Professor Ernst Adolf Chantelau's Discovery of the Nazi Edition of BILLY BUDD

Ernst Adolf Chantelau, the man who translated my book READING BILLY BUDD into German a few years ago, has made a significant discovery. With his permission I am posting here the information he has sent me.

Ernst Adolf Chantelau <chantelau@gmx.de>

To:hershelparker@sbcglobal.net

Nov 8 at 8:34 AM

Dear Prof. Parker, you probably might wish to know about the fate of BB in Germany. In Nazi-Germany after the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, the publication of parts of the Constable Edition was considered by Henry Goverts and Eugen Claassen (H.Goverts publishing house, established 1934 in Hamburg with the approval of the Nati-authorities). Their first-ever German publication of Billy Budd, elegantly translated by Richard Moering, was manipulated (presumably in order to ease approval 1938 from Goebbels' ministry of propaganda, and, thereby, advertisings in the Nazi-party newspapers, and  purchases even by the Nazi-army). The manipulations consisted (among smaller wording distortions) of the (concealed) omissions of the following passages, which were justified in the afterword of the publisher with the well-known incompletion of the work
(pagination Northwestern Newberrry Edition 2017):
p10: The character...city brought.“
p11: In this particular...have a hand here.
p27-28: Long ago an...the Biblical element.
p50: Some imaginative... the Barbarian.
p54: When speak... Starry Vere.
p57: Says a writer...bridge“.
p62: And, as elsewhere...English girls.
p62- 63: Billy listened...do not close.
p63: Bluntly put... brute force.

This Nazi-approved edition of Billy Budd was reprinted 3 times ( 3rd edition 1942, when only literature supportive to Nazi-war and -state could be printed in Germany) with altogether 8000 copies. In an announcement 1938, the publisher praised Melville's novel: „It poses the question about how duty, reason of State, and moral are intertwined. A topic, which in its treatment of the heroic attitude appears to be written particularly for the German people of today. The book will excite the contemporary Germany.“
Vere's lecture in the trial-chapter was quoted in particular, and affirmatively reviewed in a juridical Nazi-newspaper (Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, Supplement Juristische Rundschau, April 26,1938), as „it treats with a formal and poetic profoundness that is rarely achieved an example of merciless, but necessary martial law.“  
The 1938 edition was reprinted repeatedly as the gold standard text in former West-Germany and even after the German re-unification until 2006. An unabridged and precise translation by Ilse Hecht was published 1956 in Leipzig in the former German Democratic Republic. The 1962 Hayford/Sealts edition was translated by Hella Leicht and published 1996, and again by Michael Walter and Daniel Göske 2009. The Nazi-edition, which determined the reading of BB in Germany (e.g. by Thomas Mann 1955) has neither been  pointed out as such, nor criticized or rejected. Kind regards, Ernst Chantelau
 

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