Strange Bird: The Albatross Press and the Third Reich

New Directions in Narrative History

by Michele K. Troy

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.

Genres: Books About Books, Nonfiction, History, World War II

440 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 4, 2017

Reviews

[Desirae · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an enjoyable, illuminating venture into the difficulties faced by an Anglo-German-European publishing house during the inter-war years. This is a book for those of us who love books, particularly the literature of the early 20th century, and those of us who are curious about German and European life in the 1930s. When I lived in Prague in the late 1990s I was starved for books in English and I found an Albatross volume from 1934 in a tiny antiquary that I'd accidentally stumbled across in one of those mysterious cobblestoned alleyways for which Prague is famous. I only just read the book recently (unfortunately it was terrible), but it made me curious about this Albatross publishing house that appeared to have thrived in the 1930s. How was it able to do so in Hitler's Germany? Why did the authorities allow these English books to continue to be sold? This book answers these questions and gives a fascinating insight into how such a company navigated the myriad confusing and shifting rules and regulations governing business among various nations during this time. Highly recommend if you, like me, enjoy reading about the inter-war years in Europe and would enjoy this particular spotlight on one facet of this period's literary life.

[Gary Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book deserves five stars for the crushing amount of difficult research completed alone. The author took what could have been a very dry, pedantic story, and never compromising a single fact turned it into an amazing story of survival, overcoming, and victory during the darkest days of our history. It is a very important history of publishing under the greatest of duress and restrictions in Nazi Germany. This book has tremendous hero's and villains fighting this battle. However, we might disagree as to who is whom when fighting to publish and distribute under Hitler and his evil minions. I needed to know and understand publishing in Europe from the thirties until after WWII. This author turned this into a page turner. Well Done!