Two small nations, very far apart. Australia, a southern-hemisphere settler country of only 23 million, isolated geographically if yet English-speaking, historically a bastion of European culture in an Asia Pacific cast as its cultural other, with an indigenous population of less than 10 per cent. It is often completely absent from contemporary mappings of world literatures. The German Democratic Republic (GDR), an erstwhile nation, now; for its 40 years in the second half of the twentieth century the intellectual flagship of the former socialist Eastern Bloc, with one of the most surveilled and controlled national populations in contemporary history; a utopic experiment finally sustained through force and coercion. Evoking a German-speaking country now vanished from the middle of Europe, its history pulls between nostalgia, erasure and excoriating exposé. Why bring these two into detailed cultural comparison?

Our reasoning is partly that they are polarities, points on a cold war compass long since displaced by an alternative geography, with different claimants to the ‘Global South’ and an increasingly powerful Asian East. Exploring the imaginative construction of the post-colonial South by the communist East, this book offers a multifaceted, collaborative study of the reception of Australian literature in the GDR. As an account of the fraught and complex, cross-cultural literary exchange between two highly distinct, even uniquely opposed reading contexts, the volume seeks to explore some of the questions basic to each culture in the light of the other. The essays are propelled by opportunities presented through new developments in empirical book history, ‘distant reading’ methodologies, globalizing cross-cultural theoretical frames and, most compellingly, by the richly exact and reflective reading histories manifest in the GDR's expansive paper trail. The records of the centralized regime of publication control can tell us how many East Germans were expected to read any particular published title and, moreover, exactly how the East German nation expected that population to read it, in great detail. Historian of East German book history Siegfried Lokatis opens the collection by observing that ‘no other country of the Communist Eastern Bloc has archival records […] that are even remotely as good in quality and publicly accessible’.