Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic

Reading through the Iron Curtain

Edited by Nicole Moore, Christina Spittel

Publication date:

19 June 2016

Publisher

Anthem Press

Dimensions:

229x153mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781783085231

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.

Introduction - South by East: World literature’s Cold-War Compass, Nicole Moore and Christina Spittel; PART I: Contexts and Frames; 1. Censorship, Australian Literature and Foreign Language Books in East German Publishing History, Siegfried Lokatis; 2. Towards a Cross-Border Canon: Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life Behind the Wall, Russell West-Pavlov; 3. Community, Difference, Context: (Re)reading the Contact Zone, Jennifer Wawrzinek; PART II: Books and Writers; 4. Sedition as Realism: Frank Hardy’s Power without Glory Parts the Iron Curtain, Nicole Moore; 5. Katharine Susannah Prichard, Dymphna Cusack and ‘Women on the Path of Progress’, Camille Barrera; 6. Walter Kaufmann: Walking the Tightrope, Alexandra Ludewig; 7. Fictionalising Australia for the GDR: Adventure Writer Joachim Specht, Patricia F. Blume; 8. ‘To Do Something for Australian Literature’: Anthologising Australian Literature for the German Democratic Republic of the 1970s, Christina Spittel; PART III: Literary Exchange; 9. ‘There I’m a nobody, here I’m a Marxian writer’: Australian Writers in the East, Susan Lever; 10. Behind the Wall through Australian Eyes: Anna Funder’s Stasiland, Leah Gerber; 11. ‘Because it was Exotic, because it was so Far Away’: Bernhard Scheller in Conversation with Christina Spittel

Translation Literature November 2017 Issue