Rixdorf Editions issued eight books translated from German between 2017 and 2022.
The focus of the press was progressive German texts from around the beginning of the 20th century, issued along with informative commentary as quality paperbacks. We are no longer publishing new books or selling existing titles directly, but you can still find most titles:
in the US: you can order through bookshops or directly from the distributor, SPD
in the UK and Ireland: you can order through bookshops or directly from the distributor, Central
in Berlin: Curious Fox has stock of most titles
otherwise: online retailers may still have copies available
Meanwhile, if you’re interested to know what we got up to in those five years, scroll down.
WHAT AM I DOING HERE?
Publisher James J. Conway on five years of Rixdorf Editions:
‘Perhaps if I had been more patient I could have pitched the idea to someone with more publishing experience than I had, which is to say any at all. On my own bookshelves there were numerous translated books issued by small presses that were rediscovering, newly translating and thoughtfully contextualising works of the past, and it was to their example that I aspired.’
OUT NOW
Else Lasker-Schüler
Three Prose Works
Three Prose Works brings together major fiction collections issued by Else Lasker-Schüler prior to the First World War:
The Peter Hille Book (1906)
The Nights of Tino of Baghdad (1907)
The Prince of Thebes (1914).
Published in English for the first time, they represent the bulk of Lasker-Schüler’s early prose, showing a vital facet of her creative output developing in parallel with her better-known verse. As with all of her work, there are numerous parallels to events in the writer’s life and the people with whom she shared it, while the characters that she developed in turn informed her public personae as she presented herself to her contemporaries as ‘Princess Tino, poetess from Arabia’ or ‘Jussuf, Prince of Thebes’.
More on Else Lasker-Schüler
Holz & Schlaf
Papa Hamlet
It’s 1889. From out of nowhere, Norwegian writer Bjarne P. Holmsen is suddenly the toast of the German avant-garde. Translated by Dr Bruno Franzius, his book Papa Hamlet is an exhilirating experiment in style and subject matter marking the dramatic arrival of Naturalism in Germany. A few months after the book is published, there are more shocks in store: there is no Holmsen and Franzius. They are inventions of the book’s real authors, German writers Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf. But the audacity of their creation remains. The title novella of their book finds ‘Niels Thienwiebel’ reliving his stage glories, reciting soliloquies from his most famous role in the squalid room he shares with wife Amalie – slowly sinking into catatonic depression – and their ill-fated infant son Fortinbras. This, and Holz and Schlaf’s other works, offer an inventive side to Naturalism well overdue for rediscovery.
DOWNLOAD A FREE EXTRACT OF PAPA HAMLET (PDF)
More on Arno Holz & Johannes Schlaf
august endell
UNIMAGINED DELIGHT
Architect, designer, theorist, visionary: 150 years of August Endell, author of The Beauty of the Metropolis
Franziska zu Reventlow
ERICH MÜHSAM: THE COUNTESS
On the 150th anniversary of her birth: writer Franziska zu Reventlow as remembered by her friend, anarchist writer Erich Mühsam
Hermann Bahr
The roots of modern populism
Hermann Bahr’s landmark 1894 interview collection Antisemitism captures the moment when an ancient enmity assumed new force, the age of the Dreyfus Affair and Germany’s pre-Nazi peak in politicised race hate. Antisemitism is no echo chamber, with some respondents offering robust defence of prejudices that would have harrowing consequences in the 20th century. But with its conspiracy theories, babbling demagogues and demonised minorities, Bahr’s investigation is sadly all too relevant today. This important study is finally available in English translation.
Downloads
Antisemitism: Background (PDF)
Antisemitism: Translator Q&A (PDF)
Antisemitism: extract (PDF)
Elsa Asenijeff
FREE, PROUD AND ALONE
Elsa Asenijeff, one of the most original yet undervalued writers of the Wilhelmine era
The outer limits
The last judgement of Oskar Panizza
One hundred years since his death, an autobiographical account of a German writer whose subversive writings attracted the full force of Wilhelmine justice.
from the blog
