German Studies Review

Recalling his trip to Berlin in 1934, British author, artist, and sometime Hitler admirer Percy Wyndham Lewis noted "the Albatross editions I saw everywhere" (5). The ubiquity noted by Lewis seems surprising at first glance—the Albatross Press had specialized in publishing works of Anglo-American literary modernism for the continental market, in English, since 1932. Later a model for Penguin Books, the firm built a reputation for publishing cutting-edge literature at affordable prices, its offerings including works banned in the English-speaking world, such as James Joyce's Ulysses and D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. The house won the contract to publish "Lady C" four days before Hitler became Chancellor (62).

This now-forgotten publishing house was able to survive and thrive under a regime that railed publicly against "un-German" culture and held books in translation to be "an insidious channel of dangerous ideas [and] a failure of patriotism on the part [End Page 168] of German readers," as one official fulminated in 1938 (157). Yet sales in Germany represented a third of the Albatross Press's total market by the late 1930s. How this situation could be, and the negotiations and compromises required to bring it about, is the subject of Michele Troy's richly detailed volume on the Albatross Press.

Troy's avowedly transnational history of the business and its personalities is written with flair, and very well researched—her bibliography lists twenty-eight archives in seven countries, as well as seven similarly dispersed private collections. Among the wealth of information on the key personalities of Albatross Press and their relationships with each other, the somewhat slippery figure of John Holroyd-Reece stands out. Symptomatic of the times is the fact that his international dealings called him to the attention of the French Secret Service, which opened a file on him as a suspected German agent in 1937. Troy's sympathetic portrayal makes clear that his personal charm, ambition, and skill, as well as his "well-honed amorality" (324), were necessary to exploit the regime's economic and ideological priorities for the survival of the business. The reader is tempted to judge Holroyd-Reece more harshly than Troy herself does, given her account of him browbeating an associate-turned-rival while the latter was in a hospital bed after being hit by car, and indeed her admission, at the book's end, that it remains unclear whether Albatross ever "turned a profit on his watch" (325).

Indeed, little in this book will disabuse readers inclined to see the 1930s, with W.H. Auden, as a "low, dishonest decade." Even prior to Hitler's chancellorship, a German competitor used xenophobic and antisemitic innuendo in an unedifying attempt to snuff out their nascent rivals. For the Nazi regime, it was useful to cultivate the market for English-language books as a much-needed source of foreign currency; in this way, Troy argues, "Nazi censorship [was] as much economic as moral" (101). Yet such tolerance extended only so far, with the vigilance of Nazi newspapers such as Der Stürmer leading to Albatross offerings by Jewish authors being banned and the regime blocking the firm's takeover of its German competitor due to the former's "foreign owners" (78). Troy also reveals a degree of self-censorship on the part of the publishers, making substantial cuts to Aldous Huxley's Beyond the Mexique Bay (1934) and removing its more explicit criticisms of Hitler's regime to ensure that at least an abridged version of the book could enter the German market. Its initial run of 12,000 copies sold out. Just as important as the export trade and accommodations with the government to the survival of the Albatross Press was the well-known factionalism of the Nazi hierarchy and "fragmentation" of its bureaucracy. Troy emphasizes, as have historians such as Erhard Bahr and Guenter Lewy, that "multiple government factions struggled for control of the cultural arena" (133, 64), and that, particularly in the regime's early years, Nazi censorship was "far less organized and efficient" than often believed (92). In this context of polycracy, even "anarchy," in the cultural realm, a firm specializing in English-language books also came under less scrutiny precisely [End Page 169] because its offerings were accessible to fewer readers (95), who were concentrated among the educated middle-class and thus "less dangerous to the Volk" (99).

Troy effectively positions her findings within a broader debate on cultural policy and censorship under the Third Reich, although this reviewer would have liked to see some of these points explored in more detail. These wider issues are often raised fleetingly, before the narrative returns to the details of the history of the business and its protagonists. Troy has indeed extracted full value from her sources, but some of the biographical detail on fairly minor players in this story might have been omitted. At times the impact made by Albatross seems overstated. Yet Troy skilfully reveals the Albatross Press's success in perceiving a shifting market for its product, from Anglo-American tourists to domestic German readers, gambling on a curiosity about Anglophone culture, previously noted by Gerwin Strobl, which survived long into the Third Reich. This curiosity was due not least to the regime's own failure: its security services in 1938 noted that translated literature offset an "obvious lack of good, entertaining reading" available in Germany (162).

"Burdened by its past" (312) after 1945, the Albatross Press failed to make a successful transition into the postwar world: squeezed by cheaper, Marshall-Aid backed US competitors, and encountering hostility from Allied occupiers and continental publics alike as a "German" or even "Nazi" concern, the firm ceased trading in 1955. Yet in her highly readable and richly detailed history, Troy makes a case for Albatross as an interwar transnational success story, skilfully navigating the strictures of the Nazi state and keeping the flame of Anglo-American literary modernism—and thereby, she argues, liberal democratic values more generally—in challenging circumstances. At a time when such values, and international understanding more broadly, seem increasingly imperiled once more, her book makes for illuminating, and occasionally melancholy, reading.