Mistress of Mediation - the German-American Publisher Helen Wolff (1906-1994). A Biographical Study in the Publishing History of the 20th Century from a Gendered and Transnational Perspective

• Applicant: Dr. Marion Detjen
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2014 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 269374664

Quality trade book publishing houses in 20th century used to be meeting places, focal points, for the production and establishment of meanings and interpretations. Publishing history as the history of the material, mental and social conditions allows us to examine how world views are created, how resources are built, how distinction is reached and how symbolic rule is organised. Two aspects of this have so far been widely neglected, though: 1) the transnational and transcultural dimension of publishing: the translation business and intercultural mediation and marketing tasks and the transnational networks in publishing; and 2) the gender history of publishing: gender constructions and gender roles that created and accompanied the male concept of the publisher in a business which attracted and integrated women in a very special way. The project wants to look into these dimensions by way of a biographical study: a study about a publishing figure that had a key position in the european-transatlantic literary networks from the 1940s until the end of the century. Helen Wolff (1906-1994) was the wife and widow of the famous publisher Kurt Wolff (1887-1963), emigrated from Germany 1933, co-founder of the US-american publishing house Pantheon Books 1941 and of the imprint for european literature A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book within the big publishing concern Harcourt, Brace 1961. She opened the US-american market to a great number of german and european writers (Günter Grass, Max Frisch, Uwe Johnson, Italo Calvino, Georges Simenon and many more) and worked as a bridge between the different cultures. The project will deconstruct the image of the internationally influencial publisher that has been rigidified by her own autobiographical stagings as much as by a conserving publishing history, and it will try to re-develop this image under new criteria. The project has been well prepared in my position at Humboldt University and shall now be completed by funding. Subsequently I want to examine the representativity and the scope of its results in a carry on project, to re-conceive publishing history as a gendered and transnational history of entanglements.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants