Christian Wegner

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Max Christian Wegner (born September 9, 1893 in Hamburg ; † January 14, 1965 there ) was a Hamburg publisher .

Life

Christian Wegner attended the Johanneum in Hamburg until he graduated from high school in 1912 and began his book trade training in the Johs range. Storm in Bremen. During the First World War , Wegner did not change from artillery to the imperial air force until 1917 as a lieutenant in the reserve . As a pilot and artillery observer, he received the badge for observation officers, the Iron Cross I and II Class and the Hamburg Hanseatic Cross in 1918 and, after more than 105 enemy flights, in August 1918, the Knight's Cross of the Royal House Order of Hohenzollern with swords. In a dogfight he was wounded.

After his apprenticeship as a general bookseller and started studying literary history at the University of Leipzig (1914-1919), he rose to his uncle Anton Kippenberg's position in the 1920s as authorized signatory at Insel Verlag , where he was primarily responsible for the Insel library . From 1930 he changed for a short time as managing director of the Bernhard Tauchnitz publishing house in Leipzig .

Together with John Holroyd-Reece , Wegner was director of the Albatross Verlag from Paris, which they founded, from 1932 onwards . The extradition was done by Kurt Enoch in Hamburg. The "The Albatross Verlag Hamburg GmbH" was entered in the Register Leipzig since November in 1931 and printed in Oscar Brandstetter in Leipzig, the first modern paperbacks ( paperback ) for the mass market in the original language of a global delivery. Albatross quickly managed to win over prominent authors such as Aldous Huxley , James Joyce , DH Lawrence , Sinclair Lewis , Thornton Wilder and Virginia Woolf and to publish them in large numbers. The Albatross Books are considered to be the first modern paperback books for the mass market: produced in the golden section (181 × 111 mm) in sans-serif and the respective literary genres are indicated by colors. Allen Lane later took over the successful concept for Penguin Books , Kurt Enoch in the USA with Montor Books and Wegner himself after the war for the modern Fischer paperback .

With the Odyssey Press, founded in his hometown in 1932, Wegner published in English authors such as James Joyce ( Ulysses , 1932) and DH Lawrence ( Lady Chatterley , 1933), which were not yet released for sale in England . After leaving Albatross, Wegner returned to Hamburg in 1936 and took over the "Oscar Enoch" wholesaler and the "Verlag der Gebrüder Enoch", which he renamed in 1939 to "Grossohaus Wegner" and "Christian Wegner Verlag" (from 1936 ) convicted. Kurt Enoch had to emigrate to the USA because of his Jewish descent and sold the company to Wegner, who enabled him to make a new start in America with a six-figure collection of English books. Wegner took over as the author Hans Leip , new additions were Vita Sackville-West and Jakob Johann von Uexküll and others.

In the Second World War, Wegner was already the major promoted as commander of a transport unit due to anti-Nazi statements for military morale in November 1943 by the military tribunal of the Commander of the 16th Flak Division sentenced in Brussels to four years in prison, demoted and finally to imprisonment pardoned. After ten months in the military prison in Germersheim , at his own request he was taken to the Eastern Front as a simple soldier "on probation" and deployed in Königsberg . At the end of the war, he managed to return unscathed to Kiel via the Baltic Sea.

After the war, Wegner and Axel Springer and others were one of the first to receive a publishing license in Hamburg in 1945. In 1948 he began to publish the Hamburg edition of the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe commented on by Erich Trunz in 14 volumes and re-edited the works of Friedrich Hölderlin , Georg Büchner and Heinrich von Kleist . This was followed by Pierre La Mure's novel Moulin Rouge , new editions of the animal stories by Manfred Kyber as well as books by Richard Benz , Rudolf Goldschmit-Jentner , Heinrich Eduard Jacob and Elsa Sophia von Kamphoevener and illustrated books, for example by the photographer Rosemarie Clausen . Wegner was a co-founder of the Fischer pocket library, whose inexpensive and successful pocket books he published from 1952 together with S. Fischer Verlag .

At the beginning of the 1950s, Wegner was chairman of the publishers' committee in the German book trade association for several years . In this capacity he organized numerous book exhibitions abroad and in 1953 Thomas Mann returned to Hamburg and his hometown Lübeck . He was also involved in the Hamburg cultural deputation, on the supervisory board of the Thalia Theater and on the advisory board of the Hamburg library. In 1963 the Senate awarded him the Medal for Art and Science of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg for his commitment .

Christian Wegner was married four times and had a total of seven children, including the author and publisher Matthias Wegner , the publisher Christian Strasser and the politician Markus E. Wegner .

Special publishing services

  • Publication of the first modern paperback series with Albatross and later Fischer paperback
  • Goethe's works : Hamburg edition in 14 volumes, ed. v. Erich Trunz, 1948–1960, also register volume 1964
  • Georg Büchner: All works and letters. Historical-critical edition with commentary. ed. by Werner R. Lehmann . 1) Seals and translations. 2) Mixed writings and letters. 3) Critical grades. Prolegomena for the Hamburg Büchner edition. 1967-1971

Literature and further evidence

  • Maria Honeit, Matthias Wegner (ed.): Congratulations. Festschrift for Christian Wegner on his 70th birthday. Wegner, Hamburg 1963
  • Karl H. Pressler: Tauchnitz and Albatross. On the history of the paperback. In: From the Antiquariat , No. 1, Munich 1985
  • Erich Trunz : Christian Wegner . In: Die Zeit , January 22, 1965

Footnotes

  1. a b Matthias Wegner: Hanseatic League. Of proud citizens and beautiful legends . Siedler, Berlin, 2nd, revised edition 1999, ISBN 3-88680-661-8 , p. 13.