Strange Bird: The Albatross Press and the Third Reich by Michele K. Troy (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 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...