Eugene Claassen

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Eugen Claassen around 1954

Eugen Claassen (born February 14, 1895 in Zurich , † April 26, 1955 in Hamburg ) was a German publisher .

family

Eugene Claassen's maiden name was Yevgeny Schmujlow, which he carried until 1917: His Russian father, Vladimir Schmujlow, born in Charkow , had left his Ukrainian hometown in 1890 and studied chemistry and sociology in Dresden . There he met the German actress Maria Claassen (* 1869 in Tilsit ), who was descended from Mennonites on her father's side. In the absence of government permission for their marriage, the couple married in London . Friedrich Engels was a best man . The couple went from London to Zurich, where they joined a socialist student group.

Life

The family moved from Zurich to Munich in 1898 , where their father took over the management of the Russian department in the Munich Reinsurance Company . In 1901 the child was baptized in the Orthodox Church on Salvatorplatz in Munich, together with his sister Hertha.

In the war year 1915, Claassen began - after attending a grammar school - at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich and in Berlin at the Humboldt University in Berlin to study philosophy and art history . He had to interrupt his studies during the First World War because he was a soldier from 1917 to 1918. In 1922 Eugen Claassen received his doctorate in Munich with a dissertation on epistemology and real ontology . The theme was reality and ideality. An epistemological attempt to create a real foundation for ideality.

Claassen then worked for the Frankfurter Zeitung until 1925 , which was part of the Frankfurter Societäts-Druckerei company . Within the company he was head of the Societäts-Verlag from 1925 to 1935.

In the spring of 1934, Eugen Claassen and Henry Goverts began planning to found their own publishing house. On December 20, 1934, they founded the H. Goverts Verlag in Frankfurt am Main in the legal form of a GmbH with its registered office in Hamburg-Rotherbaum , first at Alte Rabenstrasse 12 and then Moorweidenstrasse 14. Despite the establishment, Claassen remained in Frankfurt. On May 1, 1935, he then moved to Hamburg as managing director of the publishing house. The staff included the teacher Heinrich Landahl , the lecturer Wilhelm Gollub and his wife Hildegard Claassen .

Gravestone Claassen in the women's garden

The first books to appear at the end of 1935 were the novels Frau Orpha by Marie Gevers , Anna Linde by Editha Klipstein and Peter Abälard by Helen Waddell . The publishing house achieved its first bestseller in 1937 with the German edition of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind , translated by Martin Beheim-Schwarzbach . By July 1941, the book had reached a circulation of 276,900 copies.

After the Second World War , Henry Goverts received a license from the British occupying forces to re-establish the publishing house under the name Claassen & Goverts. In 1947 Henry Goverts and Eugen Claassen separated, who now ran the company under the name Claassen Verlag until his death in 1955. Then his wife Hildegard Claassen took over the management.

Eugen Claassen was buried in the Ohlsdorfer Friedhof , Planquadrat AB 23, 091-3 (west of Chapel 6). The tombstone created by the German sculptor Hans Martin Ruwoldt has been in the women's garden since April 2020 .

literature

  • Eugen Claassen , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 24/1955 from June 6, 1955, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)
  • Hilde Claassen (Ed.): Eugen Claassen. Think in books. Correspondence with authors and translators. Claassen, Hamburg / Düsseldorf 1970
  • Dietrich Schaefer (ed.): Encounter with Henry Goverts. On his 80th birthday presented by his friends on May 28, 1972. Goverts Krüger Stahlberg Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1972
  • Reinhard Tgahrt: The publisher won't have to change direction. 1934-1966. In: Bernhard Zeller (Ed.): Eugen Claassen. From the work of a publisher. With a bibliography by the publishers H. Goverts, Claassen & Goverts, Claassen 1935–1966. Marbacher Magazin 19/1981, pp. 7–30
  • Anne-Margret Wallrath-Janssen: The publishing house H. Goverts in the Third Reich. (= Archive for the history of books , studies, volume 5). Dissertation University of Göttingen 1999. Saur, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-598-24904-4 , excerpt from Google Books.
  • Bernhard Zeller (Ed.): Eugen Claassen. From the work of a publisher. With a bibliography by the publishers H. Goverts, Claassen & Goverts, Claassen 1935–1966. Catalog for the exhibition from June to August 1981 in the Schiller National Museum in Marbach, edited by Reinhard Tgahrt, Huguette Herrmann, Gudrun Karlewski, Monika Waldmüller. Marbacher Magazin 19/1981

Web links

Commons : Eugen Claassen  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Hilde Claassen: Notes on the biography of Eugen Claassen. In: Bernhard Zeller (Ed.): Eugen Claassen. From the work of a publisher. Marbacher Magazin 19/1981, pp. 81–85.
  2. ^ Anne-Margret Wallrath-Janssen: The publishing house H. Goverts in the Third Reich. Saur, Munich 2007, p. 23.
  3. ↑ Bernhard Zeller (Ed.): Eugen Claassen. From the work of a publisher. Marbacher Magazin 19/1981, p. 7f.
  4. ^ Hilde Claassen: Letter from May 1972. In: Dietrich Schaefer (Ed.): Encounter with Henry Goverts. On his 80th birthday presented by the friends on May 28, 1972. Goverts Krüger Stahlberg Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1972, pp. 11-15.
  5. ^ Anne-Margret Wallrath-Janssen: The publishing house H. Goverts in the Third Reich. Saur, Munich 2007, p. 445.
  6. ^ Anne-Margret Wallrath-Janssen: The publishing house H. Goverts in the Third Reich. Saur, Munich 2007, p. 84.
  7. ^ Curt Vinz, Günter Olzog (ed.): Documentation of German-language publishers. 8th edition. Günter Olzog Verlag, Munich / Vienna 1983, p. 86f.
personal data
SURNAME Claassen, Eugene
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schmujlow, Yevgeny
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German publisher and founder of the publishing house
DATE OF BIRTH February 14, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Zurich
DATE OF DEATH April 26, 1955
Place of death Hamburg