Edition Nautilus

Edition Nautilus is an independent, collectively managed publisher in Hamburg with a literary and political branch. It was through their political commitment that Hanna Mittelstädt, Lutz Schulenburg and Pierre Gallissaires gravitated into publishing more by accident than design in the early 1970s when they began publishing revolutionary texts that they themselves wanted to read. Initially they published texts by ‘council communists’ (‘Rätekommunisten’), anarchists and situationists alongside contemporary poetry and fiction, and texts by Dadaists, Surrealists and other forgotten outsiders. In 1980 they also began publishing autobiographies, prose by young German-language authors, and detective novels. In 2016, after more than forty years, Hanna Mittelstädt handed the publishing house over to her colleagues, who run the company today as a collective. The company is now known chiefly for its political pamphlets series, ‘Nautilus Flugschriften’, which offer analysis, intervene in ongoing socio-political debates, and provide ammunition for use in debates on controversial issues: from Laura Penny’s anti-capitalist feminism and Jack Unwin’s analysis of toxic masculinity, via the classic texts of Henri Lefebvre and Raoul Vaneigem, radical post-situationist analyses by the ‘Comité Invisible’, and Mithu Sanyal’s Vergewaltigung. Aspekte eines Verbrechens (‘Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo)’, all the way through to anti-racist and post-colonial texts by Lilian Thuram, Grégory Pierrot and others.