Strange Bird
The Albatross Press and the Third Reich
-
- $25.99
-
- $25.99
Publisher Description
The first book about the Albatross Press, a Penguin precursor that entered into an uneasy relationship with the Nazi regime to keep Anglo-American literature alive under fascism
The Albatross Press was, from its beginnings in 1932, a “strange bird”: a cultural outsider to the Third Reich but an economic insider. It was funded by British-Jewish interests. Its director was rumored to work for British intelligence. A precursor to Penguin, it distributed both middlebrow fiction and works by edgier modernist authors such as D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway to eager continental readers. Yet Albatross printed and sold its paperbacks in English from the heart of Hitler’s Reich.
In her original and skillfully researched history, Michele K. Troy reveals how the Nazi regime tolerated Albatross—for both economic and propaganda gains—and how Albatross exploited its insider position to keep Anglo-American books alive under fascism. In so doing, Troy exposes the contradictions in Nazi censorship while offering an engaging detective story, a history, a nuanced analysis of men and motives, and a cautionary tale.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Albatross Press, started shortly before the rise of Nazism, had a strange and perplexing business model: it was incorporated as a German firm, with an office in Paris and English financial backing. It was the purveyor of the great (and often controversial) modern authors of England and America (Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence) to an increasingly tumultuous continental Europe. In the hands of Troy, a professor of English at the University of Hartford, the story of how this English-language book publishing company survived in the heart of the Third Reich becomes an absorbing tale of economics, censorship, and literature. Troy has brilliantly pieced together the engrossing lives and corporate chess game of Albatross's three principal players: the enigmatic and urbane John Holroyd-Reece, the company's public face and mastermind of the German-English-French axis that made Albatross unique; passionate Max Christian Wegner, who had been abruptly dismissed from Albatross's chief rival in the English-language continental book trade, Tauchnitz; and Kurt Enoch, who ran the main office in Hamburg and whose escape from Germany to France to the U.S. forms a gripping subplot. Troy's riveting exploration of Albatross is a rewarding mix of publishing history, literary criticism, and biography.
