Anton Kippenberg

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Anton Hermann Friedrich Kippenberg (born May 22, 1874 in Bremen , † September 21, 1950 in Lucerne ) was a German publisher and Goethe collector. From 1905 to 1950 he headed the Insel-Verlag .

biography

education

Kippenberg spent his childhood and youth in Bremen and grew up with nine other siblings. His father, August Kippenberg and his mother Johanne Kippenberg were founders and directors of large Bremen schools. After completing the Untersekunda, Kippenberg decided in 1890 to start training at the Eduard Hampe bookstore .

Following his apprenticeship, he went to a foreign bookstore in Lausanne for further training. On the side, he wrote the first articles for the Weser newspaper and unconsciously laid the foundation for his future Goethe collection with the purchase of the latest edition of Faust by Sabatier.

In 1894 he left Lausanne in order to complete a quarterly traineeship at the commission bookstore K. F. Koehler in Leipzig after a short trip to northern Italy . A year later he began his one-year service as a conscript in Bremen and then tried again to go abroad. The project failed, but he received an offer from the scientific publisher Wilhelm Engelmann from Leipzig, who offered him the management of the assortment accounts. He accepted this position in order to gain a foothold in what was then the book trade metropolis. He worked full-time here for the following year and a half until he finally moved to Leipzig University in 1898 .

After finishing school, he enrolled at the Alma mater Lipsiensis , where he majored in German studies and minor subjects in music history, Romance studies and aesthetics . In addition, he continued to work as an authorized signatory at Wilhelm Engelmann, whom he only left when he took over Insel-Verlag in 1905. During this time, the future publishers tied the first contacts with the company H. F. Jütte , later especially the high-quality reproduction of picture books of the Island Library in multi-color printing should take.

In the summer of 1901 he submitted his dissertation on The Sage of the Duke of Luxembourg and completed his academic training with the title "Doctor Philosophiae et Magister Artium".

Kippenberg and the Insel-Verlag

When he was offered the management of the Insel-Verlag, which had been founded six years earlier, in 1905, he did not hesitate because he had wanted to switch to an artistic-literary publisher for a long time. Together with Carl Ernst Poeschel , whom Kippenberg had already met in 1902, he now managed the publishing house that emerged from the magazine of the same name . In the same year he married Katharina von Düring (1876–1947), whom he had met at a meeting of the Goethe Society in Weimar . She became his most loyal collaborator and emerged as a translator and editor.

Poeschel left the publishing house as early as 1906 and Kippenberg took over the sole management of the company, which he expanded into one of the leading literary publishers in Germany in the years to come. Furthermore, he determined the literary focus of the house right from the start; the works of Goethe and Rainer Maria Rilke should form the basis for his future work. Other authors included Stefan Zweig , Friedrich Nietzsche , Alfred Mombert , Ricarda Huch , Hugo von Hofmannsthal , Giovanni di Boccaccio and Rudolf Alexander Schröder . The basis for Kippenberg's success was his vein for literary quality as well as for the preferences of the readership, commercial fluency and a contemporary book design appropriate to the text .

In 1909 he published the Volks-Goethe (Ed.  Erich Schmidt ). In 1912 he finally founded the world-famous island library . Before he went to the front during the First World War and published the war newspaper of the 4th Army from 1914 to 1918 , the first catalog of the Kippenberg Collection was published in 1913 .

The next two decades he devoted himself entirely to work in the publishing house. The main building of the publishing house was destroyed in a bomb attack in December 1943. A year later, in February 1945, Kippenberg's private house in Leipzig-Gohlis was also bombed in an air raid during which he temporarily continued the publishing business. Before the Soviet troops approached, he was able to convince the Americans of the importance of his Goethe collection, which had previously been relocated to Thuringia and Saxony. The US Allies finally brought the collection to the Central Art Collecting Point in Marburg ; Today it is continued as the largest and most important private Goethe collection in the Goethe Museum in Düsseldorf .

Kippenberg's father, his mother and his brother Hermann August Kippenberg (1869–1952) ran a private teacher training college , from 1868 a teaching institution for adult daughters and teachers ' college , from which the state Kippenberg grammar school on Schwachhauser Heerstrasse emerged .

Kippenberg has also emerged as an author and has u. a. Spoonerisms written and published under the anagram Benno Papentrigk. His estate is in the German Literature Archive in Marbach.

Honors

Works

  • The legend of the Duke of Luxembourg and the historical personality of its bearer . Dissertation, Leipzig 1901
  • Benno Papentrigk (pseudonym): Schüttelreime . Insel-Verlag, Leipzig 1939 (1942: Insel-Bücherei No. 219/3)
  • Stories from an old Hanseatic city . Insel-Verlag, Leipzig 1941

See also

literature

  • Bibliography Kippenberg (May 22, 1939). Directory of Professor Dr. Anton Kippenberg wrote, edited and translated writings and essays , Leipzig 1939
  • Anton Kippenberg: speeches and writings . Insel-Verlag, Wiesbaden 1952
  • Ernst Schulte Strathaus: Kippiana: Friendly encounters with Anton Kippenberg in Munich 1908-1949 . Society of Bibliophiles (among others), Munich-Solln 1969
  • Friedrich Michael (editor): Anton Kippenberg on the hundredth birthday . 1st edition. Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1973, ISBN 3-458-05799-4
  • Curt Vinz:  Kippenberg, Anton. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 11, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1977, ISBN 3-428-00192-3 , pp. 631-633 ( digitized version ).
  • Gerhard and Margarete Jonas: Anton Kippenberg (1874–1950) and the Insel-Bücherei . Library and information system of the University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg 1995, ISBN 3-8142-0509-X
  • Severin Corsten u. a. (Editor): Lexicon of the entire book industry . Volume IV. Second, completely revised edition. Anton Hiersemann, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 3-7772-8527-7
  • Siegfried Unseld : Anton Kippenberg: "Suffice the best of our time". Siegfried Unseld, Frankfurt am Main 1999
  • Thomas Neumann (editor): The correspondence with Julius Petersen 1907 to 1941 . T. Neumann, Kropp 2000, ISBN 3-8311-0969-9

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Werner Marx: The Villa Kippenberg in Gohlis . Citizens' Association Gohlis eV, Leipzig 2001
personal data
SURNAME Kippenberg, Anton
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kippenberg, Anton Hermann Friedrich; Papentrigk, Benno (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German publisher
DATE OF BIRTH May 22, 1874
PLACE OF BIRTH Bremen
DATE OF DEATH September 21, 1950
Place of death Lucerne