The Sad Tale Behind Tolkien's Famous 1938 Letter to a German Publisher

It is well known that in 1938 a German Publisher, Rütten & Loening, contacted Tolkien about publishing a German translation of The Hobbit. Under the laws in Nazi Germany it was illegal to publish works by Jewish authors. So, they asked Tolkien if he was "arisch," that is, "Aryan." Tolkien, being Tolkien, responded with all the fury of a philologist who detested the Nazis. As described in Letter 29 of The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, he wrote two letters and sent them to Allen & Unwin, his own publisher, telling Stanley Unwin to forward whichever one he deemed it best to send. Letter 30 in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, the only one of the two that survives, is caustic, learned, sarcastic, and dripping with contempt for the antisemitism of the question. Letter 30 is not the one sent to Germany, but Stanley Unwin let Tolkien know how much his staff enjoyed it.

The sad tale here is that until July 1936 Rütten & Loening had been owned and operated by Jews, who were forced to sell the company precisely because they were Jewish. I wonder if Unwin and Tolkien knew this. Here is a link to the German Wikipedia page on this publisher. Below you will find a translation (by Google Translate) of the most relevant sections of that page.

In 1936, publishers Wilhelm Ernst Oswalt and Adolf Neumann received an order from the Reich Chamber of Literature, based on the Nuremberg Laws, ordering them to sell the publishing house to an "Aryan" publisher or close down. In July 1936, Rütten & Loening was sold to the Potsdam publisher Albert Hachfeld (Athenaion Verlag), and the business was immediately relocated to Potsdam, taking with it all of its assets, archives, and some employees. All "Jewish" and "international" authors (including Romain Rolland) were abandoned. During the war, the publishing house produced primarily classical literature, but also "edifying literature" for the Wehrmacht.

Forced to sell his publishing house, the principal owner and publisher of Rütten & Loening, Wilhelm Ernst Oswalt, was a broken man after the sale. In 1942, he was denounced and arrested for refusing to publicly wear the Star of David. Two weeks later, he was murdered in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Oranienburg. The elder son, Heinrich Oswalt, fled to Switzerland and survived the Nazi era there. The younger son, Ernst Ludwig Oswalt, was deported "to the East" and murdered.

The publishing director and 25% co-owner of Rütten & Loening, Adolf Neumann, once one of the most respected publishing figures in the German Reich, fled to Norway, and after its occupation by the Nazis, to Sweden. He survived the war. He then granted licenses to the Potsdam publishing house for several titles that had not been sold in 1936 for political reasons. Neumann died in Stockholm in 1953.

In 1942, as was customary after the murder of Jews, Wilhelm Ernst Oswalt's private assets were publicly auctioned on behalf of the Gestapo, and the proceeds were confiscated for the benefit of the Reich. The extremely valuable and extensive private library, comprising over 10,000 volumes, compiled over a nearly century-old family tradition, was acquired by the renowned antiquarian bookshop "Frankfurter Bücherstube Schumann & Cobet" (known before 1937 as the Frankfurter Jugendbücherstube Walter Schatzki), which operated until the 1990s, for the ridiculous price of 8,500 Reichsmarks.

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"Nazis, I hate these guys" -- J.R.R. Tolkien (no, not really a Tolkien quote. Marcel 

‪@thetolkienist.com‬ will confirm this.)