Egon Ammann

Egon Ammann (born October 9, 1941 in Bern ; † August 9, 2017 in Berlin ) was a Swiss publisher and founder of Ammann Verlag .

Life

After finishing school, Egon Ammann began studying classical philology in Friborg and Zurich , which he broke off. Instead, he did an apprenticeship as a retail bookseller at the A. Francke AG bookstore in Bern. He then lived temporarily in Istanbul , where he worked for Franz Mühlbauer's German-Turkish bookstore. He also taught at the local Goethe Institute . When he returned to Switzerland, Otto F. Walter hired him as an editor at his Walter Verlag . Shortly thereafter, however, Walter was pushed out of the publishing house by the company's shareholders, so that Ammann's employment became obsolete. In 1966 he founded his own publishing house, the Kandelaber Verlag. Kandelaber published books by Gerhard Meier , who was still unknown at the time , essays by Adolf Muschg , poems by Hans Rudolf Hilty and Felix Philipp Ingold, as well as an anthology of poems from the Prague Spring . The business success did not materialize, however, in 1970 the Kandelaber Verlag had to file for bankruptcy. Ammann went to Barcelona and was an editor at Editorial Seix Barral. He also hired himself as a "rejón", as a servant of a torero .

In 1975 Siegfried Unseld made him head of the Swiss branch of Suhrkamp Verlag in Zurich. Ammann's task was to track down and promote young Swiss authors.

In 1981 he and his wife Marie-Luise Flammersfeld founded Ammann Verlag in Zurich. The impetus was provided by a manuscript by Thomas Hürlimann , whose story "Die Tessinerin" was the first book published by Ammann Verlag. Ammann initially concentrated on Swiss authors, later he published a. a. Dostoevsky in the translations of Swetlana Geier , Fernando Pessoa , Konstantinos Kavafis , László Krasznahorkai , Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt , Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt , the poet Ossip Mandelstam, who died in the Gulag , and Abraham Sutzkever , the chroniclers of the Vilna Ghetto . “He saw books where they didn't even exist. He found poetry where others carelessly passed by. ”In 1983 he brought out Wole Soyinka - and kept his books in the program, even when the board of directors, in the face of poor sales (14 books in three years with a print run of 5000 copies), urged Soyinka weed out. Then, in 1986, its author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature , "one of the many stroke of luck that kept the publisher, which was plagued by money, alive for a long period of time". George Reinhart and Monika Schoeller support him in difficult economic times .

On August 10, 2009, Egon Ammann announced the closure of the publishing house on June 30, 2010.

“The reasons for this decision lie in the advanced age of the publishers and in a market situation that is becoming increasingly difficult for literature. A publisher with the profile of Ammann Verlag is closely tied to the responsible persons and cannot continue without them. Marie-Luise Flammersfeld and I gave what we had to give. - "Everything has it's time""

- Publishing announcement

After that Egon Ammann and Marie-Luise Flammersfeld lived as privateers in Berlin.

Quote

• "For me, reading is traveling without leaving."

literature

• "Reading is the most important thing." Egon Ammann in dialogue with Verena Auffermann . In: Irmgard M. Wirtz, Ulrich Weber , Magnus Wieland (eds.): Literature - Publishing House - Archive . Wallstein, Göttingen / Chronos, Zurich 2015, ISBN 978-3-8353-1644-7 (Wallstein) and ISBN 978-3-0340-1285-0 (Chronos), pp. 225-239.
• Thomas Hürlimann: Ahmed, the Levantine. Laudation for Egon Ammann . In: Ders .: Heaven, help! About Switzerland and other nests . Ammann, Zurich 2002, ISBN 3-250-30010-1 , pp. 85-98.

Footnotes

1. ↑ Egon Ammann in the Munzinger Archive , accessed on December 13, 2011 ( beginning of article freely available)
2. ↑ ^{a b} Egon Ammann is dead , boersenblatt.net, August 11, 2017, accessed on August 11, 2017.
3. ↑ "Reading is the most important thing." Egon Ammann in dialogue with Verena Auffermann . In: Irmgard M. Wirtz, Ulrich Weber, Magnus Wieland (eds.): Literature - Publishing House - Archive . Wallstein, Göttingen / Chronos, Zurich 2015, pp. 225–239, here p. 230.
4. ^ ^{A b c} Roman Bucheli: The many lives of Egon Ammann . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung from October 8, 2011.
5. ↑ "Reading is the most important thing." Egon Ammann in dialogue with Verena Auffermann . In: Irmgard M. Wirtz, Ulrich Weber, Magnus Wieland (eds.): Literature - Publishing House - Archive . Wallstein, Göttingen / Chronos, Zurich 2015, pp. 225–239, here p. 228.
6. ↑ "Reading is the most important thing." Egon Ammann in dialogue with Verena Auffermann . In: Irmgard M. Wirtz, Ulrich Weber, Magnus Wieland (eds.): Literature - Publishing House - Archive . Wallstein, Göttingen / Chronos, Zurich 2015, pp. 225–239, here p. 231.
7. ^ House of World Literature . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of October 4, 2011, p. 36.
8. ↑ ^{a b} Tilman Spreckelsen: From the niche into the light of the world. Pessoa, Mandelstam, Hürlimann: On the death of the Swiss publisher Egon Ammann . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of August 12, 2017, p. 12.
9. ↑ Cornelia Geissler: He brought the world into the German language. The Swiss publisher Egon Ammann died at the age of 75. In: Frankfurter Rundschau of August 11, 2017.
10. ↑ Roman Bucheli: He was the most passionate and crazy among the book lovers. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung of August 12, 2017, p. 40.
11. ↑ Thomas Hürlimann: Ahmed, the Levantine. Laudation for Egon Ammann . In: Ders .: Heaven, help! About Switzerland and other nests . Ammann, Zurich 2002, pp. 85–98, here p. 85.
12. ↑ Ammann stops. Ammann Verlag will end its journalistic publishing work on July 30, 2010. , boersenblatt.net, August 10, 2009, accessed on September 14, 2017.
13. ↑ "... traveling without leaving". The publisher Egon Ammann . A film by Peter K. Wehrli , Schweizer Fernsehen 2002.

Web links

• Egon Ammann in the online version of the Reich Chancellery Files Edition . Weimar Republic