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

20世纪的优质大众图书出版社曾经是产生和确立意义和阐释的聚会场所、焦点。出版历史作为物质、精神和社会条件的历史，使我们能够审视世界观是如何产生的，资源是如何建立的，区别是如何达成的，以及符号规则是如何组织的。这其中有两个方面迄今为止被广泛忽视：1)出版的跨国和跨文化维度：翻译业务、跨文化调解和营销任务以及出版的跨国网络；2)出版业的性别史：性别建构和性别角色创造并伴随着出版者的男性观念，以一种非常特殊的方式吸引和融合了女性。该项目希望通过传记研究的方式来研究这些方面：一项关于从20世纪40年代到本世纪末在欧洲-大西洋文学网络中具有关键地位的出版界人物的研究。海伦·沃尔夫（1906-1994）是著名出版人库尔特·沃尔夫（1887-1963）的妻子和遗孀，1933年从德国移民到美国，1941年是美国万神出版社的联合创始人，1961年是大型出版公司哈考特的欧洲文学出版公司海伦和库尔特·沃尔夫的联合创始人。她为许多德国和欧洲作家（格<e:2>特·格拉斯、马克斯·弗里施、乌韦·约翰逊、伊塔洛·卡尔维诺、乔治·西梅农等）打开了美国市场，并在不同文化之间架起了一座桥梁。该项目将解构这位具有国际影响力的出版商的形象，这种形象被她自己的自传式表演和保守的出版历史所僵化，并试图在新的标准下重新发展这种形象。这个项目在我在洪堡大学任职期间已经准备好了，现在将通过资助完成。随后，我想在一个持续的项目中考察其代表性及其结果的范围，将出版史重新构想为一种性别化和跨国纠葛的历史。

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.