Was there a Battlecorps story that explained the conflict between the Wolverines and Widowmakers?
I think you're thinking of the BattleCorps edition of Betrayal of Ideals here. I'm not aware of any other story that delved into that particular subject matter.
there was at one point a set of book printed about the clan during exodus made for the german readers. have those stories ever were translated into English?
The funny thing is that these stories were
written in English (by Randall Bills). But halfway through, FASA shut down and Roc terminated the original novel line, so there was no venue to publish them. Which presumably is the reason why the third book of the trilogy wasn't written.
However, German BT licensee FanPro didn't care about what FASA or Roc did, and instead launched their own line of all-new German novels. Bills' first two Founding of the Clans novels (
Fall from Glory and
Visions of Rebirth) were translated and published as part of that line, as was Chris Hartford's
Fall from Grace, another story originally written in English but only published in its German translation because only FanPro Germany still produced new novels at the time.
Both
Fall from Grace and
Fall from Glory would be released in English much later via BattleCorps.
Visions of Rebirth remains a German-only book as of this writing even though there is an original English manuscript out there.
That's the Founding of the Clans trilogy. First book will be published for kickstarter backers by the end of the year (probably for everyone else too I'm thinking), with the second some time after that, while the author works on finishing book three.
No kidding? I always wondered how Canon the German stuff was.
It's not Canon under Herb Beas' still-valid definition of Canon. As official products, Sarna considers them apocryphal. Which is to say, any canon publication can disregard them but as long as no other canon contradicts it, you can assume stuff happened as described therein.
The original German material wasn't translated (save for parts of
Ronin! which were incorporated into
Brush Wars). Without a translation, there is a language barrier for the predominantly English-speaking BT authors - they cannot incorporate or heed information from sources that they cannot read or understand, so these sources aren't considered canon by default.