Gottfried Berger

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Gottfried Berger ( April 21, 1922 in Vienna - February 15, 2012 in Sittendorf ) was an Austrian Germanist , bookseller , owner and long-time managing director of the Mohr-ZG and Mohr Morawa publishing houses .

Berger was a long-time functionary in the Austrian book trade. From 1955 he was the owner of the J. Berger bookstore , from 1961 as managing director of Mohr-Vertriebs, from 1972 also of Langenscheidt Verlag Vienna , from 1992 as managing partner of Mohr Morawa. He was known and friends with many writers. Heimito von Doderer dedicated the story The Bookseller to him . In the case of wood felling from Thomas Bernhard , Berger was the first addressee of the complaints of the composer Gerhard Lampersberg , because his company sold all publications of the Suhrkamp publishing house .

life and work

The J. Berger bookstore on Vienna's Kohlmarkt was partly owned by the family from 1931 and completely from 1936 to 2012. The company was run by his father, Josef Berger , as an authorized signatory from 1924 and was finally taken over as a partner from 1931. Gottfried Berger was appointed authorized signatory by his father on January 1, 1947. After the unexpected death of the father on June 10, 1947, the son did not inherit, but left the management of the business to his mother, a proven anti-fascist. Gottfried Berger became the owner of the bookstore in 1955.

In 1960, together with Heimito von Doderer and Hans Weigel, he founded the hour of encounter , literary evenings on the floor above the bookstore with readings from almost all of Austria's major writers. Four hundred events had taken place by 2001. On the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, the critic Kurt Kahl described Berger as a “bookseller out of conviction, with character”. He substantiated this with Berger's refusal to deliver a Solzhenitsyn book because the author did not agree to its printing. During the hours of the encounter , the great old men of German-language literature of the post-war years dominated, in addition to Csokor , Doderer, Gütersloh and Weigel also Carl Zuckmayer or Johannes Mario Simmel , but also the grande dame of Austrian Catholicism , Gertrud Fussenegger , with unbreakable loyalty to Berger also stood after their Hitler adorations from the subsequent year 1938 became known in the 1990s. But Berger was also able to build a bridge to the present and the 1968 generation. HC Artmann , Peter Handke , Carl Merz , Helmut Qualtinger , Gerald Szyszkowitz and Peter Turrini also read in the Berger bookstore.

One of the most important deliveries in Austria in the 1950s was the Mohr-ZG company, which had publishers such as Brockhaus , CH Beck , Kiepenheuer & Witsch , Georg Thieme , Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag and Suhrkamp in its program. In 1960 Gottfried Berger joined the company, became the sole owner on January 1, 1961 and considerably expanded the radius of the sales company. In 1977 the company switched to IT, and in 1988 the company moved into new premises in the south of Vienna. In 1992 the merger with the company Morawa took place , after which Berger acted as managing partner of the new house.

In 1976 Gottfried Berger established the first Viennese paperback shop on the premises of the Wiener Frauenbuchhandlung (WFB), which mainly offered magazines for women , for the kitchen and for fashion . The business was run by Margit Stano and kept 35,000 to 40,000 titles in stock at all times. After Stano's retirement in June 2000, the store had to close. The Berger bookstore on Kohlmarkt was run by his daughter Astrid in the last few years of its existence. After Gottfried Berger's death, the family no longer felt it would be profitable to continue the business due to the size of the business of just under 30 m², especially since the rent was gradually "raised to the level of local rents".

Private

Gottfried Berger was married twice. The wedding with Dora geb. Wippel took place on September 5, 1949 in the parish church of Heiligenblut in East Tyrol. With his first wife he had two daughters, Dorothea and Astrid. Dora Berger died in 1958 after a long struggle of complications from cancer. On April 8, 1959, he married again, this time in Maria am Gestade Leonora Essl nee. Popelar. The witnesses were Georg Mautner Markhof and Ludwig Polsterer , close friends of Berger. The couple had a daughter together, Verena, born in 1961.

The bookseller was an avid mountaineer, but at the age of almost sixty he failed because of his lifelong dream of an eight-thousander. He was also a world traveler, who documented his visits to all continents with photographs and passed them on to the public in photo lectures .

Publications

Book publications
  • The last week . A report of seven days at the front, ending almost five months of struggle in the east. Vienna: J & V / Edition Wien / Dachs Verlag 1995, 55 pages
  • America in the XIX. Century. The United States as reflected in contemporary German-language travel literature. Vienna: Molden 1999. ISBN 3-85485-039-5 , 239 pages
  • America in the XIX. Century. Reviews - reviews - reflections. Vienna 2000, 80 pages
more publishments
  • The Last Week , autobiographical report, 1945
  • The bookseller as a carrier of culture. In: The Young Bookseller , Vol. 3, No. 6, June 1954
  • Everything runs through the PSK. The school book campaign in Austria - an unprecedented phenomenon. In: Börsenblatt , March 19, 1979, 91–93

Awards

literature

  • Beatrice Weinmann: Gottfried Berger , bookseller and Austrian with passion, Vienna: Molden 2002. ISBN 3-85485-086-7 , 384 pages
  • Gerald Schnitten (ed.): Festschrift for the 80th birthday of Gottfried Berger , Vienna, April 2002, 168 pages

Individual evidence

  1. ^ KK: The bookseller of the encounter, in: Kurier (Vienna), April 20, 1972
  2. ^ Norbert Bachleitner, Franz M. Eybl, Ernst Fischer: History of the book trade in Austria , Otto Harrassowitz Verlag 2000, p. 348
  3. ^ Hans Haider : Paradise of the Cheap Title: Farewell to the Wiener Taschenbuchladen, in: Die Presse (Vienna), June 10, 2000
  4. ↑ Gottfried Berger: Margit Stano retired, in: Anzeiger , Die Fachzeitschrift des Österreichischen Buchhandels, J. 135, N. 13/14, mid-July 2000, p. 25, with photographs by Margit Stano and from the paperback shop
  5. ↑ Michael Freund: Expensive rents in the city of Vienna: Books have to give way to clocks , Der Standard (Vienna), July 16, 2012
personal data
SURNAME Berger, Gottfried
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian Germanist, bookseller and managing director of book deliveries
DATE OF BIRTH April 21, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH February 15, 2012
Place of death Sittendorf