It is possible to date the beginning of the rule of communist censorship in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany very precisely: to 20 April 1948. This is the date of the ‘Circular Addressed to the National Educational Authorities’ (‘Rundschreiben an die Volksbildungsämter’) that was inserted retrospectively into the Catalogue of Banned Nazi Books and Military Literature with which the Soviets tasked East German librarians, publishers and booksellers to clean their holdings after the war. Comprising just a single sheet, the circular's additional list starts with the names of Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin and Gregory Zinoviev, thus indexing, for the first time, authors of quite a different kind: the ‘party enemies’, ‘dissenters’ and dissidents of the left who had been prosecuted by Stalin in show trials.

The symbiosis of the Soviet censorship system with bureaucratic German diligence renders the archival records relating to the publishing history of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) increasingly important internationally, particularly in historical research since 1989. It is quite rare for a country's entire literature to be so thoroughly reflected in censors’ and publishers’ files, across a period of 40 years. It is certainly true that no other country of the communist Eastern Bloc has archival records covering its censorship history that are even remotely as good in quality and as publicly accessible. In part, these records are available even online on the website of the German Federal Archive in Berlin, which now holds the detailed, compulsory applications for print supplied by East German publishers. These files offer a tremendous opportunity for research into the conditions, instruments, difficulties, successes and limits of the literary-political experiment that was the GDR.

Therefore, this chapter is about more than what the GDR, that half country, might have constituted from an Australian perspective: a tiny spot on the other side of the globe. Rather, the book history of the GDR opens a strange window onto a twentieth-century society that followed different rules, revealing the distinctive bureaucratic mechanisms of its ideological control. These rules and mechanisms form the interest of this chapter, which introduces the East German censorship system and its role in constituting the distinctive GDR versions of foreign literatures delivered to readers.