Strange Bird

The Albatross Press and the Third Reich

Bibliographic Data

ID23464367
AuthorsMichele K Troy (corresponding author)
Year2017
Pages423
Publication date2017-04-04
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueStrange bird (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherYale University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.12987/yale/9780300215687.001.0001
OpenAlexW4241859944
ISBN9780300215687
Open LibraryOL27235754M
LanguageEN
Citations received4

This book is 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. Albatross 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 Adolf Hitler's Reich. The book 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, the book 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.

Albatross · Archaeology · Art · Art history · German · Insider · Literature · Nazism · Political science · Anarchism and Radical Politics · Cultural History and Identity Formation · European history and politics · History · Law · 20th century · Albatross Verlag · Drittes Reich · Englisch · Germany · Kulturpolitik · Literatur · Publishers and publishing

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