“Life is too short to learn German”: The Tauchnitz Editions of Oscar Wilde’s Works and His Reception in Germany

Tauchnitz published a comprehensive line-up of Oscar Wilde’s works between 1908 and 1911, with numerous reprints until 1941. This chapter situates the Tauchnitz Wilde in the wider context of his reception in Germany, where Wilde was immensely popular in the opening decades of the twentieth century. To explain this popularity, we can assume a special affinity between Wilde and his German readers. This affinity will be investigated from different angles, arguing that Wilde had an ambivalent and stereotypical perception of ‘Germanness’ which tragically came to be verified, as it were, in his problematic reception amidst the troublesome German developments that would lead towards World War II. Wilde’s oeuvre was increasingly retranslated and reinterpreted to fit the demands of Nazi ideology. The Tauchnitz editions of Wilde’s works, by contrast to such appropriations, seem to reflect ‘Germanness’ as an unideological mindset of German-connoted (albeit not essentially German) editorial principles. Staying faithful to these principles made it possible for Tauchnitz to travel beyond the borders of Germany and offer a cosmopolitan idea of world literature.