It is the flashpoint of Australia's cultural Cold War: on 18 July 1951, in Melbourne, communist Frank Hardy emerges to cheering crowds as the victor of a trial for criminal libel brought against his novel Power without Glory. He had first been charged in October 1950, only five days after the federal Parliament of Australia passed a bill outlawing the Communist Party of Australia that subsequently would be overturned by the country's high court. The detailed realism of Hardy's book was at once its authority and its danger, since it was clearly based on the life of wealthy and influential Melbourne identity John West, and suggested collusion with crime on the part of both major political parties, implicating senior figures of the Catholic Church. And it seems clear that the novel was charged with criminal libel only because public opinion meant that it could not be charged with sedition successfully. In East Germany, however, that notionally seditious realism was transformed, or perhaps literalized, to instead sign for Australia itself. As the cover blurb for the Panther Books English language version from 1956 suggests, for the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Australian ‘reality’ was rather unreal; a necessarily outlandish or hyperbolic ‘adventure’ that could be expected to manifest as drama and, in Hardy's novel, political drama at that.

Macht ohne Ruhm became the first piece of Australian fiction to be published in the GDR when released by the internationalist house Volk und Welt in 1952. Hardy's visit to the new nation in 1951 and his book's wide reception show him acting as at once a cultural ambassador for his home country and its political critic. He was a conduit for Australian communist writers later published in East Germany, including Katharine Susannah Prichard, Dorothy Hewett and even Walter Kaufmann, before Kaufmann's return to Germany. And, with Egon Kisch's widely read Landung in Australien from 1937, Hardy's work established a frame through which exotic Australia would continue to be understood by the GDR as an exemplary backward capitalist state: repressive, exploitative, materialist, sexist and racist.