Construction publishing house

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Structure Verlag GmbH & Co. KG

logo
legal form GmbH & Co. KG
founding 1945
Seat Berlin , Germany
management Matthias Koch (Management)
Constanze Neumann (Head of Literature)
Reinhard Rohn (Head of Literature)
Number of employees 39
sales 12.5 million euros
Branch Book publisher
Website www.aufbau-verlag.de
Status: April 2016

The structure Verlag (proper notation: verlag construction or structure Verlag ) is a German book publisher . It was founded in Berlin in 1945 on behalf of the Kulturbund zur Democratic Renewal Germany eV and soon grew into the largest fiction publisher in the GDR . After its founding, it had specialized in exile literature and anti-fascist literature as well as literary and philosophical topics with reference to the humanistic legacy of German culture . In the following decades, the publishing program expanded to include works of classical world literature, contemporary, sophisticated German literature, Eastern European and Latin American titles as well as individual Western European literatures.

In addition to the Aufbau Verlag brand, the Aufbau Verlag also includes the imprints Aufbau Taschenbuch (atb) , Rütten & Loening and Blumenbar . The publisher has 39 employees (as of 2020) and publishes around 200 new publications annually, 110 of which are novelties in paperback and 150 new titles as e-books . The focus of the publishing house is in the areas of fiction , non-fiction and paperback. Today it is part of the Aufbau publishing group , to which, in addition to the Aufbau publishing house, the other library and Edition Braus belong as independent subsidiaries , and is based in the Aufbau Haus in Berlin-Kreuzberg .

history

Signet of the publisher until approx. 1994

The beginning

On August 16, 1945, Kurt Wilhelm , Heinz Willmann , Klaus Gysi and Otto Schiele, acting as trustees on behalf of the recently founded Kulturbund for the Democratic Renewal of Germany, founded the Aufbau-Verlags-Gesellschaft with limited liability , the managing directors of which were the publisher Wilhelm and the publishing clerk Schiele . Paragraph 4 of the articles of association stated that the interests of the Kulturbund had to be safeguarded as long as the organisation's journals and its sponsored publications appeared when it was set up . In 1946 the Kulturbund eV acquired all shares in the Aufbau-Verlag GmbH.

The license (No. 301) for the company was issued by the Soviet military administration to SMAD two days later, on August 18, 1945. The military authorities supported the publishing house and ensured the company was allocated sufficient quantities of printing paper, which was difficult to obtain after the Second World War was.

The first titles

The first titles were Heinrich Heine's Germany. A winter fairy tale , Theodor Plieviers Stalingrad and manifesto and speeches of the Kulturbund for the democratic renewal of Germany published. The novel of Plievier already went after one year in the seventh edition, reaching by the end of 1948 over 177,000 copies in the Soviet Occupation Zone (SBZ). In addition, selected poems from the period of exile from 1933–1945 by Johannes R. Becher , the “ Spiritus rector ” and co-founder of the Aufbau Verlag and from August 1945 president of the Kulturbund, were published. In 1948 Leonid Wassiljewitsch Solowjow appeared picaresque novel Chodscha Nasr ed-din .

The program of the founding years

One focus of the program was literature by writers who emigrated from Germany in the wake of the “ seizure of power ” by the National Socialists . In May 1948 the publishing house took over the rights to all titles of the Aurora publishing house (except for those of Franz Carl Weiskopf ) and published them in the Aurora library . Wieland Herzfelde founded the Aurora publishing house in 1944 in New York as the mouthpiece of German exiled authors in the USA ; In 1947 the company was dissolved due to financial difficulties of the publisher. The Aurora library contained works by Ernst Bloch , Bertolt Brecht , Alfred Döblin , Oskar Maria Graf , Lion Feuchtwanger , Anna Seghers , Berthold Viertel , Wieland Herzfelde and Ehm Welk , among others .

Classic linen cover of the Aufbau-Werke

In the field of anti-fascist literature, Anna Segher's novel The Seventh Cross was published in 1946 , which had a circulation of over 100,000 copies by 1950 - next to Stalingrad one of the company's longsellers. Further works on the causes and effects of the Third Reich were Hans Falladas Everyone dies for himself (1947) and Der Irrweg einer Nation by Alexander Abusch (1946–1951: 130,000 copies).

In the early days, writings by classical and contemporary Russian authors were also published. a. by Anton Makarenko , Alexei Tolstoy , Maxim Gorki , Leo Tolstoy and Alexander Pushkin . The German classics also moved into the publishing program: Heinrich Heines Deutschland. A winter fairy tale , Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris , Friedrich Schiller's letters on the aesthetic education of man and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Nathan the Wise . The forewords and afterwords of the books emphasized the authors' humanistic attitude, vision and ethos. Classics should be seen as confirmation of the actually better nature of Germans and serve as role models for readers with their impressive résumés.

Overall, the publisher's early years were very successful. Up until the currency reform in 1948 , almost all of the works were published in editions between 10,000 and 30,000 copies, and the company's magazines, Structure: Kulturpolitische Monatsschrift , Sinn und Form , Pronunciation and Sonntag , achieved enormous initial print runs ( Sunday 1946: 200,000 copies). This made Aufbau the most successful fiction publishing house of the post-war period .

The publishing house 1949–1990

In the following four decades, the orientation of the program depended on the political demands of the SED and thus reflected the cultural development of the GDR. The employees fought over and over again for more rights in the selection of titles and content-related objectives.

1949-1960

From 1951 Walter Janka took over the management and three years later he succeeded Erich Wendt as managing director. In the 1950s, the Aufbau-Verlag published socialist, anti-religious and Marxist literature in accordance with the government's intentions . Young authors who wrote about the lives of the common peasants and workers should be encouraged. Works such as Margarete Neumann's Der Weg über den Acker (1953) have appeared in the field .

Nevertheless, the publisher endeavored to also publish works of world literature by Western authors, including Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea , Jean-Paul Sartre's The Flies. The honorable whore. Nekrasov or Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (all 1956/1957). Just like the publications by Franz Kafka and Hugo von Hofmannsthal that appeared at the same time , these books were a little sensation on the GDR book market and were quickly sold out. However, after executives of the publishing house demanded a fundamental social change in the GDR in connection with the beginning reforms in Poland, Hungary and the Soviet Union, the direction of the company was again controlled more closely by the government. The publishing editor Wolfgang Harich called for an immediate reorganization of socialism and the reunification of Germany on the left. Head of state Walter Ulbricht thereupon arranged for the arrest of Janka and Harich for "forming factions within the party and betraying the class enemy" and had them sentenced to prison terms in a show trial in 1957 . As a result, the company's program was quickly switched back to socialist contemporary German and Eastern European literature, and many important Western European authors were deleted from the list. Klaus Gysi , the father of the politician Gregor Gysi , took over the management on February 1, 1957. “The new publishing director, Klaus Gysi, acted as an ideological discipline. The new party secretary sent by the party, the lecturer Joachim Schreck, also helped bring the house back to the party line. "

In 1954, the publisher presented itself for the first time at the Frankfurt Book Fair at a special exhibition with other GDR publishers . The West German Exchange Association forbade direct participation in the event due to the expropriation of the publishing house in the GDR. A year later, the Aufbau-Verlag " GmbH " was converted into an organization-owned company of the Kulturbund and entered as such in the register of the people's own economy. Important German writers of those years were Wolfgang Joho , Herbert Nachbar , Erwin Strittmatter and Ehm Welk .

1961-1970

At the beginning of the 1960s, editions of works increasingly shaped the publisher's profile. In 1960 the first volume of the great “Berlin Edition” of Goethe's works came out. A year later, the company founded the ten-volume Heine edition and the largest German-language series of works by Mark Twain . Until 1990, there were several volume editions by Lion Feuchtwanger , Heinrich Mann , Honoré de Balzac , Anna Seghers , Fjodor Dostojewski and Bertolt Brecht. At the same time, the Central Publishing Administration (HV) of the Ministry of Culture asked to print licensed editions of Western publishers in higher editions than agreed in order to save foreign currency .

Volumes from the library of German classics

On January 1, 1964, based on a resolution of the Politburo of the SED of July 31, 1962, the GDR publishing landscape was reorganized, the so-called "Profiling of the Publishing System", as a result of which the Thuringian Volksverlag and the Arion publishing house were expanded and produced. Verlag , Weimar , took over and continued the Library of German Classics (BDK) founded by the Weimar publishers (over 150 volumes, total circulation more than 7 million copies). With the publishing house Rütten & Loening, which is also registered in HRC, he formed a working group - while maintaining the ownership structure - which was jointly administered by the main administration of publishing and bookshops in the Ministry of Culture of the GDR.

Both publishers remained registered in HRC as independent organizations and published their books under the name Aufbau-Verlag Berlin and Weimar and Rütten and Loening, Berlin . In addition to the existing editorial offices for contemporary German literature, German heritage and foreign literature , the literary studies department was added, which was headed by Jürgen Jahn.

Latin American literature became a further focus. With the novel Under the Star of Evil , the Aufbau-Verlag introduced the Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez to the German book market in 1966 . In the same year, Fritz-Georg Voigt , who had been a lecturer in the company since 1952, took over the management of the publishing house.

Some publications by GDR authors, including those by Kurt Bartsch and Reiner Kunze , met with rejection from the SED and were criticized . In 1967, the first year of the literary calendar was published and two years later brought construction to the debut novel Jakob the Liar by Jurek Becker out.

1971-1990

With the volume Reading and Writing , Christa Wolf's entire work was included in the publisher's directory in 1972 . In the same year, books by Volker Braun , which the censorship authorities had long banned, were published. At that time, the publishing house published works by Friedrich Hölderlin (on the occasion of his 200th birthday), Jo Mihaly and Eva Strittmatter . Since the internationally successful novel Life and Adventure of Trobadora Beatriz, according to the testimony of her minister Laura von Irmtraud Morgner in 1974, women's literature played a decisive role in determining the publisher's profile in the years to come. Helga Königsdorf was published with My inappropriate dreams as was Hermynia zur Mühlen with As the Stranger Came .

Since the beginning of the 1970s, the company in the Schwedt petrolchemical combine held a so-called “publishing day”, on which editors, writers and lecturers presented new books to employees. The project met with a great response and was pursued for the next twenty years.

Many authors of the publishing house, including Stephan Hermlin , Sarah Kirsch and Christa Wolf, protested in 1976 against the expatriation of the artist Wolf Biermann . As a result of the Biermann affair, the government intensified its repression of certain writers, whereupon Kurt Bartsch , Günter Kunert , Joachim Seyppel and other regular authors from the Aufbau Verlag left the GDR. The government's 1979 "instructions on the uniform approach of all cultural-political institutions in dealing with authors" impaired the work of the publishing house, as it stipulated that writers' associations, publishers and other cultural institutions should intervene "politically and ideologically" as early as possible in the creation of new works . Nonetheless, critical texts were published again and again in the house, for example in 1980 the publishing management set the publication of Erwin Strittmatter's miracle worker. Third volume against the censorship authorities.

On the 100th anniversary of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's death, the first volume of the 20-volume work edition was published in 1981. A year later, Christoph Hein's novella The Foreign Friend achieved great international renown. In 1983 Heinrich Mann's essay volume Der Haß was published in memory of the book burning during the National Socialist era . Elmar Faber , who had been in charge of Edition Leipzig until then, also took over the management of the company .

For its 40th anniversary in 1985, the Aufbau-Verlag had works from 55 countries in its program. Texts by authors whose world rights the publisher owned were translated into all major languages. The publisher's sustained commitment to Jewish writers such as Lion Feuchtwanger, Anna Seghers, Arnold Zweig and Heinrich Heine was also clear .

In addition to a three-volume selection by Ingeborg Bachmann , the first volumes of the Great Berlin and Frankfurt Edition , a joint venture with Suhrkamp Verlag , were published in the late 1980s on the occasion of Bertolt Brecht's 90th birthday . In 1985, the house decided to print Christoph Hein's book Horns Ende without permission from the censorship authorities. Towards the end of the GDR, the publishing house founded the series Aufbau - Besides the series , which served young, non-conformist writers as a forum.

In 1989, in the last year of the GDR, the publishing house and book trade head office announced a simplified regulation for printing permits. The editions of some prose pieces by Uwe Johnson went under in the turmoil of the collapse of the GDR and the publication of Fritz Rudolf Fries ' novel The Way to Oobliadooh was hardly registered.

When the provisional board of directors of the SED / PDS announced in a newspaper article facts and figures on party assets on June 14, 1990 in New Germany that the Aufbau-Verlag was party property along with other major publishers, many important authors of the house protested who had previously believed were that the Aufbau-Verlag belonged to the Kulturbund. Some even wanted to terminate their publishing contracts, but were quickly reassured. The board of the PDS had already decided on January 11, 1990 to transfer the publishing house from party property to public property. On March 14, 1990, the Ministry of Culture signed a takeover / handover protocol according to which the publisher was to be transferred to public property with retroactive effect from January 1, 1990, “without compensation”. The PDS signed on April 2, but made the condition that 16.987 million marks would be due to the PDS if the publisher was resold , which the ministry rejected. Nonetheless, the Aufbau-Verlag, registered in HRC as an organization-owned company , was supposedly converted into a " GmbH under construction" (GmbH i. A.) owned by the Treuhandanstalt with effect from July 1, 1990, as if it had been a VEB . The Federal Court of Justice ruled in the last instance in 2008 that the Aufbau-Verlag was never the property of the SED and was therefore never public property, and therefore a conversion according to the Trust Act did not take place. The supposed shares in the supposed Aufbau-Verlag GmbH in general therefore did not exist. The Aufbau-Verlag remained the property of the Kulturbund until it was sold by the Kulturbund to the publisher Bernd F. Lunkewitz in 1995.

On July 1, 1990, after their confirmation by the Treuhandanstalt, the supposed managing directors of the supposed Aufbau-Verlag GmbH on behalf of Elmar Faber , Peter Dempenwolf and Gotthard Erler took over the management of the publishing house.

Up until the monetary union of the two German republics on July 1, 1990, the Aufbau-Verlag had around 4500 first editions in 125 million copies ( excluding Rütten & Loening titles). The conversion to the market economy system brought the company heavy losses, mainly because of competition from the old federal states. In addition, the publishing house had only printed many writers in licensed editions and had no available holdings of its in-house authors and classic titles. The non-fiction book Der Sturz (conversations by Reinhold Andert and Wolfgang Herzberg with Erich Honecker ) became the first success after monetary union.

The publisher's book series from 1951 to 1991

Volumes of the BFDS from 1951

In 1951, the company took over the library of progressive German writers (BFDS) from Volk und Wissen Verlag . This series was intended to represent a representative collection of works from the first half of the century and to break down the barrier between workers and literature. Works with socialist and left-wing bourgeois content were published here, including by Arnold Zweig , Friedrich Wolf and Bertolt Brecht. The books were printed in an edition of 30,000 copies and could thus be offered at a price of three to six marks . Wieland Herzfelde and John Heartfield were won over for the equipment .

The German Public Library (DVB) was founded in 1953, the volumes of which cost 2.85 marks. The DVB program was open on all sides and contained German literature of the classical period and literary realism, left-wing bourgeois writings of the 20th century, and socialist contemporary and world literature. The series grew to 118 titles in its 14-year existence and actually helped many workers to create the basis for their own library.

With the episode bb for “Cheap Books”, Aufbau launched its first series of paperbacks in 1958, which until 1991, when the Aufbau-Taschenbuchverlag was founded , presented 622 titles with a total circulation of 39.5 million copies. The range of books essentially corresponded to the rest of the publisher's program, but there were also a few first or even single editions here (the latter e.g. Memory with Wings by Romain Gary).

Other important series were Novels of World Literature (together with Rütten & Loening , 1951–1957), Die philosophische Bücherei (1954–1957), Library of World Literature (1962–1991) and Edition New Texts (1972–1991). The latter served as a platform for experimental German and foreign texts, in which works by Erwin Strittmatter , Heinz Kahlau and François Bon were published, among others .

Publishing archive until 1990

The publisher's documents from 1945 to the fall of the Wall are the property of the former publisher Bernd F. Lunkewitz and are on loan from the Berlin State Library . They comprise more than a million sheets from the post-war period to 1990. A film copy of the archive material is kept in the Barbarastollen near Freiburg im Breisgau . In addition, the documents are accessible for research in digitized form.

The publishing house 1991–2008

Signet of the publisher from 1994 to 2010

Privatization, Expansion and Ownership

On September 18, 1991, the Frankfurt real estate entrepreneur Bernd F. Lunkewitz (1967–1969 active for KPD / ML ) bought the shares in Aufbau Verlag GmbH and Rütten & Loening GmbH from the Treuhandanstalt .

Additional shareholders at that time were Thomas Grundmann, Eberhard Kossack and Ullrich Wechsler. The branch in Weimar was closed earlier. The Aufbau-Taschenbuch-Verlag was founded. After Elmar Faber left the house, Lunkewitz took over the management of the publishing houses himself and realigned the programs. As a flagship, the Aufbau-Verlag remained a program publisher for sophisticated classical and modern literature, while Rütten & Loening became a publisher for upscale entertainment. Erwin Strittmatter's old work The Shop. In 1992, the third part was a success for the Aufbau publishing house, particularly in eastern Germany, while book sales in the west remained critical.

In 1993 Lunkewitz acquired Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag , Leipzig , from the Treuhandanstalt. René Strien, previously a lecturer at Bastei-Lübbe, became head of the Rütten & Loening publishing house in 1995 , which, as part of the reorganization of the corporate group, gave the literary magazine Sinn und Form to the Aufbau-Verlag.

The publishing house landed one of the greatest successes after taking over from the Treuhandanstalt in 1995 with the diaries of Victor Klemperer I want to bear witness to the last . Books by Brigitte Reimann and Alfred Kerr could also be sold in large numbers. Since Rütten & Loening and then Aufbau-Taschenbuch-Verlag had an extraordinary success with the novel Die Päpstin (more than five million copies sold in total) in 1995 , the publishing group was in the black for the first time after the fall of the Wall.

Since 1995, however, the publishing work has been burdened by considerable uncertainties about the ownership structure of the publishing house and, in particular, about the publishing rights and copyrights. Information provided by the Independent Commission to review the assets of the parties and mass organizations in the GDR led to the suspicion in September 1994 that the privatization of the publishing houses by the Treuhandanstalt might have failed and that the Aufbau-Verlag is still the property of the Kulturbund, which is under fiduciary management the Treuhandanstalt, renamed BvS, was located. After the BvS categorically denied this and rejected all claims, the publisher Bernd F. Lunkewitz now bought the shares in the old Aufbau Verlag GmbH , or the assets of the Aufbau Verlag, and all claims for damages against the BvS from the Kulturbund . The subsequent litigation against the BvS, the associated expenditure of time and the considerable costs, seriously affect the publisher.

In the spring of 1999, on the initiative of Aufbau and Südwestrundfunk, Der Audio Verlag was founded, which in autumn of the same year listed a selection of 34 titles in its directory. Structure had already published audio books in its book segment .

At the end of 2003 Lunkewitz discontinued the independent activity of Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag , which since then has been run by Aufbau Verlag as a "segment with its own program management".

In 2005 the Aufbau publishing group had a total turnover of 16 million euros .

In March 2008, after 13 years of litigation , the Federal Court of Justice ruled in the last instance that the Aufbau-Verlag still belongs to the Kulturbund, i.e. it was never publicly owned and therefore not owned by the Treuhandanstalt. Therefore, in 1991 the Treuhandanstalt illegally sold the publishing house to the group of investors around Lunkewitz. Since some of the officials knew, according to their records, of the true ownership, Lunkewitz has been suing the Federal Agency for Unification-related Special Tasks (BvS) for damages of 27 million euros since 2009 ; this amount corresponds to the total of his investments in the publisher up to then.

On May 30th, 2008 the management of the Aufbau Verlagsgruppe GmbH applied for the opening of insolvency proceedings at the Charlottenburg district court after the publisher Bernd Lunkewitz announced the end of his financial support for the Aufbau-Verlagsgruppe GmbH from private funds. The bankruptcy proceedings were opened on September 1, 2008. On October 13, 2008 it was reported that the publisher was about to be taken over by a Berlin businessman.

Since then, the Berlin investor Matthias Koch has been successfully running the Aufbau Verlag with the associated other publishers.

The publishing program after 1990

Some items on the program, such as classics of world literature or editions by Latin American authors, were retained beyond 1990. Some of the work editions by Dostojewski, Egon Erwin Kisch, Turgeniew, ETA Hofmann, which were never complete in the GDR times due to the lack of paper, were published in full. The complete editions of authors such as Bertolt Brecht, Hans Fallada , Lion Feuchtwanger or Friedrich Schiller continue to be a focus in the publisher's directory. Editions planned for the long term are the Great Brandenburger Edition of Fontane's Works (GBA) in connection with the Theodor Fontane-Arbeitsstelle of the University of Göttingen, the Berlin edition of Arnold Zweig's works (since 1996) and the Anna- Seghers complete edition in connection with the University of Mainz .

With the department of GDR literature, the house makes an important contribution to the distribution of writings from the new federal states. Other sections such as the children's book sector were added, with which new readership groups could be reached. Edited picture books by authors and illustrators such as Rotraut Susanne Berner , Barbara Frischmuth , Norman Junge and Mario Giordano have been published since spring 2000 .

In the field of fiction, the publisher publishes works of classical modernism , among others by Franz Kafka and Rainer Maria Rilke . Contemporary authors of German and international literature being built include Polina Daschkowa , Nino Filastò , Lenka Reinerová , Thomas Lehr , Robert Schneider and Eva and Erwin Strittmatter ; the crime authors include Fred Vargas and Malla Nunn .

In the non-fiction area, there are autobiographical reports, contemporary history, texts on social and cultural criticism, biographies, illustrated books and essays. In 2003, Michel Friedman was won over to head the Political Books program area. Authors in the non-fiction department include Alfred Kerr , Victor Klemperer and Brigitte Reimann .

The structure of the literary calendar was published in 2012 in the 45th year.

With the dissolution of the GDR Writers' Association in 1991, the Aufbau-Verlag took over the association magazine neue deutsche literatur (ndl), founded in 1953 , in order to save the paper from collapse. The magazine has been published by Schwartzkopff Buchwerke in Berlin since 2004 .

The magazine Sinn und Form is published today by the Akademie der Künste (six times a year) and distributed by Aufbau Verlag.

Today's construction publisher

The Aufbau Haus at Moritzplatz in Berlin-Kreuzberg has been the seat of the Aufbau publishing house since 2011

In October 2008 the entrepreneur Matthias Koch took over the Aufbau Verlag with all rights from Bernd F. Lunkewitz and the insolvency administrator Joachim Voigt-Salus (Berlin). In February 2009, the publishing house left its previous domicile at Hackescher Markt in Berlin and moved to a temporary quarter in Kreuzberger Lindenstrasse in the vicinity of the Jewish Museum (Victoria Areal). The publishing house moved to its final location in May 2011 in the Aufbau Haus on Moritzplatz in Kreuzberg . In addition to the Aufbau Verlag, the other library and the Edition Braus, a bookstore, a theater, a club and a gallery as well as the “Planet Modulor”, a department store for art supplies, have moved into the center for creative people . The Aufbau Verlag is planning regular events there in collaboration with artists, authors and journalists to bring together cultural activities, social projects and book content. Koch is a partner in a family company that has invested in the creative industry. He does not want to influence the operational business of the publisher. The former high school teacher for German , French and literature from Mülheim an der Ruhr manages the assets of private investors as managing director. Officially, the publisher is currently (as of 2013) Aufbau Verlag GmbH & Co. KG .

In January 2014, the publisher and the two managing directors René Strien and Tom Erben parted ways due to “different opinions about the future strategic direction”. They were accused of having won too few new authors for the publishing house and that the ambitious program of the small publishing subsidiaries was insufficient for the economic prospects of the whole company. In the future, the publisher is to concentrate on the financially significant parts of the offer, such as the construction of the paperback. At the same time, the long-time managing directors, together with Matthias Koch, had successfully led the publishing house out of bankruptcy and repositioned it since 2008. Regular placements on recommendation lists fall under the aegis of the managing directors, such as the nomination of Monika Zeiner with her debut The Order of Stars over Como for the German Book Prize 2013 as well as on the SPIEGEL bestseller list, for example with Mark Twain's My Secret Autobiography or Wie haben wir laughed by Peter Ensikat and Dieter Hildebrandt. International surprise successes such as Hans Fallada with Everyone dies for himself or Ernst Haffner's Blood Brothers , published by Metrolit-Verlag, have even initiated a trend of rediscoveries in the book industry. In 2013 it was possible to bring the independent publisher into the black, but the publisher should "end up in the profit zone with more quality and less mainstream". The sales figures have declined in recent years ( 2012 : EUR 15.3 million, 2013 : EUR 12.7 million, 2014 : EUR 12.8 million) and most recently at EUR 12.5 million for 2015 lay. The two large areas of hardcover and paperback account for EUR 4.8 million and EUR 5.3 million respectively, and here the paperback had the largest decrease of around 3.6% compared to the same period of the previous year (EUR 5.5 million ). The E-Books / Apps division was responsible for EUR 1.7 million in sales in 2015 and was even able to increase by around 6.3% compared to the previous year. In the ranking of the 100 largest book publishers (based on turnover) of buchreport.magazin , Aufbau Verlag is 76th in 2018, directly behind MVB and Thienemann-Esslinger . Gunnar Cynybulk was in charge of the publishing house until September 2017 , before that he was deputy program manager of Aufbau Hardcover with the Blumenbar label. He was followed by Constanze Neumann, who now heads the literature and non-fiction program areas. Reinhard Rohn is still responsible for the construction of the paperback and Rütten & Loening. The owner Matthias Koch wants to support the further development of the publishing house in a newly established advisory board.

See also

literature

  • Ruth Glatzer: “Publishing history 1945–1984.” In: The house on Französische Strasse. Forty years of construction publishing. An almanac. Structure, Berlin a. Weimar 1985, 417-519.
  • Jürgen Jahn (Ed.): "I would like to bring mine under one roof ..." Ernst Bloch's business correspondence with the Aufbau-Verlag 1946–1961. A documentation. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2007, ISBN 978-3-447-05320-4 .
  • Judith Marschall: Upright gait in GDR socialism. Walter Janka and the Aufbau-Verlag. Westphalian steam boat, Münster 1994, ISBN 3-924550-94-8 .
  • Marianne Vogel : Gedeelde stad, geheelde stad. Berlijnse thriller (City divided, city healed). Soesterberg: Aspect 2012. (Dutch novel in which the problematic fiduciary sale of the publisher plays a major role.)
  • Carsten Wurm: The early construction publishing house 1945–1961. Concepts and controversies. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1996, ISBN 3-447-03826-8 .
  • Carsten Wurm: A book every day. 50 years of Aufbau-Verlag 1945–1995. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-351-02440-1 .
  • Marie-Kristin Rumland: Changes in the publishing industry and book trade in the former GDR, 1989–1991 . Foreword by Alfred G. Swierk. 1st edition. tape 44 : Scientific articles from the German Book Archive Munich, German Book Archive Munich . Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 1993, ISBN 3-447-03419-X , ISSN  0724-7001 ( books.google.com [accessed on May 9, 2017] According to Christoph Links , this work contains factual errors).
  • Regine Reich: On the competitiveness of East German book publishers on the German market as a whole . 1st edition. BOD / Diploma.de, 1997, ISBN 3-8386-0065-7 ( books.google.com [accessed on May 9, 2017] Master's thesis from 1997 at Leuphana University Lüneburg ).
  • Simone Rath: The Aufbau-Verlag and the turning point: program and structural changes as a result of reunification . 1st edition. GRIN Verlag, 2008, ISBN 978-3-640-17572-7 , urn : nbn: de: 101: 1-201008293672 ( books.google.com [accessed on May 9, 2017] Master's thesis from 2006 at the University of Duisburg -Food ).
  • Christoph Links : The fate of the GDR publishers. Privatization and its consequences . 2nd Edition. Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-595-9 ( books.google.com [accessed on May 9, 2017]). (First edition: ISBN 978-3-86153-523-2 . Work is based on the author's dissertation at the Humboldt University in Berlin under the title The transformation of the East German publishing landscape in the process of German unification in 2008.)
  • Konstantin Ulmer: You have to hang your heart on something that is rewarding. The history of the Aufbau Verlag 1945–2020 , Aufbau-Verlag 2020, ISBN 978-3-351-03747-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Thomas Wilking (Ed.): Book report (=  magazine . Volume 47, April). Harenberg Kommunikation Verlags- und Medien-GmbH & Co.KG , April 29, 2016, ISSN  1615-0724 , OCLC 49978621 , ZDB -ID 1494552-6 , p. 47 .
  2. ↑ Press | Building house. In: www.aufbauhaus.de. Retrieved June 17, 2016 .
  3. ↑ Magdalena Heider: Cultural Association for the Democratic Renewal of Germany in Martin Broszat, Hermann Weber (ed.): SBZ manual: State administrations, parties, social organizations and their leaders in the Soviet occupation zone , Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag Munich, 1993, ISBN 978-3- 486-55262-1 , p. 732
  4. ↑ Carsten Wurm: “Season for poetry. Cultural-political incidents in the Aufbau-Verlag at the end of the sixties. " In: Horch und Guck - magazine for the critical processing of GDR literature. Conflicts in the GDR 1958–1968 . 11. Vol. 37, pp. 37 .
  5. ^ Christian Esch: Literature in a steel barrel. In: Berliner Zeitung , November 29, 2006, ISSN  0947-174X .
  6. ^ Christian Esch: Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag leaves Leipzig . In: Berliner Zeitung , February 28, 2003, ISSN  0947-174X .
  7. ^ A b Hans Leyendecker : Trouble about the construction publishing house. "I won and I sleep badly". In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , March 27, 2008.
  8. ↑ Even the greatest fortune is used up at some point. In: boersenblatt.net , May 30, 2008.
  9. ↑ Aufbau-Verlag - Insolvency proceedings begin. In: boersenblatt.net of September 1, 2008.
  10. ↑ New construction publisher raises hopes for the future. ( Memento from October 17, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) In: Münstersche Zeitung , October 14, 2008.
  11. ↑ Topic: 70 Years of Construction-Verlag - Burkhard Müller - Die Zeit Nº 21/2015 - accessed on May 23, 2015.
  12. ↑ Construction in the Victoria area. In: boersenblatt.net , March 9, 2009.
  13. ↑ Lucky bag for high demands In: die tageszeitung , June 19, 2011
  14. ↑ Love marriage or drowning. In: Börsenblatt , January 21, 2011.
  15. ↑ Ingo Arend: The promise of quality. In: Friday , November 19, 2009.
  16. ↑ Surprising separation: dismantling of the bosses while building. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , January 31, 2014.
  17. ↑ Aufbau-Verlag fires its managing directors. In: Die Welt , January 31, 2014.
  18. ↑ René Strien and Tom Erben leave Aufbau Verlag. In: Book Market , January 31, 2014.
  19. ↑ Christopher Schmidt : Hunter of the lost treasure. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung 8./9. March 2014.
  20. ↑ Holger Heimann: More demanding. In: Börsenblatt for the German book trade. July 2013.
  21. ↑ Establishing a new management duo In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , February 7, 2014
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on June 11, 2007 .