The New German Baldwin and His Company

“Baldwin is back.” With this slogan the German publisher dtv announced an ambitious project in 2018: to make Baldwin available again to German readers, who encountered the problem that the once well-received translations of his books published by Rowohlt had been out of print for several decades. The German Baldwin who can be discovered in, to date, eight dtv books is not only newly translated, but has also found new company. Each book includes a foreword or afterword written by a German public intellectual. So far, the paratexts have been written by René Aguigah, Elmar Kraushaar, Verena Lueken, Ijoma Mangold, Jana Pareigis, Sasha Marianna Salzmann, Mithu Sanyal, and Daniel Schreiber. After presenting the eight paratext writers in more detail, this article focuses on two aspects: the paratext writers’ rhetorical strategies of affiliating themselves with and establishing their own authority to speak about Baldwin, and their strategies in recommending Baldwin’s texts. The article shows how they add value to these texts by emphasizing Baldwin’s “timeliness” versus “timelessness,” his “literary” quality versus “ethical-political” authority, and his Americanness versus his relevance to German contexts.