Publisher persisted despite Nazi rule

By: Reviewed by Douglas J. Johnston Posted: 4:00 AM CDT Saturday, Jun. 10, 2017

THIS book’s title is a double entendre.

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THIS book’s title is a double entendre.

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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/06/2017 (3386 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THIS book’s title is a double entendre.

The “strange bird” of title is the iconic bird that lent its name to and adorned paperback book covers of Second World War German publisher Albatross Press.

But it’s also an allusion to how this odd bird of a publisher got away with printing, in English, Anglo-American books right under the nose of Nazi German censors who deemed pretty much all such literature deviant and contrary to Aryan values.

Hamburg’s Albatross Press finessed the publication of the likes of Aldous Huxley, Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster and Ernest Hemingway under Hitler’s Third Reich — virtually from his attaining power in 1933 until near mid-war, in 1941.

University of Hartford English professor Michelle Troy’s crisp yet detailed account of this strange survivor bird of a publisher’s existence under fascism is a treat to read.

The Albatross Press did a delicate dance with the Nazis for years. It kept Anglo-American literature, and thereby Anglo-American ideas and values, alive in the heart of the German Reich.

The Nazis, in turn, tolerated it for one reason — money, specifically the foreign currency its hefty export sales to the rest of continental Europe provided the German state.

To build their military, the Nazis had to export more goods than they imported. Trade surpluses were critical to the purchase of foreign raw materials required to build ships, tanks and artillery. While Germany’s propaganda ministry abhorred Albatross, the economics ministry knew a foreign-currency cash cow when it saw one. So for the longest time, Albatross was permitted to ply its trade.

What makes Albatross’s survival even more astonishing and intriguing is how ultimate ownership of the company was hidden from the Nazis via a holding company. Albatross Press was a German corporation, but one solely owned by a British holding company. Better yet, a holding company funded principally by Jewish investors.

Albatross was immensely successful. It was the pioneer and premier European mass-market paperback publisher of its day. Much of its success was due to the marketing and manufacturing wiles of its managing director, John Holroyd-Reece who, though German-born of a Jewish father, was a British citizen — facts the Nazis either didn’t know or willfully ignored. Troy even cites speculation, without adopting it, that he was in fact a British intelligence agent during the war.

Albatross was both precursor to, and the model for, Penguin Books.

Troy alleges Penguin founder Allen Lane gleaned his knowledge of mass-production techniques from Holroyd-Reece as a result of an abortive mid-1930s deal with Albatross. Even Lane’s new publishing firm’s avian name was a calculated borrow from Albatross.

Before the Nazis forced the closure of Albatross in Hamburg, Holroyd-Reece effectively moved its headquarters to Paris, only to see its business eventually shut down there, too, under the German occupation.

Postwar, Albatross never regained traction in the publishing world. It limped on until 1955, when it officially ceased business.

In portraying the rise, decline and fall of Albatross, Troy has concocted an unorthodox, but very fine, blend of a book. It’s part business story, part literary criticism, part cultural record and part political history — but all good.

Douglas J. Johnston is a Winnipeg lawyer and writer.