The majority of Australian novels accepted for publication by the Ministry of Culture were by authors with Communist Party affiliation or by authors dealing with issues of political and/or social oppression and contestation. These novels were often taken up for publication in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) because they illustrated the destructive effects of a capitalist society in which individualism, the commercialization of difference and the dictates of a competitive market economy driven by desire and acquisition could be seen to result in the marginalization of certain sections of society. Yet despite the aims of the GDR to differentiate itself from the capitalist West, and to frame imported literature as a didactic means of reinforcing this differentiation, it nevertheless used the same binary structures of identity constitution as those underwriting nation-states in the West. In this sense both the GDR and Australia had newly established national identities in which notions of self, community, and state were consistently constructed upon dialectical models of identity differentiation that depended upon the subjection and marginalization of otherness.

Two Australian novels approved for publication in the GDR were Fergus Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, first published in Melbourne by Kemp and Boyce in 1886, and Xavier Herbert's Capricornia, first published by Angus and Robertson in Sydney in 1938. Hume's Mystery tells the story of exploitation, murder and blackmail as it moves between the genteel suburbs of East Melbourne and the inner-city slums of Little Bourke Street. Since its first publication in 1886 and subsequent republication in London the following year, the novel has experienced enormous popularity around the world, appearing in at least 27 editions and several translations, including Swedish (1889), Norwegian (1891), French (1914), Danish (1917) and Spanish (1994). It was translated into German as Das Geheimnis des Fiakers in 1895 by the Stuttgart publishing house Lutz and it was this edition that was subsequently reprinted in 1984 by Verlag Das Neue Berlin (Fig. 3.1). Curiously, the German edition relocates the scene of events from Melbourne to the very bourgeois European setting of Vienna, thus necessitating the removal of all descriptive passages particular to Melbourne and its colonial context in the British Empire. Yet the primary narrative of exploitation and blackmail remains as a disturbance of a social space that is heavily regulated and patrolled in order to ensure the class-based hierarchy placing the aristocracy over the working classes.