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Authors who fled Germany and France following the
rise of National Socialism often found themselves stranded abroad
without publishers, and writing in a language foreign to their host
countries. Though several exile presses were established in the early
1930s—Querido Verlag and Allert de Lange in Amsterdam, for
example—fascism’s advance made it necessary during the war years for
exile presses to flee to more distant shores, including those of the
United States and Mexico.
Publishing in Exile brings together for the
first time literary works published by these German-speaking exile
publishers in the United States during the Third Reich. Displayed
along with the original books, rare photos, letters, and archival
material are several unique manuscripts that characterize the writing
done during this dark time, such as Thomas Mann's, Joseph der Ernährer
[Joseph the Provider] and Franz Werfel’s, Die wahre Geschichte vom
wiederhergestellten Kreuz [The True Story of the Restored Cross], as
well as materials from collections in Germany and across the United
States. Many of the titles published by the exile presses in the U.S.
were written by authors banned by the Nazis: Jewish writers, Marxists,
pacifists, internationalists, and other undesirables, but some were
classics that were out of line with Nazi dogma, such as Grimm’s
Märchen.
The exhibit features the seven most prominent
publishers who issued German-language literary texts in the United
States between 1940 and 1950. Gottfried Bermann-Fischer,
editor-in-chief of Fischer Verlag in Berlin, after attempting to work
in Vienna and Stockholm, finally fled to New York. There he founded
L.B. Fischer Corporation with Fritz Landshoff, who had published many
exiled authors in his Querido Verlag in Amsterdam before he too was
forced to leave Europe. Wieland Herzfelde introduced socialism into
publishing in the U.S., forming the only author-run press among the
exiles, Aurora Verlag. Art dealer and publisher Otto Kallir
reestablished his small Viennese house, Johannespresse, in Manhattan,
mainly to publish the work of his friend and fellow exile, the poet
Richard Beer-Hofmann. On the West Coast, Ernst Gottlieb and Felix
Guggenheim joined together as Pazifische Presse to produce deluxe
editions of German fiction. Master of international modernism, Kurt
Wolff, together with his French partner, Jacques Schiffrin, started
Pantheon Books, which went on to have an illustrious history in
American publishing. Against the odds, these émigrés brought out new
books by Bertolt Brecht, Hermann Broch, Alfred Döblin, Lion
Feuchtwanger, Oskar Maria Graf, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Anna Seghers,
Franz Werfel, and Arnold Zweig, among others, as well as reissuing
classics by Hölderlin, Goethe, Hauptmann, and Rilke—all in the
original language.
The exhibition opens on April 23 with a symposium, at which a panel of
experts will describe the experience of publishers in exile and the
crucial assistance they gave fleeing authors, reopening the case file
of important cultural work done on foreign soil during the war.
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