Probing the Archive – Finding Literary Agents

Berta Zuckerkandl’s role as a translator and as a literary and theatre agent has long remained overshadowed by her public persona as an influential salonnière and journalist. Rooted in the liberal, upper middle class Jewish milieu, her salon in Vienna was a significant cultural hub, just as the salon of her sister Sophie in Paris — who was married to Paul Clemenceau, the brother of Georges Clemenceau. This constellation made France Berta Zuckerkandl’s second home. Her commitment to mediating between the two cultures and nations became, after WWI and in light of her financial situation following inflation, an economic necessity subject to stricter conditions. Her correspondence preserved in the Literary Archive of the Austrian National Library reveals new aspects of her identity as a translator and agent in the field of predominantly theatre texts from the 1920s onward. Her letters often testify to the intensity of this labour.
Zuckerkandl translated around 120 French plays, enabling authors such as Paul Géraldy, Henri-René Lenormand, Jean Anouilh, and others to enter the repertoires of major theatres in Vienna, Berlin, and beyond. Her translations were embedded in a broader ecology of mediation: she attended rehearsals, negotiated contracts, advised on titles, and shaped reception contexts. Her brokerage for Arthur Schnitzler and Martin du Gard demonstrates two different practices within transnational literary markets.
Zuckerkandl’s work anticipates contemporary understandings of literary agents and translators as cultural actors who navigate networks, institutions, and power structures. Her role in events such as the Salzburg Festival and the 1937 Paris World Exhibition — where she was praised as “the most important link between Austria and France”—underscores the political dimension of her mediation in a time of escalating crisis.

Speaker bio
Theresia Klugsberger is an independent researcher in the field of Austrian literature and intercultural communication. She has served as a research associate at the Literaturhaus in Wien and taught in the Department of German Studies at the University of Salzburg as well as at the Department of Cultural Studies at the New Design University St. Pölten. She is the co-editor of the flight diary of Berta Zuckerkand, „Flucht!“ (Czernin, 2013) and published (among others) on Berta Zuckerkandl and on the Austrian author and journalist Hans Habe with a focus on his service in the US-Army during WWII in Europe and in postwar Germany.