Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic: Reading through the Iron Curtain
274
Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic: Reading through the Iron Curtain
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Overview
Exploring the imaginative construction of the post-colonial South by the communist East, this is a multi-faceted, collaborative study of the reception of Australian literature in the German Democratic Republic. An account of fraught and complex cross-cultural literary exchange between two highly distinct, even uniquely opposed reading contexts, this study has resonance for all newly global reckonings of the cultural Cold War.
Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic is an investigative exposé of Australian literature’s revealing career in East Germany. 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. Cast as a geo-political conundrum – beautiful and exotic, yet politically retrograde – Australia was presented to East German readers as an impossible, failed utopia, its literature framed through a critique of Antipodean capitalism that yet reveals multiple ironies for that heavily censored, walled-in community.
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783085255 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Anthem Press |
| Publication date: | 06/19/2016 |
| Series: | Anthem Studies in Australian Literature and Culture , #1 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 274 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Christina Spittel is a lecturer in English at the University of New South Wales.
Read an Excerpt
Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic
Reading through the Iron Curtain
By Nicole Moore, Christina Spittel
Wimbledon Publishing Company
Copyright © 2016 Nicole Moore and Christina SpittelAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78308-525-5
CHAPTER 1
CENSORSHIP, AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE AND FOREIGN-LANGUAGE BOOKS IN EAST GERMAN PUBLISHING HISTORY
Siegfried Lokatis
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 Volksbildungsamter') 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. The essay also sketches some of the basic conditions of literary import into the GDR, above all the permanent shortage of hard currency, of course, and its effects on literary policy, but also the emergence of a differentiated publishing landscape whose individual players enjoyed quite different degrees of latitude in their dealings with the literary administration.
Which features were common to the systems of literary administration in those countries of the Eastern Bloc that were modelled on the Soviet Union? First of all, in countries such as Poland, the Soviet Union, North Korea, Cuba and China, the censorship authority itself presided over a regime of centrally directed book production, with a relatively small number of large publishers dividing the key tasks amongst themselves, with a central publisher for school textbooks, a party publishing house for political writing, and a few key publishers for the important areas of fiction and poetry, academic and artistic writing. Of course, there was a publisher for agriculture and a military publisher.
In principle, such concentration allowed publishers to profit from sizeable print runs, given well-organized distribution and a commensurate population. Who, then, benefitted from this? Publishing houses either belonged to the state and the people (volkseigen, in GDR parlance) or to one of the mass organizations: the party or its youth organization, the trade union, the academy of the sciences or the army. It was quite typical for such organizations to finance themselves through the book trade and this could still leave enough 'fat' to fund the expensive apparatus of pre-publication censorship typical of Soviet-style systems, which insists on sighting almost every manuscript in order to submit it to a more or less extensive process of assessment.
Like the entire socialist economy, publishing was also organized via the principle of centralized planning. Thus a process of annual planning – Themenplanung (planning of themes) in the GDR – preceded the censorship of individual texts. Publishing houses presented their plans for future writing, editing and translation projects to the central authority for approval well before final manuscripts reached the censors' desks. During this important pre-selection, publishers requested and received the required paper stock and where international writing was concerned, the hard currency required to buy international rights. Whenever cultural functionaries of the 'socialist brother states' met at international publishers' conferences in Budapest, Warsaw or Leipzig, they swapped notes about these foundational processes and their potential improvement as well as on national deviations and particularities.
What were these, as far as the GDR was concerned? First of all, the GDR was a successor state to vanquished Nazi Germany. Antifascism was its prime political doctrine, and the re-education of readers the purpose of its literary system. But few communist comrades survived the camps and it proved impossible to get by entirely without the skills of 'bourgeois' elements. The powerful tradition of the book city of Leipzig, centre for German publishing since the fifteenth century, could not be fully eradicated, and this also held for many old, suddenly banned books. The task of 'cleansing' the giant secondhand bookshops and libraries could be likened to tilting at windmills. There was a second, even more important point of difference between the GDR and other countries of the Eastern Bloc: with the exception of their colleagues in North Korea and, for a period of time, North Vietnam, the censors in East Berlin were alone in operating in a divided country and sharing a linguistic space with the Klassenfeind (class enemy), in this case, the imperialist Federal Republic. Once the Berlin Wall sealed the German-German border in 1961, subversive literature had to pass customs and the vigilant control of the postal service. Prior to that, the difference in currencies had formed the most reliable protection for the East German state's literary policy: after the Western and Soviet-occupied zones introduced separate currencies in 1948, literature from East Germany was much more affordable for its citizens than writing from the West.
In addition, out of consideration for West Germany and to avoid losing precious licences, the GDR's publishing landscape retained a series of 'bourgeois', privately owned companies, such as Gustav Kiepenheuer, well into the 1970s, quite unlike other socialist countries. These publishers were eyed and ruled with as much suspicion by the censors as the Christian publishing houses and the publishing houses owned by the Blockparteien, the satellite parties. There was even a series of famous German publishing houses, such as Brockhaus and Reclam, that effectively ran as separate companies in the two states and led a fraught double life, as alienated brothers, after the defection (Republikflucht) of their owners to the West. Indeed, for the entire 40 years of its existence, literary policy in the GDR meant competition with the West, trumping them with better writers, only to watch these writers leave, one by one, for the Federal Republic. East German censorship had also to be wary of the vitriol of West German reviewers, for the enemy was reading along, observing the minutest changes in a text and mocking when a book could not be published.
In the schizophrenic, bracing climate of a divided nation, literature is polarized, its interpretation politically charged on both sides (hüben wie drüben (over here as well as over there), as Germans used to say). In the GDR, this held for public literary criticism as much as for the secret assessments made for censorship. Naturally, the criteria for censorship changed over the years, as did the rules according to which they were applied. It is the general aim of censorship to remain as invisible as possible. Censorship in the GDR, however, was subject to substantial scrutiny and criticism from the start. Publishers and booksellers liked to compare it with national socialist Schrijttumspolitik (politics of literature) and this comparison, strictly forbidden by East German censorship, was highly revealing because the national socialist system, characterized by the chaos of competing institutions, did not have such systematic, centralized pre-publication control. A whole range of East German literary functionaries changed sides in the 1950s, moreover, offering their knowledge of censorship to the West German class enemy. Small wonder that censorship changed form, adapted, learned from frictions and modernized itself nolens volens, even transforming into a driver for reform! From the 1970s, particularly, it protected the critical stance of contemporary GDR writing as a new kind of public sphere, the only possible alternative to the regulated East German press.
This long-term process of obvious modernization, however, was overlaid by the changing seasons typical – even constitutive – of communist systems: the larger political weather systems dominate with their feared changes; then there are the highs and lows of political thawing conducive to reform as well as relapses into icy periods — for example, in 1957, after the Hungarian uprising, and in December 1965, after the infamous Kahlschlagsplenum, the 11th plenary session of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party (SED). This would be when 'heads would roll': responsible editors, publishers and censors were demoted, dismissed or even arrested, while spectacular bans raised the bar for future censorial practice.
Clever publishers and editors needed stamina and patience, but they could see when, after such backlashes, the time for a 'challenging' book that they yearned to see in print was finally ripe. The moment might come for censors to close their tired eyes and adopt a milder practice. But more liberal publishing was not just a question of timing; it was also a matter of being in the right place, such as the publishers who were operating in the shadows of political attention, perhaps far away from the central authority in Berlin, like Greifenverlag based in Rudolstadt in the Thuringian mountains, for example, or Hinstorff Verlag based in Rostock on the Baltic Coast. This worked well until there too the lightning flash of censorship hit and rebellious authors had to find themselves a different publisher, a powerful one, perhaps, with particularly good connections to the echelons of political leadership, such as Aufbau Verlag or Verlag Neues Leben (house-publisher of the Free German Youth), where pseudo-feudal structures of patronage could easily establish themselves. With these publishers, paper stock was more easily accessible and lucrative reprints, always a good source of income for writers in the GDR, a real possibility. Those who did not want to offer themselves to the Politburo or the Stasi did well to find a publisher who was heavily exporting: if a book promised to earn hard currency, a censor would regularly close both eyes. And of course, it was the rebellious, critical authors who were feted by West German critics and found a market in the Federal Republic. This was, roughly speaking, the situation for many East German authors, although the fit was never perfect. Rather, their relations with the regime were complex, multiform and sometimes ambiguous.
But who looked after international writing? How could a book from Australia find an advocate to survive in this bureaucratic publishing maze and see the light of some public reception? As discussed, the division of labour is one of the specific features of socialist publishing and this applied to literary writing too. There were publishers for children and young adults; Verlag Neues Berlin was responsible for science fiction and crime; Eulenspiegel-Verlag for humour and satire. Why would there not be a place for a suitable book from Australia? A new generation of authors was raised by Mitteldeutscher Verlag in Halle, whose editors looked after the 'writing workers' in the factories. Why should they not, as Joachim Specht did, write about their experiences in Australia, if they had any? This is where the publishing houses belonging to SED's 'bourgeois' satellite parties played a special role: Union-Verlag (owned by the Christian Democratic Union party), Buchverlag der Morgen (owned by the Liberal-Democratic Party of Germany) and Verlag der Nation (owned by the National Democratic Party of Germany). These publishing houses exerted considerable political influence, on the back of which they pursued their own, ambitious publishing programmes. Hence they produced the odd title with an Australian connection. Buchverlag der Morgen brought out Xavier Herbert's Capricornia as early as 1960, while Verlag der Nation took on books by Walter Kaufmann and Joachim Specht. Privately owned Kiepenheuer Verlag in Weimar had published communist authors Anna Seghers and Bertolt Brecht in the 1920s but had to hand them over to the GDR's Aufbau Verlag. Instead, Kiepenheuer turned to Kurt Heyd's Christophs Abenteuer in Australien: Eine Erzählung aus der Goldgräberzeit (Christoph's Adventures in Australia: A Story from the Gold Diggers' Era, 1935), a book that had also helped the publisher through the Nazi period. 'Distant as it is from any politics', there was 'no direct need to remove the book from trade,' grumbled much-feared censor Carola Gärtner-Scholle in late 1954, 'but just as little need to publish it'. And yet, the book did come out.
All these publishing houses, however, including the world-famous Reclam Verlag in Leipzig, operated in the shadow of the two leading Berlin publishers for fiction and prose – Aufbau and Volk und Welt – and had to content themselves with the crumbs left by these Leitverlage (key publishers) as they built their lists. Aufbau Verlag was responsible for leading GDR writers such as Bert Brecht, Anna Seghers and Christa Wolf; the classics Goethe, Heine and Schiller; and the humanistische bürgerliche Erbe (humanist bourgeois heritage), with Thomas Mann as its most important representative. Among its most famous migrant authors was iconic reporter Egon Erwin Kisch, whose Australian Landfall, a reportage about his 1934 trip to Sydney as a delegate of the World Committee against War and Fascism and his subsequent arrest, with a brief history of Australia, appeared regularly with Aufbau Verlag from 1948 after being first released in German by Amsterdam-based Verlag Allert de Lange in 1937. It is the crucial point of departure for any discourse about Australia in the GDR, and in other Socialist countries, the one text about Australia which every comrade knows and should have read. Aufbau Verlag only published a single Australian title, contracted from West German Goldmann Verlag: Arthur W. Upfield's bush whodunit Gefahrfür Bony (Bony and the Mouse), which appeared in 1975 as a paperback in a print run of 40,000 copies, although the East German Volkspolizei would hardly have approved of Napoleon Bonaparte's spiritualist methods of investigation.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Figures, vii,List of Tables, ix,
Acknowledgements, xi,
Introduction. South by East: World Literature's Cold War Compass Nicole Moore and Christina Spittel, 1,
Part I. CONTEXTS AND FRAMES,
Chapter 1. Censorship, Australian Literature and Foreign-Language Books in East German Publishing History Siegfried Lokatis, 35,
Chapter 2. Towards a Cross-Border Canon: Marcus Clarke's For the Term of His Natural Life Behind the Wall Russell West-Pavlov, 51,
Chapter 3. Community, Difference, Context: (Re)reading the Contact Zone Jennifer Wawrzinek, 71,
Part II. BOOKS AND WRITERS,
Chapter 4. Sedition as Realism: Frank Hardy's Power without Glory Parts the Iron Curtain Nicole Moore, 93,
Chapter 5. Katharine Susannah Prichard, Dymphna Cusack and 'Women on the Path of Progress' Camille Barrera, 117,
Chapter 6. Walter Kaufmann: Walking the Tightrope Alexandra Ludewig, 139,
Chapter 7. Fictionalizing Australia for the GDR: Adventure Writer Joachim Specht Patricia F. Blume, 163,
Chapter 8. 'To Do Something for Australian Literature': Anthologizing Australia for the German Democratic Republic of the 1970s Christina Spittel, 187,
Part III. LITERARY EXCHANGE,
Chapter 9. 'There I'm a Nobody; Here I'm a Marxian Writer': Australian Writers in the East Susan Lever, 211,
Chapter 10. Behind the Wall, through Australian Eyes: Anna Funder's Stasiland Leah Gerber, 221,
Chapter 11. 'Because It Was Exotic, because It Was So Far Away': Bernhard Scheller in Conversation with Christina Spittel, 239,
Contributors, 249,
Index, 253,