German publishing house of the sciences

This article describes a publisher in the former GDR. For the publishing house in Baden-Baden, see Deutscher Wissenschafts-Verlag .

The German publishing house of the sciences ( DVW ) was a specialist book publisher in the GDR .

history

The DVW was founded on January 1, 1954 as the successor to the main university literature department of the Volk und Wissen publishing house as a publicly owned company based in Berlin. In the first ten years the publisher brought out 780 new publications with around 3.7 million copies. Mainly mathematical and scientific university textbooks were published; the publishing house was one of the publishing houses of the mathematical student library . In 1964 he took over parts of the Rütten & Loening publishing house and published the university textbooks on philosophy - with the exception of those on Marxism-Leninism , which remained with Dietz , as well as history and sociology . In 1964 the publishing house had 80 employees. Their supervision was the responsibility of Section II (cultural institutions / radio, television, film) in Department V (renamed HA XX in 1964) of the Ministry of State Security, which is responsible for the supervision of the state apparatus . The publisher was the Austrian August Beranek, who had headed the International Psychoanalytical Publishing House in Vienna until it was dissolved by the National Socialists in March 1938.

Although over a third of the production was delivered to western countries, the publisher was operating at a loss because of the state-set book prices. In 1988 the GDR reported a loss of 1.3 million marks with a turnover of 8.4 million marks.

On June 30, 1990 the publishing house was converted into a GmbH and an austerity program was implemented. In October 1991 the publishing house was sold to the Hüthig Heidelberg publishing group , with some parts of the social science program being transferred to other publishing houses. In February 1992 the publishing activity was stopped. The GmbH went into liquidation and expired in 1995.

Publishing archive

The publishing archive was transferred to a depot of DV-Informationssysteme und Service GmbH and to the Federal Archives in Berlin , the documents on scientific production remained with the Hüthig publishing group.

literature

• Christoph Links : The fate of the GDR publishers. Privatization and its consequences. Dissertation. Humboldt University Berlin 2008. Links, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-86153-523-2 ( limited preview in Google book search).

Footnotes

1. ↑ Christoph Links: The fate of the GDR publishers. Privatization and its consequences. Links, Berlin 2009, p. 56.
2. ↑ Stefania Maffeis: Between Science and Politics. Transformations of GDR philosophy 1945–1993. Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-593-38437-5 , p. 88.
3. ↑ August Beranek: To mark the 10th anniversary of VEB German Academic Publishers. In: Börsenblatt for the German book trade . Edition Leipzig. Born in 1964, No. 8, February 18, 1964, p. 153.
4. ↑ Joachim Walther : Security area literature. Writer and State Security in the German Democratic Republic . Links, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-86153-121-6 , pp. 148-149.
5. ↑ Chapter Freud's Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag. A secret acquisition. In: Murray G. Hall , Christina Köstner: "... to get hold of all kinds of things for the national library ...". An Austrian institution during the Nazi era. Böhlau, Vienna 2006, ISBN 978-3-205-77504-1 , pp. 221–228, here note 610 to p. 224.
6. ↑ Christoph Links: The fate of the GDR publishers. Privatization and its consequences. Links, Berlin 2009, p. 57.
7. ↑ Siegfried Lokatis , Stefan Tiepmar: publishing archives of the GDR. An overview. In: Leipzig yearbook on book history. Volume 6, 1996, pp. 451–466, here p. 458.