Refugee from Nazism became a leading publisher in England
Colourful, charming wheeler-dealer sought glamour in book business
Lord Weidenfeld, an Austrianborn publisher who died aged 96 on Wednesday, was one of the best known and most influential refugees to have fled to England from Hitler’s persecution at the end of the 1930s.
George Weidenfeld was still in his twenties when he began his firm of Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1948, in partnership with Nigel Nicolson.
Over the next decades Weidenfeld (Nicolson was always an inactive partner) built up a remarkable list of biography and current affairs, but perhaps most notably of literary fiction — adorned with such names as Vladimir Nabokov and Mary McCarthy.
He sometimes said that Lolita (1959) and The Group (1963) were the books of which he was proudest; other landmarks were The Double Helix (1968) by James Watson, and Isaiah Berlin’s essay The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953).
Early on Weidenfeld made important friends. He published as one of his first titles New Deal for Coal (1945) by the obscure young politician Harold Wilson, who as prime minister many years later thanked his publisher with first a knighthood and then a peerage.
Weidenfeld also had a knack of making enemies. Although a man of considerable charm, he was far from universally loved. Sometimes it was his assiduity which put people off, sometimes a certain romantic vagueness in business dealings which left others bemused and dissatisfied. Among those who expressed their distaste for him in public was his second ex-wife, Barbara Skelton.
He was “future-oriented,” he said, energetically taking on new missions in old age. As he approached his seventies he undertook what may have been a rash expansion into American publishing. In 1991 he sold his company to Anthony Cheetham and it became an imprint of Cheetham’s Orion Group (now part of Hachette), with Weidenfeld as non-executive chairman, freed from tedious dayto-day duties.
In his eighties he set up a thinktank (the Institute of Strategic Dialogue) and a scholarship program for students coming to Oxford from developing economies.
“Age is like sexism,” he told Elizabeth Grice in The Daily Telegraph in 2005. “I never think about it.”
Arthur George Weidenfeld was born on Sept. 13, 1919 into a wellto-do and cultivated family of Viennese Jews. His father, Max Weidenfeld, was a scholar who had gone into business.
Hitler’s arrival in March 1938 changed Weidenfeld’s life. Later in the year he escaped to London with, as the story had it, a suitcase and the address of the Central British Fund for Refugees.
During the Second World War he joined the BBC and monitored German broadcasts. He later worked for the News Chronicle and in 1943 published a book on the Nazi propaganda machine, The Goebbels Experiment.
Weidenfeld was in many ways well-suited to journalism, and was always a good and lively writer who wrote too little. For a couple of years before founding his firm he ran a political-literary periodical called Contact.
Weidenfeld & Nicolson took some time to find its feet; there were stories of unpaid bills. Certainly, the new generation of refugees in the book trade, like Weidenfeld, Andre Deutsch and Paul Hamlyn, were not always warmly greeted by older publishers.
But by the 1950s the firm was established and well-known, and so were Weidenfeld’s methods of doing business. He was a wheeler-dealer, an intriguer, a buttonholer, never at rest, constantly travelling, a ceaseless party-giver wherever he went, but most of all in London.
He would, at the height of his activity, give three parties a week, lunches for 20, dinners for 50 or sometimes more. Few parties went by without Weidenfeld at least trying to get a book out of one of those present.
Apart from serious literature (including two Booker prize winners), his list was as a result characterized by the reminiscences of the famous, and it included nearly all the notable diarists of the age, including Cecil Beaton, Chips Channon, Alan Clark, Noel Coward and Duff Cooper.
If Weidenfeld thought that there was money, or, more to the point, glamour and excitement, in a book, he would publish it — even if the author were Albert Speer (Inside the Third Reich, 1970).
The pursuit of glamour and excitement through charm and cajolery characterized Weidenfeld’s private life too. He was four times married.