ABSTRACT
This chapter takes about the loss of authorship associated with both literary translation and literary censorship. More specifically, the case of the celebrated post-war German writer Gunter Eich is used to explore how the conventional notion of authorship, or, to use Michel Foucault's term, the 'author-function', is surrendered within the censorship context of the National Socialist radio system. Forsaking original creativity in order to meet the professional demands of the radio industry and the cultural-political requirements of National Socialism, Eich was prolific between 1933 and 1940 in producing lightweight entertainment programming, often rewriting well-known literary or historical source material. The selection of material for these 'translations' reveals much about the mechanisms of censorship in the Third Reich: texts came to conform to the regime's norms not only through top-down intervention, but also through the pragmatic anticipation of those norms, as well as coincidence with pre-existing aesthetic traditions.
