Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic: Reading through the Iron Curtain ed. by Nicole Moore and Christina Spittel (review)

This appealing, aptly illustrated essay collection on the selective production and reception of Australian literature in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) brings together eleven essays written by Australian and German authors.

In their Introduction, "South by East: World Literature's Cold War Compass," the editors draw out the contextual preconditions for publishing Australian literature in the GDR: the interest in Australia as a postcolonial settler culture and its predilections, the cultural and political relations between Australia and the GDR, the literary institutions in the GDR, the Cold War travel restrictions, the isolation in regard to Western literature, the centralized markets and the censorship control (in both countries!), the GDR's preference for socialist realism (hence no early translations of Christina Stead, Patrick White, or Randolph Stow). The editors describe the GDR's rewriting of Australia's literary history as an "alternative canon" (3). The Introduction outlines the control over cultural production in the GDR during the Cold War. With the creation of the Seven Seas publishing series in English, the GDR succeeded in exporting books internationally, preferably to previous British colonies. An exchange of books was facilitated through the literary institutions of the Left in Australia, such as the GDR-Australia Friendship Society and the Realist Writers groups. Thus the Introduction gives us a good overview of the book history during the Cold War in both countries. "The volume examines not just the reception of Australian books in East German contexts, but the Australian reception and textual construction of East Germany in its turn" (22). The 85 endnotes to the Introduction allow a glimpse into interesting further reading.

Part I, "Contexts and Frames," starts with an article by Siegfried Lokatis: "Censorship, Australian Literature and Foreign Language Books in East German Publishing History." Lokatis tells us that the vast amount of archival records of the censorship history of the GDR, comprehensive in quality and publicly accessible, reveal the bureaucratic mechanisms of the ideological control common in the GDR. He also discusses the conditions of literary imports and its effects on literary policy with its centralized planning methods and describes the most relevant publishing houses and their aims, among them, above all the publishers of international literature, Volk und Welt in Berlin, with its chief editor Hans Petersen who was the main German contributor to the literary and cultural exchange between the GDR and Australia. Inflated print runs and reduced royalties led to the publisher having to pay compensation for twelve million illegally printed books after the Wende!

In Chapter 2, "Towards a Cross-Border Canon: Marcus Clarke's For the Term of His Natural Life Behind the Wall" by Russell West-Pavlov examines the very popular German translation of Clarke's novel, Lebenslänglich (1957), in the light of borders, imprisonment and escape in "carcereal nations," the penal colony of Australia and the GDR. He sheds light on the intentions of the obligatory Afterword by Anselm Schlösser, "seeking a residual high-culture legitimization in a 'workers and farmers' republic" (61).

Chapter 3, "Community, Difference, Context: (Re)reading the Contact Zone" by Jennifer Wawrzinek deals with the reading of Fergus Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab and Xavier Herbert's Capricornia (translated as Capricornia: Die paradiesische Hölle—the paradisiacal hell). The author describes her aim as "to explore the ways in which the same texts that were adopted by the GDR as ideologically useful were capable of fissuring its homogenous vision of community, in order to gesture towards a different thinking of community altogether" (75). Capricornia, in particular, was seen as fierce criticism of the capitalist and racist situation in Australia. Wawrzinek argues that "the suffering depicted in Herbert's novel comes to form the basis upon which the GDR enables its own version of community as its dialectical opposite" (81).

Part II of the...