ROMANTIC REVIVAL
[ALMANACK.]
Velhagen & Klasings Almanach. Ein Biedermeier-Jahrbuch.
[Leipzig, Fischer and Wittig for] Berlin, Bielefeld, Leipzig, and Vienna, Velhagen & Klasing, [1927].
8vo, pp. [iv], 229, [3]; with half-title; title and a further 15 coloured plates by Erich M. Simon, 65 chromolithographic illustrations by Erich M. Simon in the text; a very good copy in the publisher’s cloth-backed printed boards, top-edge stained blue; corners and spine bumped, slight soiling to boards.
A literary almanack for 1927 with stories by several notable German, Austrian, and Swedish authors with a distinctly nineteenth-century flavour, illustrated with several handsome neo-Romantic coloured plates and illustrations.
Graphic artist Erich M. Simon (1892–1978), whose characteristic neo-Romantic style is on full display here, was born near Kolberg (now Kołobrzeg, Poland), and lived in London from 1933 before moving to the United States; he is perhaps best known for his cover design and illustrations for Mann’s Tonio Kroger (1923) and his work as an illustrator for the Curwen Press. He later designed packaging for Elizabeth Arden and Fortnum and Mason, inter alia. Each year’s almanack had a different historical theme: the present edition was inspired by the Biedermeier period (1815–1848), 1926 was Rococo, and 1928 inspired by the ‘days of the old Kaiser’.
The literary collaboration present here is particularly interesting given the varied trajectories of its contributors under the National Socialist regime. Amongst the contributors are the art historian Oskar Bie (Jewish editor-in-chief of Die neue Rundschau from 1894 to 1922; reprints of his books were banned from 1933); the Expressionist and co-founder of the Darmstädter Sezession Kasimir Edschmid (his works burnt by the Nazis); Swedish novelist Adolf Paul, friend of Strindberg, Munch, and Sibelius; the psychologist and historian of philosophy Traugott Konstantin Oesterreich (forced into retirement in 1933 and denounced by his colleagues for his marriage to a Jewish woman); and the Nazi writers Robert Hohlbaum, Börries von Münchhausen, and Hjalmar Kutzleb. The Velhagen & Klasing press would later benefit from the closure of Jewish and left-wing publishers, and their maps, which falsified borders to imply greater German cultural influence, were used as early Nazi propaganda.
Outside continental Europe, OCLC finds three copies in the US (Middlebury, Texas A&M, Wolfsonian-Florida), and none in the UK. Not in Library Hub.
