Walter Landauer was born on 31 August 1902 in Berlin. As a student in Frankfurt am Main he became acquainted with Fritz H. Landshoff and Hermann Kesten. From 1927 onwards, Walter Landauer was a lector at the Gustav-Kiepenheuer publishing company, that was shortly before taken over by Landshoff. When the general elections of 1930 turned out to be a victory for the NSDAP, Landauer, Landshoff and Kesten considered transfering their publishing firm to Switzerland. Because they feared the amount of work this brought to it, they gave up this plan.
When the NSDAP seized power in 1933, three-quarters of all Kiepheuer publications where prohibited. Walter Landauer subsequently left Germany and sought employment with several publishers in Austria and Switzerland. Eventually he was employed by Allert de Lange publishers in Amsterdam. From the spring of 1933 onwards Landauer was the head of the department that published books by banned German authors. Landauer was assisted by Hermann Kesten. With Landauer in charge, Allert de Lange grew out to be one of the most succesfull publishers of Exil-Literatur. Landauers main rival was Landshoff, who had come in charge of the Exil-Literatur department of Querido publishers. Landauers work came to an end when the German occupation authorities ordered his resignation.
Addition of a visitor of the website
In Wir leben nun mal auf einem Vulkan Peter Crane wrote about Walter Landauer in Bergen-Belsen.