Literature as Cultural Politics: Alexander von Guttry’s ‚Polnische Bibliothek‘ (1916 —1939)

In the years 1918 –1919 the German publisher Georg Müller published the first seven volumes of ‚Polnische Bibliothek‘, a book series initiated in 1916. The circumstances of its creation and the later attempts at a reactivation of the series are noteworthy on at least three grounds: first, archival and other sources testify to a unique demand in the German book market for translations from languages which had to that point been marginal in the literature transfer to Germany during WWI; second, although the series was prepared during the war and its nature was not primarily that of propaganda, the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Berlin viewed its function as political-cultural. Thus, the series received considerable logistic and financial support. The attempts to continue the series, which were undertaken in the 1920s, then became part of Polish foreign cultural policy. Finally, existing correspondence shows that the mechanisms of the so-called “Kunst- und Kulturpropaganda” from the period of WWI served as a model