Thus is happened that we eleven writers, some German, some Austrian, and one from Prague, decided in the summer of 1944 to jointly found a publishing house for free German literature in America. The manuscripts were there, the enthusiasm too; as usual in such cases, all that was missing was the money. But we found the means to print a beautiful prospectus. We sent it to all the German readers whose addresses we could find, requesting that they subscribe. The response was not overwhelming, but enough at least to fund the first volume. It had already been sent to the typesetter's when the old American firm of Schoenhof's Foreign Books, Inc. in Cambridge, run by former Viennese bookseller Paul Müller, whose experiences in German concentration camps made him particularly able to appreciate our efforts, offered to take over the general distribution for Aurora production, and in this way set the publishing house on a secure financial footing. This happened in the s ummer of 1945. Since then, eight Aurora titles have come out, works by Oskar maria Graf, F.C. Weiskopf, Ferdinand Bruckner, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Bloch, Verthold Viertel [sic], Ernst Waldinger, and Alfred Döblin. Further works will appear in 1946 - by Anna Seghers, Wieland Herzfelde, Bodo Uhse, Egon Wrwin Kisch, John Heartfield, George Grosz, Lion Feuchtwanger, in addition to a "History of German Literature in Exile 1933-1945," with more than one hundred extracts, edited by Kurt Pinthus and F.C. Weiskopf, as well as a German reader, entitled, Morgenröte [Dawn], introduced by Heinrich Mann, with contributions from classic and contemporary authors.

There is major interest in the books everywhere, but greatest where to this day they have been unavailable, in Germany and Austria. We have no doubt that in the near future these books - imported or in new printings- will also be placed in the hands of those for whom, above everyone else, they were written.