Sir Victor Gollancz (; 9 April 1893 – 8 February 1967) was a British publisher and humanitarian. Gollancz was known as a supporter of left-wing politics. His loyalties shifted between liberalism and communism; he defined himself as a Christian socialist and an internationalist. He used his publishing house chiefly to promote pacifist and socialist non-fiction, and also launched the Left Book Club.
In the postwar era, he focused his attention on Germany and became known for his promotion of friendship and reconciliation based on his internationalism and his ethic of brotherly love. He founded the organisation Save Europe Now (SEN) in 1945 to campaign for humane treatment of German civilians, and drew attention to their suffering, especially children, and atrocities committed against German civilians. He received an honorary doctorate at the University of Frankfurt in 1949, the Großes Bundesverdienstkreuz of Germany in 1953 and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 1960, and several streets in Germany, including the Gollanczstraße in West Berlin, and two schools, the Victor Gollancz Elementary School and the Victor-Gollancz-Volkshochschule Steglitz-Zehlendorf, were named in his honour. He also campaigned for friendship with Soviet Russia. Gollancz once said: "I hate everything that is pro and anti (different peoples). I am only one thing: I am pro-humanity." Since 2000, the Society for Threatened Peoples has awarded the Victor Gollancz Prize.
Early life
Born in Maida Vale, London, to a family of German Jewish/Polish Jewish background, Victor Gollancz was the son of a wholesale jeweller and the nephew of Rabbi Professor Sir Hermann Gollancz and Professor Sir Israel Gollancz. His grandfather, Rabbi Samuel Marcus Gollancz, had migrated to the United Kingdom in the mid-19th century from Witkowo, near Gniezno (then Gnesen in Prussia) to become cantor of the Hambro' Synagogue in London.
After being educated at St Paul's School, London and taking a degree in classics at New College, Oxford, he became a schoolteacher. Gollancz was commissioned into the Northumberland Fusiliers in October 1915, although he did not see active service. In March 1916, he transferred to Repton School Junior Officers' Training Corps. Gollancz proved to be an innovative and inspiring teacher; he introduced the first civics class to be taught at an English public school and many of his students went on to become teachers themselves, including James Harford and James Darling.
In 1917, he became involved in the Reconstruction Committee, which was planning for post-war Britain. There he met Ernest Benn, who hired him to work in his publishing company, Ernest Benn Limited. Starting with magazines, Gollancz then brought out a series of art books, after which he started signing novelists.
As a publisher
Gollancz formed his own publishing company in 1927, publishing works by writers such as Ford Madox Ford and George Orwell, who wrote that "Gollancz is of course part of the Communism-racket," to Rayner Heppenstall in July 1937 (Orwell went to Secker and Warburg from Homage to Catalonia onwards). The firm, Gollancz Ltd., published pacifist and socialist nonfiction as well as, by the mid-1930s, a solid selection of contemporary fiction, including authors such as Elizabeth Bowen, Daphne du Maurier, and Franz Kafka. While Gollancz published The Red Army Moves by Geoffrey Cox on the Winter War in 1941, he omitted some criticisms of the USSR.
Gollancz was one of the founders of the Left Book Club, the first book club in the UK. He had a knack for marketing, sometimes taking out full-page newspaper advertisements for the books he published, a novelty at the time. He also used eye-catching typography and book designs, and used yellow dust-covers on books. Starting in 1948, Gollancz made yearly scouting trips to the USA; by 1951 American books made up half of his publications.
Gollancz's politics started as those of the Liberal Party and Guild Socialism. By 1931 he had joined the Labour Party, and by the early 1930s he had started publishing left-wing political works, in addition to his more popular titles. Although he never joined the CPGB, Gollancz was closely allied to the Communist Party during the second half of the 1930s. He finally broke with the party after the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact in 1939, and pledged himself to Christian socialism. In the early 1940s, Gollancz was sympathetic to Richard Acland's socialist Common Wealth Party and gave talks for the group before the general election of 1945. Although he never thought the party would win an election, he believed it represented a useful, socialist pressure group.