This essay essay focuses on the divided city of post-war Berlin whose literary life in the 1950s and 1960s was characterised by the struggle for cultural recognition, the promotion of cultural internationalisation, and an ever-growing cultural competition. Taking as her starting point the reviews of two literary festivals held in the Western and Eastern part of the city in the 1960s, Müller-Tamm discusses the mutually stimulating dynamics of cosmopolitanism in West Berlin and socialist internationalism in East Berlin. Both ideological factions sought to outdo each other by implementing or, at least, cultivating competing notions of a world literary scene. While West Berlin became the object of a political strategy that sought to overcome the city's insular provinciality by proclaiming West Berlin an international cultural centre, the government of the GDR interpreted Western cosmopolitanism as a matter of cultural imperialism and, in turn, sought to increase the prestige of German socialist literature by promoting an international network of socialist writers, translators, and publishers. Müller-Tamm's essay thus explores a crucial example in the literary and cultural institutionalisation of two competing political visions of modernity, internationalisation, and social progress.