Probing the Archive – Finding Literary Agents

This paper primarily investigates the postwar career of the literary agent B.J. Buber (1892-1950). A representative of the Agenzia letteraria internazionale (ALI) in France, the polyglot Buber embedded himself simultaneously in multiple literary, linguistic, and political milieus. He leveraged his Paris contacts as well as relations with such authors as Elio Vittorini and Anne Seghers to cumulatively earn and defend his unique authority as an international mediator even within the broader ambit of the ALI. In time, Buber further extended this transnational position to an international or poly-national one stretching between Italy, France, western Germany, and all of Eastern Europe. This paper accordingly explores three key aspects of Buber’s unique success: a cosmopolitanism not necessarily available to publishers’ in-house personnel; appraisals of both literary and what became political markets in a volatile geopolitical moment; and finally an ability to triangulate and enforce what I call a politics of the first option through engaging multiple foreign publishers at once. Buber’s career hence presaged a new model for western literary agencies while also rising to meet the novel demands posed by new state literary agencies in the Eastern bloc. Precisely as a transitional figure of the early Cold War as well, this paper ultimately argues, Buber’s activities permit simultaneous historical comparisons of the literary agent caught between individual and corporate functions, national and international roles, and western and eastern Europe.

Speaker Bio:
John Raimo is a cultural and intellectual historian of modern Europe with a particular focus on transnational histories of the book, reading, and publishing. Key research interests of his also include cultural transfers, sociological fields, intellectual networks, and the history of scholarship. Literature, photography, and debates on historiography also animate John's research within French, German, Italian, and Czech contexts. Currently a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute (Florence, Italy), he is currently revising his doctoral thesis, an account of postwar European publishers' constructions of a transnational identity over and against early Cold War geopolitical divisions of the continent, into a monograph. A second project of his consists of a conceptual and cultural history of European political asylum stretching from the early nineteenth century to the immediate postwar era.