“Wer Englisch liest, kauft Tauchnitz”: Reading Virginia Woolf in the Tauchnitz Edition

Drawing on hitherto unexplored correspondence between the Tauchnitz Verlag and Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, this chapter discusses the publication of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Mrs. Dalloway in the Tauchnitz Edition in 1929. While Tauchnitz’s delayed endorsement of Woolf’s writing, following the appearance of her first commercially successful novel Orlando in October 1928, seems to lend credence to Ezra Pound’s famous indictment of the German firm as a “parasitic” publisher who sought to profit from the popularity of literary modernism after the fact, this chapter proposes that where Woolf’s German reception is concerned, Tauchnitz did form part of a certain vanguard. As the advertising slogan “Wer Englisch liest, kauft Tauchnitz” [Readers of English buy Tauchnitz]—adopted by the firm from 1933—suggests, Tauchnitz’s readership included not only Anglophone travellers and expatriates living on the continent but also a significant number of non-native readers of English, including students, scholars and the educated middle class. In disseminating Woolf’s writing among these groups of German readers and making an active intervention in the cultural discourses around it, I suggest that Tauchnitz played a not unimportant role in the early reception of Woolf’s work in Germany from the late 1920s onwards.