“Tricked” into English: Translation and the Cultural Politics of Ruth Andreas-Friedrich’s Berlin Underground (1947)

Abstract

The complex history of the journals of Ruth Andreas-Friedrich (1901-1977), the German proto-feminist, author, magazine editor/publisher/journalist and WWII resistance fighter, has in recent years generated a rich body of scholarship in both German and English language criticism. A conspicuous gap in this scholarship concerns the English translation of the journals, quickly “tricked” into English by June Barrows Mussey (1910-1985) in ways that have remained pretty much unexamined. And yet, Friedrich’s most famous publication, Der Schattenmann: Tagebuchaufzeichnungen, 1938-45 was actually born in translation, appearing in Mussey’s versioning for Henry Holt Co. some months before the journal debuted in its original German. This essay delves into the void, reconstructing what we can (and cannot) know about the transmission and translation of Friedrich’s Berlin Underground. Further, the essay analyzes key features of the Henry Holt edition’s presentation and marketing for an Anglo-American audience to propose that the English editions of Friedrich’s journal provide a fascinating example of translation in the broader sense of the transformation of cultural forms, completing a “domesticating” process only begun by J.B. Mussey’s interlingual translation.