Gustav Kiepenheuer

Gustav Kiepenheuer (born June 10, 1880 in Wengern , † April 6, 1949 in Weimar ) was a German publisher .

Life

Gustav Kiepenheuer completed an apprenticeship as a bookseller in Bremen . He was a classmate of Ernst Rowohlt and Kurt Wolff . In Weimar in 1908 he took over the court, book, art and music dealership from Ludwig Thelemann and in 1909 founded the Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag . Building on the Weimar tradition, he first published classics of German and world literature , later contemporary German authors such as Bertolt Brecht , Lion Feuchtwanger , Iwan Goll , Hans Henny Jahnn , Anna Seghers and Stefan Zweig .

After the First World War, he moved from Weimar to Potsdam in 1919 and from there to Berlin in 1929 . In the following years he becomes one of the leading German publishers. Most of its authors were in the Third Reich with disbarment occupied, so he was limited at this time to reprints of older works and translations. After the Second World War he returned to Weimar in 1945 and decided to found a new publishing house together with Joseph Caspar Witsch in 1947 . At first he accepted Witsch as a partner and managing director, but died in 1949 after a long illness before the planned re-establishment.

His burial took place on the honorary grave field of the historical cemetery in Weimar. His widow Noa (third wife, marriage in 1925) continued the publishing house in the GDR, Witsch founded his publishing house in 1951 under the name Kiepenheuer & Witsch in West Germany.

The Kiepenheuer Verlag remained under this name in the GDR and, after its acquisition by the SED, was active from 1977 to 1990 as part of the Kiepenheuer publishing group, which also included the Insel , Paul List and Dieterich'sche Verlagbuchhandlung publishers .

Kiepenheuer's daughter Bettina Hürlimann was born in 1909 and was a publisher and specialist in children's books. The one year younger son Karl-Otto Kiepenheuer was a well-known astronomer and astrophysicist.

literature

• Bettina Hürlimann:  Kiepenheuer, Gustav. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 11, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1977, ISBN 3-428-00192-3 , p. 592 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Ernst Fischer: Publishing à fonds perdu: Gustav Kiepenheuer as an entrepreneurial personality . In: Günther Schulz (Hrsg.): Business with words and opinions. Media entrepreneur since the 18th century ( Büdinger research on social history ). Boldt / Oldenbourg, Munich 1999, pp. 129-145.
• Cornelia C. Funke: The publisher embodies the face of his time. Management and program design at Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag 1909 to 1944 (= publications of the Leipzig study group on the history of the book industry 11). Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1999, ISBN 978-3-447-04167-6 .
• Siegfried Lokatis , Ingrid Sonntag (Ed.): 100 Years of Kiepenheuer Publishing. Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-86153-635-2 .

Web links

• For the 125th birthday (State Department for Public Libraries in Bavaria)