Michele K. Troy on The Albatross Press and the Third Reich

Michele K. Troy is professor of English at Hillyer College at the University of Hartford. She studies Anglo-American literary modernism in continental Europe and is the author of Strange Bird: The Albatross Press and the Third Reich, the first book to be written 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 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. It distributed fiction in English by both mainstream and 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 from the heart of Hitler’s Reich.

Michele and I talk about how weird this is, among other things.