of one country’s corpus as envisioned by another. The 90 Australian titles published in the GDR form an alternative canon, revealing a shadowy literary archive that rewrites Australia’s postwar cultural history from behind the iron curtain and illuminates multiple ironies for the GDR as a ‘reading nation’. This book brings together leading German and Australian scholars in the fields of book history, German and Australian cultural history, Australian and postcolonial literatures, and postcolonial and cross-cultural theory, with emerging writers currently navigating between the two cultures.