Translating Across the Fault Lines of Collective Memory and the Cold War: Roswitha Czollek’s German translation of Edward Russell of Liverpool’s Scourge of the Swastika

Georg Felix Harsch

The publication of Lord Russell of Liverpool’s book The Scourge of the Swastika in the summer of 1954 led to a minor political scandal and the author’s resignation from public office. The book, an enumeration of Nazi war crimes and crimes against humanity written in a popular style, was perceived by Churchill’s cabinet as too “anti-German” and thus a threat to the integration of West Germany into a planned Western military alliance. The well-publicised scandal made the book a best seller in the UK, precluded publication by a major West German publisher and piqued the interest of East German publishing house Volk und Welt, which published the German translation just over a year later. In the translation process, Russell’s book became one of the most widely read non-fiction books on Nazi crimes in East Germany and also had a sustained impact on a very small group of people around the Association of Victims of Nazi Persecution (VVN) in West Germany.

In my paper, I want to briefly look at how this seemingly surprising alliance between a conservative British aristocrat and an East German publisher came about, before analysing how the official Party interpretation of Nazi crimes, the Cold War conflicts between the two German states as well as the translator’s own position as a Jewish German communist shaped the German text. I will then try to give an overview of the book’s reception in both the East and West German press as well as its distribution in both countries and close with an assessment of its contribution to collective knowledge about Nazi crimes in both German states. Using a combination of approaches from translation studies, memory studies and historical discourse analysis, I hope to show how the translation of books on Nazi crimes from English to German in the 1950s, although rarely getting the wider public’s attention, subversively laid some of the groundwork for the current state of public knowledge about the Holocaust in Germany.

bio sketch

Georg Felix Harsch, b. 1972, is a freelance translator and PhD student at the University of Hamburg’s American Studies Department. His research is on the translation history of Holocaust historiography, and his translations include the English texts for the main exhibitions at the Neuengamme (2005), Bergen-Belsen (2007) and Ravensbrück (2013) memorials and the German edition of Rafael Scheck’s Hitler’s African Victims (2009).