European publishing company
The European Publishing House (EVA) is a GmbH & Co. KG based in Hamburg . The publishers are Axel Rütters and Irmela Rütters. The publishing parts are operating under the umbrella brand EVA: eva ( philosophy , political and contemporary non-fiction book ), PHILO & ( Judaica ) and the Hanse (Hamburgensia with the series of Hanse crime novels ).
Publishing history
The publishing house was founded in Hamburg on November 14, 1946 under license from the British military authorities . The founders were members of the International Socialist Fighting League (ISK). According to the preamble, the program of the new publisher was intended to promote “ international understanding and the propagation of European ideas”.
The British military authorities in Hamburg had already given the license for the magazine Geist und Tat on November 10, 1946, the publisher of which was EVA.
The beginnings
After the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, the EVA quickly advanced to a publishing house that started with a critical program, with left-wing and socialist ideas of enlightenment and self-enlightenment. From the beginning, dealing with Jewish German history was part of it, and in the 1950s and 1960s the EVA, which had since moved to Frankfurt am Main , was the leading publisher for Judaica , social sciences and political education. The picture book for the forgetful , edited by Richard Errell, started in 1961: with pictures of destruction and evidence of delusion, the effect of which is unbroken. Titles such as History and Development of the Weimar Republic by Arthur Rosenberg , The SS State by Eugen Kogon , Elements and Origins of Total Rule by Hannah Arendt , The Dual State by Ernst Fraenkel and Behemoth by Franz Neumann followed and are now standard works. There were also important contemporary literary authors such as B. Ernst Kreuder , Wolfgang Weyrauch , VO Stomps , Hans Henny Jahnn and B. Traven .
The 1960s
From 1963 the public disputes intensified, and during the protest and student movement the EVA developed into a forum for ideas that were critical and socially changing. The EVA documented the protests against the Vietnam War ( February 1968. Days that shook Berlin ), the campaign against the publisher Axel Springer ( image falsifications ) and, with Jürgen Seifert's pamphlet, Danger in Delay , the “fundamental breach of the opposition”, such as Oskar Negt put it against the emergency legislation. Titles by Wolfgang Abendroth , Ossip K. Flechtheim , Iring Fetscher , Klaus Dörner , Erich Fromm were included in the program. The EVA also published Karl Marx's main work Das Kapital , accompanied by Roman Rosdolsky's history of the origins of Marx's “Capital” , which was published in 1968 in cooperation with the Europa Verlag of the Austrian Trade Union Federation . With the new edition of Rosa Luxemburg's writings , the editor Ossip K. Flechtheim laid the foundation for the anti-authoritarian branch of the Marxism debates of the 1960s.
The 1970s
In the 1970s, the EVA set new accents by including so-called dissident literature, including the book Die Alternative. On the critique of the real existing socialism of the GDR regime critic Rudolf Bahro .
The 1980s
The publisher Axel Rütters, who together with Karl Markus Michel founded the “Syndikat Autor- und Verlagsgesellschaft” in 1976, an organizational form in which authors were co-owners of a publishing company for the first time, led together with the partner Kurt Groenewold and the editors Günther Busch and Henning Ritter the "new" EVA. He added such illustrious names as Peter Brückner , Otto Kirchheimer , Alexander Kluge , Peter Gorsen , Albert Soboul , Isaiah Berlin , Ernst H. Gombrich and Rossana Rossanda to the program . In 1999, the EVA, which has been back in Hamburg for ten years with the publisher Sabine Groenewold, received the award from the Hamburg cultural authority. The reasoning states:
"The program of the European Publishing House has been at a consistently high level for many years and surprises time and again with forays into previously untrodden territory [...] guided by a clever, enlightened and future-oriented intellectuality."
The publishing group
- In 1999 the EVA took over the publishing house Die Hanse.
- After Sabine Groenewold left the company at the end of 2004, a new management team was formed with Axel Rütters and Irmela Rütters as publishers. The publishing archive with the archive material up to 2004 has been located in the Mainz publishing archive, which belongs to the Institute for Book Studies, since 2009.
- In 2005, the publishing house PHILO & PhiloFineArts came under the company roof from Berlin .
- In 2007 the ROTBUCH publishing division, which had been part of the publishing group since 1994, was sold to the Eulenspiegel publishing group in Berlin.
- In 2008 the Philo Fine Arts division was sold and has been an independent publisher ever since.
- Today the company name is EVA Europäische Verlagsanstalt GmbH & Co. KG.
literature
- Sabine Groenewold (Ed.): With license. History of the European Publishing House 1946–1996. eva, Hamburg 1996, ISBN 978-3-434-50095-7 .