This chapter intervenes in current debates about world literature(s), in which the notion of heritage, seen primarily as a matter of national interest, is reserved for national literature, as opposed to world literature. Reconstructing a long tradition of treating world literature as an example of cultural heritage with global reach, she traces "heritage" as a key concept in competing conceptions of literature in the 1930s, whose shared point of departure was the protection of world culture against the threat of fascism. In a universalist humanist conceptualisation of world literature as humanity’s heritage, various claims to globality competed with each other: an approach to literature as "the International of the Spirit" (Gor'kii), the Soviet (Leninist) operative formula of "critical appropriation/assimilation" (used extensively at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934), André Malraux's idea of the musée imaginaire (foreshadowed in his metaphor of a creative conquest of the literary heritage during the "First International Congress in Defence of Culture" in June 1935), but also Leo Spitzer's "translatio studii" and Erich Auerbach's "philology of world literature". But while the Soviet imperial program saw translatability as the precondition for its own implementation in the service of transregional education and community building, and while Malraux's encyclopaedic project for an "imaginary museum" advanced an understanding of translatability as technical reproduction (including the photographic representation of artworks), the German expatriates Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach problematised translation fundamentally, developing an approach of "transnational humanism" that conceived of translation as a tool for approaching and at the same time making visible the untranslatable.