When writer and director Berthold Viertel and the Malik publisher Wieland Herzfelde met one another for the first time in Berlin in the 1920s, they were both very successful in their professions. In 1939 they met again as stranded refugees in New York: Viertel had tried to establish himself as a theatre director on Broadway without success, while Herzfelde sold stamps. They were not alone in the difficulty they had to gain a professional foothold in the USA. In 1941, they joined other artists who had been forced to leave Germany and Austria in a working group called “Die Tribüne”, with the aim of staging German-language literary events in New York. 

Since arriving in the United States, Herzfelde had been dreaming about taking up new publishing activities. The obvious idea was that “Die Tribüne” could also publish books. In summer 1942 the plan of establishing a non-commercial authors’ publishing house took real shape. Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Ferdinand Bruckner, Alfred Döblin, Lion Feuchtwanger, Oskar Maria Graf, Heinrich Mann, Berthold Viertel, Ernst Waldinger and Franz Carl Weiskopf were won over as founding members, and Wieland Herzfelde, as he was a lecturer, was expected to be in charge of the programme.

However, it was more difficult than expected to coordinate the writers and the large body of correspondence that took place in connection with setting up the publishing house still exists. In these letters, the writers discussed things such as the letterhead design, the logo, the name and, of course, the programme. Finally, the Aurora publishing house - the name was proposed by Brecht - was registered in New York almost two years later on 3 April 1944. By 1947, 12 books had been published, above all works from the publishing house’s founding members. The volume of poems, Der Lebenslauf, by Berthold Viertel was published in 1946, which was his second publication in the USA after Fürchte dich nicht (1941). In 1948, Herzfelde, who got into debt with the project, sold the rights to “Aurora” to Aufbau-Verlag in East Berlin.