This article contains an analysis of the issues of cultural transfer during the First World War in the areas occupied by the Central Powers and the territories affected by the war. The German propaganda institutions that emerged after August 1914 functioned, somewhat contrary to initial intentions, as a network for transnational exchanges and were used by publishers, translators, writers, and other actors in the cultural sphere of the time. On the basis of archival research, the author advances several ideas on, respectively, culturalmobility in the years 1914–1918, cultural propaganda in the period of the First World War as the prehistory (and not the antithesis) of later cultural policy, and the role of cultural propaganda/cultural policy in research into literary transfers.