Introduction

 

Pantheon Books

 

Verlag der Johannespresse

 
Aurora Verlag
 
 
 
Aurora Verlag
       
 
Wieland Herzfelde
       
 
 

As managing director of Aurora Verlag, Wieland Herzfelde brought revolutionary ideas to the structure of publishing and thus can be said to be the most innovative of the publishers who established firms in the U.S. in the 1940s. Twelve authors ran the press jointly, together making the decisions of an editor-in-chief. "only to the authorities was I founder, owner, and the one financially liable for Aurora Press," Herzfelde wrote in an autobiographical sketch in the 1950s. "According to the founding charter I was co-founder and honorary director." Ernst Bloch, Bertold Brecht, Ferdinand Bruckner, Alfred Döblin, Lion Feuchtwanger, Oscar Maria Graf, Heinrich Mann, Berthold Viertel, Ernst Waldinger, and F.C. Weiskopf shared editorial responsibility. Between 1944 and 1946, the press published books by Brecht, Bruckner, Döblin, Feuchtwanger, Graf Seghers, Viertel Waldinger, Weiskopf, and an anthology, Morgenröte, with an introduction by Heinrich Mann.

 

Photograph of Wieland Herzfelde in New York. Courtesy of the Akademie der Kunste, Berlin.