StudienVerlag - Oapen

To the Editor, Times Literary Supplement
London, 8.8.1949
Ms. o. U., ÖNB
Sir,
I gather that many domestic servants ported to this country from Austria it is a
matter of abused dismay that, with the connivance or active co-operation of some
of the less reputable agencies, a number of cooks and chambermaids from the German
Reich keep trying to „sell“ themselves to the unsuspecting British housewife
as „Austrians“ – thus hoping to avoid all too searching enquiries into their political
background.
It is with a similar mixture of dismay and amusement that my organization witnesses
the efforts by Messrs. Heinemann, in their recent advertisements in your own
and other periodicals to „sell“ to the British reading public as „the foremost Austrian
writer“ their author Frank Thiess – a German Balt who, long before the arrival of
the Communists choose the Prussian plains for an abode, and did not exchange
them for an Austrian health resort until the Allied bombs fell. Although it is true
that he did find an Austrian Jewish publisher, his claim to being an Austrian writer
(I pass over the quaint notion of his being „the foremost“ one) is about as strong
as would be, say, a claim by your paper, Sir, is being the foremost Austrian literary
journal on the strength of its editor having enjoyed a skiing holiday on the Arlberg.
I am writing to you to give publicity to a practice of camouflage and subterfuge
which should be stopped in time, and which is as little in keeping with the established
traditions and standards of the publishing firm concerned as, I am sure, with
those of the author, an upright, nationally conscious man, who as far back as in
1933, immediately after the „Machtergreifung“ in the introduction to a re-issue of
his novel DER LEIBHAFTIGE, having made the villain „not a Jew or Half-Jew but
merely one who pandered to the Jews“, apologized for thus not having been brave
enough at the time of first publication to go the whole hog, and went on to say, „Let
us at least be brave enough now to confess our old sins, just as we are now brave
enough, with cleansed hearts, to blossom out into a new era!“
Robert Neumann
Honorary President, The P.E.N. Austrian Centre
In der Heinemann overseas edition (London) ist 1949 der Caruso-Roman „Neapolitan
Legend“ erschienen. – Der Brief von RN bezieht sich auf ein Inserat des Verlags in
Times Literary Supplement (29.7.1949, S. 485).
Frank Thiess hat ab 1945 mit Walther von Molo – in einer Polemik namentlich gegen
Thomas Mann – als Sprecher einer „inneren Emigration“ deren vorrangiges Recht proklamiert,
über die Leiden der Vergangenheit Auskunft zu geben, Wege in die Zukunft
zu weisen. „Es war schwerer, sich hier seine Persönlichkeit zu bewahren, als von drüben
Botschaften an das deutsche Volk zu senden …“
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