Larisa Schippel

Larisa Schippel has been working on the topic of translators in exile since 2008. It all started with the "Long Night of the Sciences" in Berlin, when she and a group of students, together with Yvonne Griesel, organized a reading from texts that had been burned in translation. The event commemorated the 75th anniversary of the Nazi book burning on May 10, 1933, on what is now Bebelplatz at the "Empty Library" memorial.
This gave rise to the idea of tracing what became of the translators during Nazi dictatorship whose translations had been burned back then. Initial research, for example on Lucy von Jacobi, revealed that there is little information about this phenomenon. Larisa Schippel remained connected to this topic with varying degrees of intensity, even after her move to the University of Vienna. Thus, on the basis of the so-called blacklists in Austria, the purpose of which was the "cleansing" of Austrian public libraries, especially the workers' libraries, she traced the fates of translators affected here, e.g. that of Kurt Grelling - the translator of Bertrand Russel's works who, after fleeing to France via Belgium, was handed over to the Gestapo there and died in Auschwitz. On the initiative of Michaela Wolf (Univ. Graz), she was able to report on the first results of her research in a lecture at a public library in Graz, combined in turn with a reading from burned translations, such as that of "Brave Soldier Schwejk", whose translator, Grete Reinerova, ended up in a concentration camp. The experience of the limited knowledge about this group of people gave rise to the idea for the current research project Exil:Trans, which is now carried out by colleagues with similar research interests and could be implemented thanks to funding from FWF, DFG and SSF.
Within the project, Larisa Schippel's research focus is on exile in London and the search for translators of non-literary, i.e. scientific, pragmatic, political texts.