“Geopolitics” had supposedly become obsolete after the end of the Cold War, which was also interpreted as the “end of history” of major conflicts of political systems and the integration of all non-Western cultures into the Western culture of liberal democracies. However, the concept of geopolitics and its return are very present again in public and academic debates today. The article aims to show that and how geopolitics also has an impact in the field of literature through international exchange processes of literary translations. In addition, it methodologically explores the question of how the political science term can be modified so that it can become a comparative analytical tool of a field-analytical cultural and literary studies. The focus is on East-West transfer during the Cold War and under globalised market conditions. For historical concretisation, exemplary contours of the promotion of translation at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin from the 1990s onwards will be examined.