Tim Mohr, the journalist, author, and translator "who collaborated on memoirs with Guns N' Roses' Duff McKagan and Kiss frontman Paul Stanley," died March 31, Rolling Stone magazine reported. He was 55. Mohr started his career as a club DJ in Berlin for much of the 1990s before transitioning to journalism. He was a staff editor at Playboy for several years, where he hired McKagan in 2008 to write a regular column about finance and the economy.
"To be in Tim's literary world was a crash-course lesson on how to be concise and informative, with nudges of humor here and there," McKagan said. "He nudged me to be great at all times, and to have humor every breathing second.... Tim was mainly responsible for guiding me and pushing me to write my first book It's So Easy (and other lies). I am forever grateful for his guidance.... We lost a good man, a family man, a friend, and a literary lion."
Following McKagan's book in 2012, Mohr completed Gil Scott-Heron's unfinished memoir The Last Holiday. He also worked with Stanley on his 2014 memoir Face the Music: A Life Exposed.
"My dear friend, literary collaborator, pure soul, brilliant mind, street food gourmet and so much more has died from pancreatic cancer," Stanley posted on social media. "I'm heartbroken. If you knew him, you loved him. The world has lost a bright light."
Mohr's own book, Burning Down the Haus (2018), "would become his defining work," Rolling Stone noted, adding that it told "the definitive story of the role 1980s East German punks played in bringing down the Berlin Wall." It was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.
Since 2008, Mohr had translated seven novels by Alina Bronsky for Europa Editions. In a tribute, executive publisher Michael Reynolds wrote: "Tim was a supremely talented German-to-English translator whose ear for the cadences of his source language was second-to-none and whose facility and inventiveness with English made his translations exciting to read. But he did far more as a translator than produce fun, felicitous, and faithful translations. He was committed to making conscious, meaningful decisions about whose work he translated."
In addition to Bronsky's works, Mohr translated Dorothea Dieckmann's Guantanamo (Catapult), which won the Best Translated Book Award; two books by Charlotte Roche, Wetlands and Wrecked (Grove); Tiger Milk by Stefanie de Velasco; and The Second Rider by Alex Beer.
"When Tim began working as a literary translator it seemed to him (and to many of us) that the world of literature in translation had a laddish patina to it, that it was dominated by white guys translating well-established white guys," Reynolds recalled. "Tim took issue with that and was determined to establish his reputation as a translator of female voices, and, at the same time, of voices from outside the mainstream."
Reynolds added that Mohr "was not only someone I knew professionally; he was also a good and dear friend with whom I have had a lot of fun over the almost 20 years we knew each other and with whom I shared many important moments.... I loved and admired Tim for his eloquence, his moral compass, his large, rebel heart, his consummate cool.... As Europa's publisher, I can only say that we were lucky to have worked with Tim, that we're grateful for his brilliant translations, which left our reading landscape so much the richer, and that he will be terribly missed."