Wer zensierte Adélias wolllüstige Zigarette? Eça de Queirós und sein Romanwerk im Aufbau-Verlag

Abstract

Regardless of its political couleur, every dictatorship seeks to control the literary scene in order to instrumentalize it for ideological purposes, to censor it, or to silence its voices of opposition. By recreating the background for the publication of Eça de Queirós’ novels by the GDR publishing house Aufbau this article investigates whether state-controlled censorship also interfered with literary translations or even with the concrete work of the translators. The archives of the Aufbau Publishing House, interviews with contemporary witnesses, the analysis of selected original texts as well as of their translations serve to answer the question whether the censors’ influence was limited to the state authorities’ interference in the preselection process of book titles by the publishing house, or if hidden censorship could also be detected at the linguistic level, i.e., in ideologically justified manipulations of literary expressions in the translations themselves. (AK; in German)