Frankfurt publishing house

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The Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt (FVA) is a German literary book publisher . It had two predecessors of the same name. The current publishing house was founded in 1987 and has been managed by Joachim Unseld since 1994 .

history

1920 to 1938

For the first time a "Frankfurter Verlags-Anstalt AG" was founded in 1920. The publishing house established itself in Frankfurt am Main ( Grüneburgweg 98) and in Berlin. The focus of the publishing program was architecture, town planning and applied arts. From 1921 to 1936 the publisher also published the “Städel Yearbook” of the Frankfurt Städelsche Kunstinstitut . Due to the Nuremberg Laws , the publishing house was liquidated in 1938.

1951 to 1953: Kogon and Andersch

The second Frankfurt publishing house was founded in 1951 by Eugen Kogon and Alfred Andersch . The program initially consisted essentially of bound holdings from the Stockholm exile publisher Neuer Verlag . In the vicinity of the Frankfurter Hefte published by Kogon, a . a. Works by Lion Feuchtwanger and Heinrich Mann .

The focus was on young authors of post-war German literature. Based on the evening studio series supervised by Andersch, the studio frankfurt book series was published with first publications by Ingeborg Bachmann (her first volume of poetry Die gestundete Zeit appeared in 1953 ), Heinrich Böll , Arno Schmidt and Wolfgang Hildesheimer . Due to a lack of funds, the series had to be discontinued after a dozen volumes, and soon afterwards the publisher also ran out.

1987 to 1994: Schöffling and Löffler

On January 30, 1987, Ida and Klaus Schöffling founded the company for the third time as "Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt GmbH". In an ambitious literary program, the publishing house mainly published contemporary authors such as Eva Demski , Reinhard Kaiser , Jan Koneffke , Klaus Modick , Jochen Schimmang , Burkhard Spinnen , Ror Wolf , Valery Larbaud and Sylvia Plath . But in 1994 it was threatened again: Henner Löffler , silent partner and financier of the publishing house, had changed the corporate structure against the background of impending losses without consulting the authors, which led to a scandal: on November 8, 1992, the authors closed down and left the publishing house . The authors' joint statement reads:

“The Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt was surprisingly taken over for us authors on October 30, 1992 by one of its shareholders and managing directors. The business graduate Henner Löffler has been the sole owner and responsible for the publishing work since then. With Klaus Schöffling, Ida Schöffling and Ulrich Sonnenberg, everyone who has made the Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt what it is for us authors in the last five years is leaving: a publishing house in which there was an intellectual and human climate that each of us opened up stimulated a special way of literary work, who accompanied the creation of our works knowledgeably and presented and represented them with competence and commitment. We found a literary publisher in the old Frankfurt publishing house that we would not want to do without. We see no way of recognizing what the old Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt was under completely different management and we declare without exception that we will not publish any further works in the current FVA-Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt-Henner Löffler GmbH. "

On February 22, 1993, Löffler announced that he had sold the FVA to Haffmans Verlag in Zurich . Haffmans Verlag continued distribution, but new publications no longer appeared.

Since 1994: Joachim Unseld

On October 1st, 1994 Joachim Unseld took over the FVA. Unseld, the son of Suhrkamp publisher Siegfried Unseld and originally his designated successor, had fallen out with his father a few years earlier. Now he began to rebuild the FVA from scratch without any authors and with only a few rights. The first program appeared for the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1995 with the debut of Ernst-Wilhelm Händler , the story collection City with Houses , and a six-volume edition of works by Ror Wolf . Since then Unseld has been publishing a consistently literary program.

From 1996 onwards, instead of a spring program, the publisher's efforts were concentrated on a single book, the “spring book”. The first of these spring books was Margaret Mazzantini's novel Die Zinkwanne . This was followed by debuts such as The Pollen Room by Zoë Jenny in 1997 , a novel that has sold over 500,000 copies to date and has been translated into 27 languages. This was followed by the first novels by Christoph Peters ( Stadt, Land, Fluß , 1999), Marion Poschmann ( Baden bei Gewitter , 2002), Nora Bossong ( area , 2006), Thomas von Steinäcker ( Wallner begins to fly , 2007 ), which were also awarded prizes ) to the current debuts by Julia Wolf ( Alles ist Jetzt , 2015), Sandra Weihs ( Das grenzenlose Und , 2016) and Mareike Fallwickl (dark green almost black, 2018).

In 2011, the FVA was awarded the hotlist prize for the best book of the year by an independent publisher for the novel My gentle twin by the author Nino Harati vili . For her 1280 page novel Das eightchte Leben. For Brilka , Harati vili received the Bertolt Brecht Prize , the Anna Seghers Prize , the Schiller Memorial Prize and the BDI Literature Prize , which Ulla Lenze also received in 2016 for Die Endlose Stadt . The FVA publishes the complete works of Bodo Kirchhoff , who was awarded the renowned German Book Prize for the best novel of 2016 for his experience in 2016 . The FVA attracted particular attention with its artist covers : Jonathan Meese , Thomas Ruff , Karin Kneffel and most recently Neo Rauch designed covers for a complete literary book program of the FVA. In 2019 the publisher received the German Publishing Award .

Focus and authors

The new FVA under Unseld deliberately positioned itself as a financially independent, small literary publisher with all the risks and problems that this implied. To this Unseld:

“In autumn 1995 we presented our first program. Since then we have undertaken to publish only a few selected books by new outstanding authors and to replace “far too many” interchangeable books with a small but decidedly young and literary program of really worthwhile quality. It stayed that way. "

The publishers' authors included and still count:

Alfred Andersch , Juliane Baldy, Juan Bas, JR Bechtle, Mario Bellatin, Claire Beyer , Elisabeth Bishop , Silvio Blatter , Thilo Bock , Britta Boerdner, Nora Bossong , Geneviève Brisac , Elisabeth Bronfen , Hans Christoph Buch , Lasha Bugadze , Marc Buhl, Anthony Burgess , Javier Calvo, Mathieu Carrière , Ruth Cerha, Paule Constant , Laurence Cossé, Anthony Cronin , Pauline Delabroy-Allard, Antonio Delfini , Eva Demski , Nicolas Dickner , Marc Dugain , Lucía Etxebarria , Stuart Evers, Mareike Fallwickl, Mario Fortunato , Margaux Fragoso, Christian Frascella, Vilma Fuentes, Anna Galkina, Tristan Garcia , Dagoberto Gilb, Victoria Glendinning , Dieter M. Gräf , Susanne Gregor, Bettina Gundermann , Günter Hack, Dorothée Haeseling , Joachim Hammann , Ernst-Wilhelm Händler , Nino Haratiwili , Selina Hastings , Christa Hein , Peter Henning , Kai Hensel , Klaus Hensel , Ted Hughes , Zoë Jenny , Marcus Jensen , Marielouise Jurreit , Reinhard Kaiser , Otto Kallscheuer , Stephan Kaluza . Fee Katrin Kanzler , Matthias Karow , Tanja Kinkel , Bodo Kirchhoff , Olivia Kleinknecht , Jan Koneffke , Anna Kordsaia-Samadaschwili, Menis Koumandareas , Chris Kraus , Sabine Kray, Rita Kuczynski , Helmut Kuhn , Thomas Kunst , Nestan Kwinikadze, Amanda Lasker-Berlin, Pavel Lembersky, Ulla Lenze , José Lezama Lima , Irina Liebmann , Damian Lienhard, Gert Loschütz , Marcel Maas , Luigi Malerba , Elsemarie Maletzke , Julia Malik, Giorgio Manganelli , Otto Marchi , Mariello Marianelli, Thomas Martini, Julijana Matanovic, Margaret Mazzantini , Nikola Anne Mehlhorn , Tamta Melaschwili , Maka Mikeladze, Klaus Modick , Quim Monzó , Besnik Mustafaj , Caroline Menge, Alfred Neven DuMont , Nigel Nicolson , Klaus Nonnenmann , Guðmundur Óskarsson, Sergi Pàmies , Fernando del Paso , Christoph Peters , Richard Pietraß , Sylvia Plath , Marion Poschmann , Minka Pradelski , Angela Praesent , Jacques Presser , Yann Queffélec , Maya Rasker, Ana Maria del Rio, Isaac Rosa , Julia Rothenburg, Jochen Schimma ng , Arno Schmidt , Roberto Schopflocher , Annette Seemann , Steven Sherrill, Corinna T. Sievers , Isabel-Clara Simó, Hannah Simon, Edith Sitwell , Stefanie Sourlier, Volker Spierling , Burkhard Spinnen , Thomas von Steinaecker , Anne Stevenson, Thomas Strittmatter , Lawrence Sutin, Livia Veneziani Svevo, Géza Szöcs , Eka Tchilawa, Emma Tennant, David Thomson , Ekaterine Togonidze, Jean-Philippe Toussaint , David Trueba , Pablo Tusset , Ángela Vallvey , Guntram Vesper , Michael Wallner , Sandra Weihs, Thomas Weiss , Wolfgang Weyrauch , Julia Wolf , Ror Wolf , Leonard Woolf , Peter Zingler and Marcia Zuckermann .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Börsenblatt No. 91 of November 13, 1992, p. 6
  2. ↑ Publishing Concept and Literary Publishing Today. (No longer available online.) Rankfurter-verlagsanstalt.de ;formerly in the original;
  3. ↑ All authors. In: frankfurter-verlagsanstalt.de. Retrieved February 24, 2020 .

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