Christian Strasser (publisher)

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Christian Strasser at a conference of Kriegsenkel eV in Helmstedt, 2014

Christian J. Strasser (born August 31, 1945 in Niebüll ) is a German publisher .

Life

His father was the Hamburg publisher Christian Wegner . The mother Lucie Funk was a bookseller from Danzig who founded a bookshop in Hagen / Westphalia after the war. Strasser's half-brothers include the Rowohlt publisher Matthias Wegner and the founder of the Hamburg Statt party, Markus E. Wegner . Anton Kippenberg , the publisher of Insel-Verlag, was his great-uncle.

After completing secondary school, Strasser did an apprenticeship in mechanical engineering and then hitchhiked through Canada for a year. He learned of his origins only through the death of his father in 1965. He went to Hamburg, where he completed an apprenticeship as a bookseller from 1965 to 1966. After his military service as Fahnenjunker dR, he became head of advertising at the Hugendubel bookstore in Munich at the beginning of 1969, where he and Heinrich Hugendubel founded book advertising for Neun Christian Strasser KG in 1971 , to which the nine largest German booksellers belonged as limited partners.

In 1973 he joined the Time Life Group , first in Amsterdam as German Marketing Director, then in 1975 as the founding manager of the German Time Life branch in Munich. In 1980 he was International Operations Manager in Washington DC , and in 1981 he was appointed European Head of Time Life Books Inc. , based in London. During two part-time study visits to Harvard Business School and Stanford Business School in 1980, Strasser was prepared for top management positions before taking on responsibility for global sales as Vice President International in 1985 .

In 1986 he returned to Germany and was managing partner of the Gräfe & Unzer publishing house until the end of 1988, and in 1990 he held the same position at the Zabert Sandmann publishing house. In 1990 he bought Bucher Verlag and started his own business as a publisher. In 1992, he and his 50 percent partner Heinrich Hugendubel bought the List / Südwest publishing group and founded the Goethestrasse publishing house. After the merger in early 1997 with the Econ publishing group, to which the Marion von Schröder publishing company also belonged, he founded the Econ and List publishing group. Strasser expanded the group in the same year by purchasing Claassen Verlag .

At the end of 1998 Strasser and his partners sold 95 percent of the publishing group to Axel-Springer-Verlag , which merged the company with the Ullstein and Propylaeen publishing houses to form the Econ Ullstein List publishing group . The publishing group included 14 publishers, whose managing publisher Strasser was appointed.

On January 1, 2001, Axel Springer Verlag bought Wilhelm Heyne Verlag and, through another merger, formed the new Ullstein Heyne List publishing group , still with Strasser as the managing publisher. The group had a turnover of almost 200 million euros and, together with the publishing group Random House (Bertelsmann), was the market leader in German-speaking countries.

In 2003, Axel Springer Verlag sold all of its book publishers to Random House in order to concentrate on its core journalistic business again. Due to the prohibition by the Federal Cartel Office , Random House sold half of the publishing group to the Swedish Bonnier group. Strasser failed in his attempt to buy back these publishers himself with the help of investors and left the publishing group at the end of November 2003.

On October 1, 2004, he took over the closed Swiss Pendo Verlag and, as a private publisher, devoted himself to current issues from politics and society in addition to fiction. In 2008 he sold Pendo and the now newly founded Fahrenheit publishing house to Piper publishing house, which belongs to Bonnier.

Shortly thereafter, he founded Scorpio-Verlag in Munich, where he primarily focuses on the global restructuring of economic and social structures from an economic and spiritual point of view.

In 2012 Christian Strasser bought the closed Europa Verlag Wien and opened a publishing house in Berlin and Munich in order - with a new shareholder structure - to focus more on future political, economic and social developments. He feels committed to the history of the publishing house founded in Zurich in 1933, which initially wanted to provide a forum for persecuted authors and banned manuscripts. For the sister publisher founded in Vienna in 1946, founder Emil Oprecht then formulated the concept of "being a platform for the struggle of views for the European spirit and humanitarian sentiment". Strasser wants to further develop this approach at Europa Verlag Berlin, with key topics that focus on a new ethic and sustainable thinking.

The publisher lives in Munich and Berlin.

Awards

publication

literature

personal data
SURNAME Strasser, Christian
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Strasser, Christian J.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German publisher
DATE OF BIRTH August 31, 1945
PLACE OF BIRTH Niebüll