Edition Nautilus is an independent, collectively run book publishing house in Hamburg with a literary and political programme.
Through their political activism, Hannah Mittelstadt, Lutz Schulenburg, and Pierre Gallicier slid into the world of publishing more by accident than by design in the early 1970s, when they published revolutionary texts that they themselves wanted to read.Initially, they published not only the writings of local communists, anarchists, and situationists, but also contemporary poetry and texts by Dadaists, Surrealists, and other forgotten fringes. Beginning in 1980, the program expanded to include the first biographies (by Jacques Mesrine and Charles Mingus), prose texts by young German-language writers, and detective novels. At the same time, the complete works of Franz Jung began publication, completed in 1997 after 16 years, in 14 volumes.Until Lutz Schulenberg's sudden death on 1 May 2013, he and Hannah Mittelstadt ran the Edition Nautilus publishing house. In 2016, after more than forty years, Hanna finally handed over the publishing house to her employees, who now collectively run Edition Nautilus.
The publishing house is now mainly known for its Nautilus series of pamphlets, which contain rhetorical material, analyzes and interventions on current social and political debates:From the anti-capitalist feminism of Laurie Penny and Jack Orwin's analysis of toxic masculinity, through the classic works of Henri Lefebvre or Raoul Vanegem, the radical post-positivist analyzes of The Invisible Committee, the cultural history of rape by Mithu Sanyal, all the way to the anti-racist and post-colonial enlightenment of Liliane Thuram, Gregory Pierrot and others.
