Allert de Lange Publishing House

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Allert de Lange Verlag in Amsterdam was a publisher for German exile literature and an independent division of the Dutch publishing house Uitgeverij Allert de Lange, founded by Allert de Lange in 1880 .

history

After the National Socialists came to power in 1933, the publishing house was founded as an independent German-speaking department by the publisher Gerard de Lange (1896–1935), son of Allert de Lange. The journalist Hilda van Praag-Sanders, the wife of the Allert-de-Lange author Siegfried van Praag, gave the impetus for the foundation. It was the concern of Gerard de Lange and Hilda van Praag-Sanders to offer the possibility of publication to German authors who had been driven into emigration and had lost their economic existence through the ban on books and the burning of books. The department was headed by Walter Landauer , the editing was done by Hermann Kesten , both of whom (like Fritz Landshoff at Querido ) were former employees of the Kiepenheuer Verlag .

The Allert de Lange Verlag was one of the three most important exile publishers that published in the Netherlands during the Nazi era, along with Hein Kohn's Het Nederlandsch Boekengilde and Querido Verlag .

Unlike the other major Dutch exile publisher Querido , the de Lange publishing house tried to avoid political confrontation. Gerard de Lange seems to have given in to the interventions of German authorities several times. After de Lange's early death in 1935, APJ Kroonenburg took over management of the German-speaking department. This did not change the publisher's political reluctance: At the instigation of Philip van Alfen, the new managing director of the publisher, Irmgard Keun's new novel After Midnight was rejected in 1936 because of the "political aggressiveness of this book" - despite an existing contract. from.

Another expression of the fear of politically relevant texts, let alone polemics against National Socialism (such as Heinrich Mann's Der Haß , which appeared in the first issue of The Collection by Querido), or even texts that represent left-wing positions, can be found in the relatively large proportion of historical Novels are presumed to be among the approximately 90 books published by de Lange.

After the German occupation of the Netherlands in May 1940, Kroonenburg had to liquidate the publishing house on June 21, 1940 on the orders of Obersturmbannführer Jäger. The stocks and the publisher's archive were confiscated. Walter Landauer initially managed to go into hiding, but he was arrested in 1943 and died of starvation in Bergen-Belsen on December 20, 1944 . Hermann Kesten was in France at the time of the German troops' invasion and was able to escape to the USA in the spring of 1940 .

Authors

The publisher's authors included:

literature

  • Kerstin Schoor: Publishing work in exile. Studies on the history of the German department of the Amsterdam Allert de Lange publishing house 1933–1940 . Rodopi, Amsterdam-Atlanta 1992.
  • Ulrike Spring: Publishing activities in exile in the Netherlands 1933–1940. Diploma thesis University of Vienna 1994 PDF, 1MB
  • Kurt Löb: Exile characters. German book designer in the Netherlands 1931–1950. Dissertation University of Amsterdam 1994. Gouda Quint publishing house, Arnhem 1995.
  • Toke van Helmond: 100 jaar Allert de Lange. Allert de Lange, Amsterdam 1980.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Hubben hub: Bannelingen . In: De Volkskrant , November 26, 1999, at: volkskrant.nl
  2. Peter Manasseh Boekenvrienden Solidariteit, turbulent jaren van een exiluitgeverij . Biblion Uitgeverij, Den Haag 1999. ISBN 9054831782 , pp. 9, 55, 58, 68, 70, 79, 94, 106.