Edith Jacobsohn

This article is about a publisher and an émigré. For a contemporary doctor, psychoanalyst and emigrated resistance fighter with a similar spelling, see Edith Jacobson

Edith Lotte Jacobsohn , née Schiffer (born October 26, 1891 in Berlin , † December 31, 1935 in London ) was a German translator and publisher .

Life

Edith Schiffer was born in Berlin as the daughter of the Jewish timber merchant and building contractor Max Schiffer. The liberal politician and later Reich Minister of Justice Eugen Schiffer was her uncle; the Hamburg publisher Paul Cassirer and the philosopher Ernst Cassirer were her cousins ​​with whom she was in contact.

She attended boarding school in Great Britain, where she met the English teacher Edith Lillie Williams. In 1915 she married the publicist and theater critic Siegfried Jacobsohn , who published the magazine Die Schaubühne (from 1918 Die Weltbühne ). With her fortune, she saved the famous magazine from bankruptcy several times and in 1927 (after the death of her husband) also took over the management of the Weltbühne publishing house .

Edith Jacobson translated English children's books into German, including the 1920 published book The Story of Doctor Dolittle ( The Story of Doctor Dolittle ) of Hugh Lofting and Winnie-the-Pooh ( Winnie the Pooh ) by Alan Alexander Milne . She mainly worked under her alias EL Schiffer (her maiden name) - the pseudonym EL Schiffer-Williams , on the other hand, stood for joint translations with Edith Williams.

In April 1924 she founded the children's book publisher Williams & Co. with her friends Annie Williams (née Ball) and Edith Weinreich (née Williams) , from which the later Cecilie Dressler Verlag emerged . The two English women left after just a year, and Jacobsohn ran the publishing house alone from then on. He published the Doctor Dolittle stories from 1925 and the Pooh Bear stories from 1928 with great success. In 1929 Edith Jacobsohn encouraged Erich Kästner to write children's books and published his classics Emil und die Detektiven (1929) and Pünktchen und Anton (1931) in her publishing house .

In 1927, after the early death of her husband, Jacobsohn also took over the management of the Weltbühne publishing house. First, Kurt Tucholsky was appointed head of the world stage. When he went back to France, Jacobsohn appointed Carl von Ossietzky as his successor in May 1927. Outwardly, Tucholsky's name remained on the front page of the newspaper for the time being. From October 1927 it was: Head of the Weltbühne Carl von Ossietzky with the assistance of Kurt Tucholsky. After fleeing Germany, Jacobsohn sold both publishers. The Williams publishing house was taken over by the former employee Cecilie Dressler , whose name the publishing house bore from 1941. The world stage came after long negotiations on the German Communist Party affiliated journalists Hermann Budzislawski .

The day after the Reichstag fire , at the end of February 1933, she fled the German Reich with her son Peter (* 1916) to Vienna , later to Zurich and then to London , where she got a second marriage to secure her residence permit and took the surname Forster .

Edith (Jacobsohn-) Forster died impoverished in London on December 31, 1935 at the age of 44.

Commemoration

After the end of the war , Edith Jacobsohn was almost forgotten in West Germany for decades. From December 1997 to January 1998 the Theodor Fontane Library in Berlin presented the exhibition Mein Schöner Verlag in her honor . Edith Jacobsohn and the Williams & Co. Verlag. History and success of a Berlin publisher from the 1920s . A 60-page exhibition catalog was published.

literature

• Frank Flechtmann: My beautiful publishing house, Williams & Co. memory of Edith Jacobsohn. About a forgotten publisher of famous books; with a bibliography 1925–1955. (Catalog for the exhibition "Mein Schöner Verlag. Edith Jacobsohn and Williams & Co. Verlag. History and success of a Berlin publisher from the twenties", Theodor Fontane Library, Berlin, December 1997 to January 1998), Berlin 1997, ISBN 978-3-933175-19-9 ( improved text edition, Berlin 2010, online (PDF) )

Web links

• Literature by and about Edith Jacobsohn in the catalog of the German National Library
• Biography on weltbuehne-lesen.de , accessed 2010.
• Theodor Brüggemann, Friedrich Stephan: Contemporary history in children's books: The Williams publishing house (1926–1954). Lecture, Cologne 2001. PDF Online , accessed 2010.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Chronology of the world stage on the homepage Make Aus Teutschland Deutschland.
2. ^ Frank Flechtmann: My beautiful publishing house, Williams & Co .: Memory of Edith Jacobsohn; about a forgotten publisher of famous books. In: deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de. December 4, 1997, accessed April 17, 2020 .