TRANS Nr. 17: 1.11. - Todd C. Hanlin: The Transmission of Austrian Literature to America during the 1930s

When writing about the transmission of one culture to another, there may be differing means of stimulus and reception for the various fine arts. For many of the arts, transference between cultures may be immediate and require no mediation: Sculpture, painting, architecture, and music can be appreciated and assimilated without a knowledge of the originator’s personal history or cultural heritage. Literature and philosophy, however, being word-bound, often require an intermediary or negotiator, a translator to make them comprehensible in another cultural or linguistic environment. In a discussion of the literatures of Austria and the United States, for example, there are few American writers who are fluent in the language and culture of Austria; major American writers who have lived for an extended period of time in Austria and betray at least some Austrian influence on their lives or thoughts might include Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Sinclair Lewis, and John Irving. But such writers apparently are the exception, rather than the rule. Most Americans must rely on others to transmit Austrian ideas or values, their impact being somewhat modified through the filter of translation: Is it an accurate summation of the Austrian author’s thoughts; a readable translation; and to what degree does it reflect the original foreign culture? Does it leave a positive or negative image with the target audience?

It is evident that translations and translators can play a crucial yet often invisible or inaudible role in cultural transmission. I vaguely remember reading, many years ago in a now-forgotten source, that an Austrian author, one Miss Vicki Baum, was extremely successful in the America market due to her decision to immigrate to the United States in the early 1930s, thereby acquiring (as if through her own personal authority) the best translators America had to offer; this was to account for any success she enjoyed in the U.S., but also explain why the ensuing waves of immigrant German-language writers during the course of the late 1930s were unable to find experienced translators and thus literary success—the obvious implication being, that a talented translator could make a bestselling silk purse out of a Baum sow’s ear.

This paper attempts to address some of these issues, featuring three Austrian authors from the 1930s—the exiles Vicki Baum, Franz Werfel, and Stefan Zweig—and their impact on American culture during the Third Reich. We may hope to establish whether their respective and relative successes could be due to the prestige of each author’s American publisher, the attendant publicity on behalf of the literary work, the general appeal of their topics or style, or perhaps to the abilities of their individual translators.

The original observation on Baum’s experiences in the U.S. during the 1930s, this crucial period in the political histories of the two countries, provoked my curiosity: Was it possible for a second-rate writer (such as the “unknown” Baum) to preclude world-class authors (such as Werfel and Zweig) from publishing in America on the simple basis of her well-timed flight from Europe? And if so, was this simply an historical anomaly? Moreover, these issues prompted ancillary questions: Did these newly translated works present a positive or negative image to an isolationist American audience, perhaps molding attitudes toward the original author and his or her native land—in other words, to what extent did these translated works, as popular and wide-spread as they were, intentionally or unintentionally influence America's attitude toward Austria at a pivotal juncture in that country's history? Or were there extenuating circumstances that might complicate our initial investigation?

For German-language authors, the 1920s and 1930s were critical for their reception in many foreign countries. In the U.S., for example, German culture was highly regarded before the advent of World War I, yet wartime propaganda severely damaged that perception, ultimately leading to American intervention in Europe, opposing Germany and Austria on the battlefield. Nevertheless, certain authors continued to attract American readers, especially those authors who were considered to be pacifist, cosmopolitan, or at least politically neutral toward the war—including the three authors under discussion, Baum, Werfel, and Zweig. At this juncture, it is instructive to identify those works of German literature that found great success, as bestsellers—for our purposes from 1929 through 1946:(1)

Clearly, Austrian writers were extremely popular during this period, regardless of the political situation. (Though not an Austrian, Erich Maria Remarque first gained a global readership with his anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front, its companion piece The Road Back, and fifteen years later, at the conclusion of World War II, with Arch of Triumph.)

Though I am unable to cite the long-lost source that criticized Baum for dominating the literary-exile situation, such views were not, and are not isolated in the critical literature. Frequently Baum is depicted as a hack writer of trash novels whose popular success came at the expense of more worthy writers who fled Europe at a later date. One prominent cultural critic labeled her a “facile mediocrity,”(3) and others emphasized her production of so-called “Trivialliteratur.”(4) Even attempts at positive evaluation feel the need to counter the more-prevalent slurs; as one admirer explains: “Die erfolgreichsten Schriftsteller…Vicki Baum und Erich Maria Remarque, galten (und gelten) als Bestsellerfabrikanten, Vertreter eines internationalen Belletristik-Jetset, und wurden literaturkritisch und literaturwissenschaftlich, meines Erachtens zu Unrecht, nicht immer für voll oder ernst genommen.”(5)

With that, we encounter the never-ending literary debate concerning quality vs. quantity: good literature will seldom sell a lot (which alone is proof of its inherent merit), while popular books sell in great numbers (thereby corroborating their mediocrity). But this is an aesthetic dispute and has nothing to do with the existence or prevalence of translated works in a foreign culture. In reality, the huge success of Grand Hotel forced the hurried translation of Baum’s earlier works by various individuals to take advantage of her sudden celebrity. Several of the more important texts during the 1930s were rendered by Basil Creighton, especially after the initial success of his Grand Hotel,(6) though others, known and unknown, attempted to translate her works as well; in the first two years of her American adventure, Baum herself also published four short stories that were obviously translated, but appeared without attribution.(7) By 1935, with Men Never Know (Das grosse Einmaleins), her current work was published almost simultaneously in the original German and an English translation.(8) Then, beginning in 1941, her works would appear first in English and only then be translated into German, with the explanation that Baum had learned to write in English and from this point on did, indeed, author her novels in her second language.(9) Though this is an astonishing feat, it is not without precedence.(10) Perhaps her decision to become an American citizen accelerated her desire to become fluent in English, though it is also conceivable that Baum, faced with the uncertainty of a reliable translator, concluded that she should learn to write in English and thus obviate the impediment.

The following list shows the publication dates of the English translations with translator (when known), and then Baum’s original German title and its date of publication:(11)

(After Baum had been writing for at least twenty-five years primarily in English, it may seem baffling that her memoirs would first be published in German as Es war alles ganz anders, and then appear two years later in English as It Was All Quite Different. The awkward English label is evidently a direct translation of the more-fluent German title, so we could safely assume this was also the order of their origination. In fact, the book was only indirectly authored by Baum, but rather was edited and published posthumously by her daughter-in-law, and the two editions are substantially different.(12))

At the time she emigrated to the U.S. in mid-1932, Vicki Baum was forty-four years old, wife of an orchestra conductor and mother of two children; since 1914 she had authored eighteen prose pieces, almost exclusively novels and novellas, and was an editor with Ullstein on their Uhu magazine. Though successful on a European scale, it must have been difficult to resist the financial security and personal safety an invitation to America involved. Whether she was prescient enough to intuit the rise of Hitler and the fate of Jews like herself, as she claimed,(13) was vulnerable to the adulation of Nelson Doubleday and the likes of Sinclair Lewis(14) and the prospect of celebrity status, the possibility of living with her family in the United States was exceedingly attractive to this intelligent, financially-realistic author and businesswoman.

Menschen im Hotel was first translated for the British market, and the rights to the translation were later purchased for an American readership. As Lynda J. King writes:

During the 1920s several of Baum’s books were translated into other languages, but Menschen im Hotel was the first to be translated into English, the most important language for international fame. The 1930 translation of this novel in Great Britain signaled the beginning of Baum’s rise to international prominence, since under the title Grand Hotel it became an overnight sensation in that country. Baum’s next success came on Broadway, where the U.S. version of the play adapted from the novel premiered in November 1930 and was hailed as the hit of the season. Grand Hotel enjoyed a 257-performance run in New York before moving to other U.S. cities. Meanwhile, U.S. publishers Doubleday, Doran overcame obstacle after obstacle to obtain the English rights to the novel, so convinced were the decision makers in New York that the book would be a best-seller in the U.S. Their speculations proved true, and the novel Grand Hotel shot to the top of the best-seller list immediately upon publication.(15)

The reasons for its instant success are summarized by one scholar: “With the shift of scene to Berlin, Baum moves from the novel of development focusing on a central character [as in the earlier stud. chem. Helene Willfüer] to a modernist montage of narrative lines and a generic mixing of New Objectivity, romance and the thriller. Like Döblin’s Alexanderplatz, Baum’s hotel is a microcosm of Berlin; as cosmopolitan as the sanatorium in Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg, it also stands in for Europe; and it points across the Atlantic through the motif of jazz to America where Kafka’s Hotel Occidental was located.”(16) In layman’s terms, it is fast-paced, spellbinding, with problematic situations and fascinating characters—in short, a “good read.”

Since the book was not originally translated for an American readership, the resulting text is predictably an odd fit. The foreign setting in and around Berlin and the characters’ names alone could have proven an obstacle. Yet perhaps because the language was British English, it lent the proceedings a decidedly European flavor. To ease the transition, the spelling was Americanized, and final editing assured that passages were not awkward or confusing. The following excerpt shows the main love interest, an aging ballerina following a performance, with her new lover in her hotel room:

The room had taken on that utterly strange and enchanted appearance often encountered in hotel bedrooms. Beneath the window a number of cars whirred and groaned like wild beasts, for the banquet of the League of Humanity was over and the departures from entrance No. II were in full swing. The night had grown cooler. Grunsinskaya came back out of the whirl of her fancies with a start and a shudder. Pimenov—with his new butterfly ballet—will think I have gone out of my mind. Perhaps I have. The flight of her fancy had only lasted a minute, yet she returned from it to her bed as though from a long journey. Gaigern was still there. She was almost astonished to find this man still there against her shoulder and to feel his hair and his hands and his breathing.(17)

It is understandable that this mixture of adventure, big business, suspense and romance between intriguing (though harmless) foreigners should attract such a large international readership and thereby create sustained interest in sequels or at least further works by such a spellbinding author.

Franz Werfel enjoyed a long and successful literary career, first gaining attention for his pre-World-War-I Expressionist poetry, though equally respected for his later dramatic and prose works. By the late 1920s, his works were frequently published in English, until the demand grew to the point where almost every year saw the publication of yet another one of his works.

To document the frequency with which Werfel’s works were translated, published, and sold on the American market, the following table offers the dates of publication and English titles that appeared in the two decades between 1926 and 1947:(18)

Werfel obviously enjoyed a continuous string of successful plays and novels that occasioned his publication by major publishing houses, primarily the Viking Press. Though he did not enjoy the services of one distinguished translator, he was capably rendered, in turn, by the likes of Clifton Fadiman, Geoffrey Dunlop, Moray Firth, Ludwig Lewisohn, and even once by Thomas Mann’s English translator, H.T. Lowe-Porter. Thus if there was competition between Baum and Werfel for influential publishers, for able translators, and for supportive publicity, it is not evident in the above documentation. Indeed, Werfel was in a more favorable position: Before Baum had even set foot on American soil, Werfel had already found a growing readership and a stable of able translators. The high quality of the translations can be seen in the following excerpt from the bestselling 1934 novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. This selection is taken from chapter V of Book One, “Interlude of the Gods,” describing the initial meeting between the German pastor Lepsius and Enver Pasha, the military leader of the Ottoman Empire—incidentally, a passage Werfel repeatedly read on his lecture tour through Germany in 1932:

Before leaving Berlin, Johannes Lepsius had asked for minute accounts of Enver Pasha, yet he felt surprised that this Turkish Mars, this one of the seven or nine arbiters of the life or death of the world, should be so unimposingly diminutive. He instantly saw the reason for those portraits of Frederick the Great and Napoleon. Heroes five feet tall, little conquerors, always on tip-toe, who force a way to power to spite their inches. Lepsius would have wagered anything that Enver Pasha wore high heels. He did not, in any case, take off his lambskin kepi, which certainly looked much taller than dress regulations allowed. The gold-tabbed marshal’s (or fancy-dress) uniform, beautifully moulded to the waist, lent added majesty, by the smart, stiff perfection of its line, investing this figure, in conjunction with gleaming rows of medals, with something almost frivolously young, ornately bold. ‘The gipsy-king,’ reflected Lepsius and, although his heart was pounding, he could not escape a rampant waltz of his early youth: “All this and more/You may be sure/I’ll do.”(19)

The well-known story of Werfel’s prayer at Lourdes and ultimate salvation from Nazi capture resulted in great publicity, beginning upon his arrival in New York, and a bestseller two years running. The following is an excerpt from this 1942 novel, The Song of Bernadette, taken from Chapter One, “In the Cachot,” which introduces the modesty and poverty of Bernadette’s father and thus his family:

François Soubirous gets up in the dark. It is just six. Long ago he lost possession of the silver watch which was a wedding present from his clever sister-in-law Bernarde Casterot. The ticket for it as well as the tickets for other poor little treasures issued by the municipal pawn brokerage had lapsed the autumn before. Soubirous knows that it is six even though the chimes of the parish church of Saint Pierre had not yet rung for early Mass. The poor have the time in their bones. Without dial or bell they know what hour has struck, for the poor are always afraid of being late.(20)

This exemplary translation captures the poetic qualities of Werfel’s prose, the emotion (and exhaustion) of Europe and its superstitions, as well as its unexpected miracles. It is a bravura piece by the translator Lewisohn and certainly fulfilled his readers’ inflated expectations.

Stefan Zweig was a well-educated, broadly traveled cosmopolitan, whose idealistic-humanistic works were popular on a global scale. Almost from the beginning, Zweig had a regular team of siblings, Eden and Cedar Paul, who did the majority of his non-fiction historical portraits in English translation; though their reputation as engaged socialists tended to overshadow their other accomplishments, they produced exemplary translations in great quantities.(21) To document the frequency with which Zweig’s works were translated, published, and sold on the American market, the following table offers the dates of publication and English titles that appeared in the more than three decades between 1913 and 1945:(22)

Zweig consequently had a continuous string of successful works that occasioned his publication by major publishing houses, primarily the Viking Press. For much of his career (and for the bulk of his major works from 1921 to 1938) he enjoyed the services of the distinguished translation team of Eden and Cedar Paul. To illustrate the vital, compelling qualities of Zweig’s prose (and the Pauls’ translation!), let us consider a passage from chapter XIII, “The Queen Becomes Unpopular,” from the bestselling non-fiction biography of 1933, Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman:

More dangerous than this toothless yesterday, which could no longer bite but could only vent its spleen, was the new generation of those who had never tasted the sweets of power and had become weary of being kept in the background. In its exclusiveness and indifference, Versailles had cut itself off so completely from the real France that it was wholly unaware of the new currents of thought which were agitating the land. An intelligent, a cultured middle class had come into being. The new bourgeois had been taught by Jean Jacques Rousseau that they possessed rights, and, looking across the Channel, they saw in England a government which was democratic at any rate in form. Those of their order who returned to France after taking part in the American War of Independence brought tidings of a remarkable country where differences of caste had been abolished by the notions of equality and liberty. In France, however, they found nothing but rigidity and decay, for which the incapacity of the court was largely responsible.(23)

Two years later, Zweig had another bestseller, with his 1935 biography, Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles. Here I have chosen the opening paragraph from chapter one, “Queen in the Cradle,” for its dramatic power, its ability to lure the unsuspecting reader into a world of intrigue and danger:

Mary Stuart was but six days old when she became Queen of Scotland, thus obeying in spite of herself what appears to have been the law of her life: to receive too soon and without conscious joy what Fate had to give her. On the same dreary December day in 1542 that Mary was born at Linlithgow Castle, her father, James V, was breathing his last in the royal palace at Falkland, little more than twenty miles away. Although he had hardly reached the age of thirty-one, he was broken on the wheel of life, tired of his crown, and wearied of perpetual warfare. He had proved a brave and chivalrous man, fundamentally cheerful by disposition, a passionate friend of the arts and of women, trusted by his people. Many a time would he put on a disguise in order to participate unrecognized at village merry-makings, dancing and joking with the peasant folk. But this unlucky scion of an unlucky house had been born into a wild epoch and within the borders of an intractable land. From the outset he seemed foredoomed to a tragical destiny.(24)

Lynda J. King emphasizes the importance of Austrian literature, specifically literature produced by Baum and Zweig, in the context of world literature: “Imagine it is 1933 and a polling organization has been hired to discover the German-language authors known best around the world: Austrians Stefan Zweig and Vicki Baum, the number-one and number-two most translated German authors of the era.”(25) If there was competition between Baum and Zweig for influential publishers, for able translators and for supportive publicity, it is not evident in the above documentation—in fact, he has obviously enjoyed a decided advantage over Baum, as well as Werfel! Zweig’s early success in the English-speaking world created an established reading public and a ready-made market for his subsequent works. In this regard, it is difficult to overestimate the impact and importance of the Pauls’ role; their translations of Zweig’s major works are truly genial and must have contributed to a substantial degree to the author’s success in the English-speaking countries.

Regrettably, there seems to be little validity to our unknown critic’s original verdict that Vicki Baum benefited from engaging the best translators before more-famous writers could emigrate, or the implication that a competent translation is the most dominant factor in a work’s potential success in a new cultural setting. Conversely, we must begin to admit that Vicki Baum was a writer of substantial talents, a shrewd businesswoman who earned her fans the hard way—one book at a time.

By the end of the 1930s, when Baum, Werfel, and Zweig were at the height of their popularity in the United States, their widely published works were joined by yet another Austrian author who topped the bestselling list in 1939… Adolf Hitler, with Mein Kampf.(26) This must have been a timely, yet sensitive publication, what with current events following the 1938 annexation of Austria, and the repatriation of the Bohemian and Moravian Germans in Czechoslovakia. Thus for this Book-of-the-Month Club selection it was apparently necessary to insert as preface a list of twenty-two individuals who formed a “committee” to sponsor the publication of this edition, including Pearl Buck, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Theodore Dreiser, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Eugene O’Neill, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., Monsignor John A. Ryan, Norman Thomas, William Allen White, and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, as well as to list ten “Editorial Sponsors” on the title page. Moreover, an Introduction, signed by ten individuals, stated that till now there had only been a version of Mein Kampf in English that was a “condensation,” published in 1933 as My Battle, abridged and translated by E.T.S. Dugdale,(27) containing less than half of the total text. Furthermore, a Publisher’s Note mentions an “editorial committee,” and notably Dr. Alvin Johnson, Mr. George N. Schuster, Mr. Helmut Ripperger, and Mr. C.H. Hand, Jr.—though without explicit mention of any “official” translator(s).

A major feature of this edition were the copious annotations whose purpose was to guarantee “accuracy and objectivity,” because “(F)ew Americans are, in the very nature of things, so aware of the German historical background that they can surmise without help what the author is discussing.”(28) The challenge in publishing Mein Kampf was probably not in finding an adequate translator; more likely political considerations dictated the editorial board to present “committees” of sponsors, editors, and collaborators—less to share the credit than to dilute any blame for even publishing this provocative text (which was nonetheless destined to become a bestseller by its inherently inflammatory nature). As an afterthought, one finds it difficult to believe that any royalties from this bestseller were ever paid out to the author, Mr. Hitler.

According to Lynda J. King, the bestselling Menschen im Hotel from 1929 was translated into eighteen different languages. Das grosse Einmaleins from 1935 was rendered into fifteen foreign languages, stud.chem. Helene Willfüer from 1928 into fourteen, Hell in Frauensee from 1927 was translated into twelve, Hotel Shanghai from 1939 into eleven, and even Theme for Ballet/Ballerina from 1958 into eleven (including German); in addition, they were often republished in multiple editions in many of the languages.(29) In other words, the competition between authors and works for able translators was perhaps equally as contested in other cultures as in the American example illustrated in this paper—and occurred many times over the years.(30) We could thus expect that established, successful authors like Werfel and Zweig would already have found reputable publishers and capable translators, long before some upstart exile like Vicki Baum came in search of security and success; indeed, Baum’s rapid acculturalization and specifically her acquisition of English may have been accelerated by the absence of those very translators she was said to have occupied. In any event, there always seem to be possibilities to translate and publish individual authors or works that are unexpectedly popular or in sudden demand, like Hitler and his Mein Kampf.

Though the influence of an individual author or an individual work on a foreign culture can be noted, that impact is determined in the end (either amplified or diminished) by commercial decisions: who will be published, which work or works, and by which publisher—and most importantly how extensive the publicity campaign on behalf of the work? Here foreign authors must compete not only with other foreigners, but also with native writers for the finite resources of any cultural or commercial enterprise. Publishers choose which authors and which works will be printed, which translators will be employed; they also decide the budget for book design and advertising, the extent of the press run. Publicity can be enhanced by serialization in magazines or newspapers, inclusion in a book club’s offerings, by encouraging fan clubs, placing items related to the author or work with gossip columnists or cultural correspondents, by arranging interviews or feature stories, etc. In the end, the reception history of a work can be as much a political or commercial event as a cultural one, and the quality of its translation may be only one of many factors that determine the work’s ultimate success or failure.

Todd C. Hanlin, emeritus professor of German at the University of Arkansas, has authored a book on Franz Kafka, edited Charles Sealsfield’s Austria as it is and a volume of essays on contemporary literature from the Austrian provinces entitled Beyond Vienna. He has written on Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Peter Turrini, Peter Henisch, Paulus Hochgatterer, and translated novels by Anton Fuchs, Gustav Ernst, Gerald Szyszkowitz, Georg Potyka, and Peter Steiner, several plays by Szyszkowitz, Felix Mitterer, and Fritz Hochwälder, as well as a volume on The Best of Austrian Science Fiction.

(1) The rankings of annual bestsellers in the U.S.A., 1929-1946 are taken from Bowker's Annual/Publisher's Weekly. Please consult: <http://www3.isrl.uiuc.edu/~unsworth/courses/ bestsellers/best30.cgi>
(2) At times, regrettably, the translator is not credited on the title page, perhaps owing to prior contractual agreement. However, there were (and are) a number of renowned translators whose craft adds to the salability of a work and are thus listed prominently on the title page. Each has his or her own history and list of published translations—many with remarkable careers and fascinating lives. However, due to space limitations, it will not be possible to credit them all here.
(3) Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Harper & Row, 1968). “Ullstein did not merely publish facile mediocrities like Vicki Baum…” (134).
(4) Peter Nusser, Trivialliteratur (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991), writes: “Neben dieser industriell verfertigten Massenliteratur hat es im 20. Jahrhundert immer auch Ansätze gegeben, das Genre bei aller intendierten Breitenwirksamkeit individueller zu gestalten oder sogar—mit unterschiedlichem Erfolg—für kritische Absichten auszunutzen. In der Trivialliteratur-forschung haben in dieser Hinsicht Autoren wie Vicky [sic] Baum… besondere Aufmerksamkeit auf sich gezogen” (65). Furthermore, Roland Heger devotes scant space to Baum in his book, Der österreichische Roman des 20. Jahrhunderts, Bd. 1 (Wien/Stuttgart: Braumüller, 1971), while granting her at least some early validity: “Auch die genannte Vicki Baum… schrieb zuerst durchaus ernstzunehmende Problemromane [Frühe Schatten, Der Eingang zur Bühne, Stud. Chem. Helene Willfüer]... ehe die Autorin, wohl durch den Zeitungsbetrieb, zur billigen Kolportage fand und Bücher schrieb, die Kino waren, noch ehe sie verfilmt wurden” (216).
(5) Helmut Müssener, “Thomas Mann…und ferner liefen… Die Problematik der Wirkung deutschsprachiger Exil-Literatur in den Gastländern am Beispiel Schweden,” in Exil: Wirkung und Wertung, Donald G. Daviau and Ludwig M. Fischer, eds. (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1985), 143.
(6) Though Creighton was an experienced translator, with renditions of works by Hesse, Mahler, Ernst Jünger, B. Traven, , as well as texts in French, it is curious that he avoided meeting Baum for many years, apparently embarrassed because he couldn’t speak German—see Baum, It Was All Quite Different, 296.
(7) “My Own Little Story,” in the September 1931 issue of Pictorial Review; I Discover America,” in the July 1932 issue of Good Housekeeping; “Film Face,” in the November 1932 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal; “December 24th—Closed: A Short Story,” in the December 1932 issue of Good Housekeeping; since 1933 she published another thirteen articles serializations in English-language magazines through 1954, according to Lynda J. King, Best-Sellers by Design: Vicki Baum and the House of Ullstein (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 241-242.
(8) The website for the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library at the University of Southern California at http://www.usc.edu/libraries/archives/arc/libraries/feuchtwanger/exiles/baum.html has a brief biography of Vicki Baum which contains the lines: “She wrote for the movies between 1931 and 1941. After these years working with the film studios, she returned again to writing novels.” The publications charts for these years seem to contradict the implication that she was neither writing nor publishing new novels before 1941. In her memoirs, Baum writes of her first contract to write for MGM: “I agreed to work six months of each year for the movies, six months for myself. I needed to keep at least some of my independence. I had to be free to write my books…” cf. Vicki Baum, It Was All Quite Different: The Memoirs of Vicki Baum (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1964), 344.
(9) Gero von Wilpert, in his Deutsches Dichterlexikon (Stuttgart: Kröner Verlag, 1963), writes that Baum “…ging 1931 zur Verfilmung von ‘Menschen im Hotel’ nach Hollywood und blieb dort, 1938 naturalisiert, bis auf weite Reisen nach Mexiko, Ostasien, Indonesien und Europa. Schreibt seit 1937 englisch [emphasis mine]. Verfasserin spannender Unterhaltungsromane und –novellen aufgrund genauer Milieustudien: Lösung z.T. aktueller Probleme des gesellschaftlichen, politischen und wirtschaftlichen Lebens vom Menschlichen her durch Liebe und Güte….Im 3. Reich verboten” (39). However, King writes in Best-Sellers by Design that “Baum emigrated to the United States around mid-1932, and from that time until the early 1940s [emphasis mine] she wrote novels in German, which were translated immediately into English and then into many other languages” (119).
(10) Donald G. Daviau writes in his “The Austrian Writer’s Response to National Socialism between 1933 and 1938,” in Austria, 1938-1988: Anschluss and Fifty Years, William E. Wright, ed (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1995): “Very few émigré writers learned the language of their host country well enough to write in it, with the exception of several writers in England who did actually produce books in English: Vickie Baum [sic], Robert Hans Flesch-Brunnigen, Robert Neumann, Hermynia zur Mühlen, Salke and Berthold Viertel, and Martina Wied. Other writers published autobiographies and factual accounts in English: Ilse Barea, Franz Borkenau, Sie George Franckenstein, Willi Frischauer, Bruno Heitig, Hans Peter Kraus, and Oskar Kokoschka. This situation has created an interesting body of work that now falls between two literary traditions, not counting either as Austrian works or as part of the English literary tradition” (109).
(11) King, Best-Sellers by Design, 230-240.
(12) See Lynda J. King, “The Parallel Lives of Two Austrian Superstars: Vicki Baum and Stefan Zweig,” in Modern Austrian Literature, 37 (2004), footnote #3 on page 29.
(13) See Baum, It Was All Quite Different: The Memoirs of Vicki Baum, 342-344. King, in her Best-Sellers by Design, summarizes: “…Baum left [Germany] permanently in early 1932, saying later that her early emigration was motivated both by an instinctive fear that German political developments could endanger the safety of the family of a Jewish writer and by her attraction to life in the United States” (13).
(14) Vicki Baum, It Was All Quite Different, 306-308, where she relates being swept through customs in New York by Doubleday and a bilingual red-headed “interpreter,” who turned out to be the Nobel Prize winner, Sinclair Lewis.
(15) King, Best-Sellers by Design, 12-13.
(16) Elizabeth Boa, “Women writers in the ‘Golden’ Twenties,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Modern German Novel, Graham Bartram, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 125.
(17) Vicki Baum, Grand Hotel, translated by Basil Creighton (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1931), 137.
(18) For the original German titles that correspond to these translations, go to: http://www.maurice-abravanel.com/werfel_works.html.
(19) Franz Werfel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, translated by Geoffrey Dunlop (New York: The Viking Press, 1934), 129. Dunlop translated Hesse and Josef Roth, among others, and his masterful translation surely contributed to the book’s success.
(20) Franz Wefel, The Song of Bernadette, translated by Ludwig Lewisohn (New York: The Viking Press, 1942), 15. Lewisohn (1882-1955) was born in Berlin, came to the U.S. with his parents in 1903, eventually gained fame as a prolific translator and author who later became one of the founding professors of Brandeis University.
(21) Maurice Eden Paul (1865-1944) was the eldest son of the British publisher Charles Kegan Paul; he was a socialist physician, writer, and translator from German, French, Italian, and Russian. Cedar Paul (?-1972) was a singer, author, journalist, and translator, the younger sister of Eden who collaborated with him on many of the German and Russian translations, including works by Zweig, Karl Marx, Karl Jaspers, and Heinrich von Treitschke.
(22) To ascertain the original German titles for these works, go to: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/szweig. htm
(23) Stefan Zweig, Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman, translated by Eden and Cedar Paul (New York: The Viking Press, 1934), 146.
(24) Stefan Zweig, Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles, translated by Eden and Cedar Paul (New York: The Viking Press, 1935), 3.
(25) King, “The Parallel Lives of Two Austrian Superstars,” 13.
(26) Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939).
(27) Mein Kampf, viii.
(28) Mein Kampf, viii.
(29) King, Best-Sellers by Design, 231-240.
(30) For corroboration, see a comparable setting in Sweden during these years, as described by Helmut Müssener, “Thomas Mann…und ferner liefen… Die Problematik der Wirkung deutschsprachiger Exil-Literatur in den Gastländern am Beispiel Schweden,” esp. 137.

1.11. American and Austrian Literature and Film: Influences, Interactions and Intersections

For quotation purposes:
Todd C. Hanlin: Bestsellers by Vicki Baum, Franz Werfel, and Stefan Zweig in English Translation. In: TRANS. Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften. No. 17/2008. WWW: http://www.inst.at/trans/17Nr/1-11/1-11_hanlin.htm

The Transmission of Austrian Literature to America during the 1930s:

Bestsellers by Vicki Baum, Franz Werfel, and Stefan Zweig in English Translation

Abstract: