In March 1950 Australia's now-celebrated novelist Christina Stead waited in London while her partner, William Blake, visited the newly established German Democratic Republic (GDR) in hope of an appointment to the University of Leipzig as a lecturer in American Literature. Stead had left Australia in 1928, aged 25, leading a wandering life until her eventual return in 1974. Blake went to the GDR in February 1950 to give some lectures, and he had good reason to expect a tenured post at the urging of his friend Henryk Grossmann, professor of politics at the university. Another communist friend from New York, a German who had spent the war there, Max Schroeder, was literary editor at Aufbau Verlag in East Berlin and was arranging for the translation and editing of Blake's novel about German immigrants in the American Civil War, The Copperheads (published in German as Maria Meinhardt in 1952).

Blake wrote to Stead that he ‘was a nobody in America relatively, but here I am a Marxian writer’. He was ‘enchanted’ by Leipzig and felt at home in a city with a picture of Stalin on every wall, where only the ‘stupid, sorry lot’ of conservative Germans criticized the new regime, and he admired the ‘magnificent physical specimens of Russian troops (beautifully clothed) omnipresent, Russian the alternate language and where I am instantly at home’. Leipzig was a country town compared to Berlin, with its stark division between the capitalist West and socialist East: ‘On one side of the street is a socialist society, everything rational and “poor”, on the other a mass of vendors of luxury articles in a “free” economy where at fantastic prices everything can be bought’.

Though he was full of hope for the appointment, Blake expressed some concern about Stead's future as a novelist in the East. He assured her that ‘I truly believe that for you it would be an occasion worth much more than the community of language in Britain. True, one could not stay here forever: an English writer must return to her sources’. He proposed two or three years. Though Blake went through all the interviews and checks necessary for the appointment, it was never offered to him. His friend Grossmann was seriously ill throughout his visit and died shortly after, and suspicions from the Soviet Occupation Authorities meant that there was unwillingness to appoint another American academic.