This paper presents part of a larger work on the reception of the Bröntes in Germany. Underlying this project is the observation that most readers of foreign literature – with the exception of translators and other foreign language professionals – are hardly aware of the fact that they are reading translations, and thus take the translated text for the original. Starting from this viewpoint, the author wants to examine if and to what extent the reception of a specific national literature in a foreign country is influenced by translations, by publishing policies or by social, sociological or cultural factors in general. Therefore, the author looks at the function of translations – as integral literary texts – in a given target culture and compares it with the function of the foreign language text in its source culture, in order to learn which factors might have influenced the possibly diverging reception in the receptive cultures.