Hans Benecke

Hans Benecke (born June 24, 1910 , † February 15, 2000 in Bad Orb , Hesse ) was a German bookseller and antiquarian .

Life

Hans Benecke comes from a family of booksellers who, together with the Eggers family, ran the traditional Berlin book and art shop Amelang on Kantstrasse. After graduating from high school , he first began a technical course and then a commercial apprenticeship before he decided to follow in his father's footsteps. After his sudden death in 1937, Benecke, who had been expelled from the Reichsschrifttumskammer in 1935 , took over the management of the bookstore, which he was only allowed to take over as a "non-Aryan" with a special permit. Although he ran the risk of jeopardizing this permit, he kept in touch with his Jewish customers and continued to try to offer literature free of ideology. In view of the scarce evidence from booksellers about the time of the Nazi regime , Hans Benecke's memoirs exemplify the fate of many of his colleagues who - like him - did not submit to the party line.

Hans Benecke rebuilt the Amelang bookstore, which had been bombed in 1944, again after the war in Berlin, before moving to Frankfurt am Main to open a new bookstore there in 1948 on Rossmarkt . After the 150th anniversary of the Amelang company, it became apparent that the bookstore could no longer be maintained in its previous form. Benecke decided to devote himself increasingly to the second-hand bookshop and in the early 1960s published the first catalogs on the subject of literature in exile. In 1972 he moved to Hamburg , where he continued to work as an antiquarian until 1986. In 1995 he moved to his retirement home in Bad Orb, where he died on February 15, 2000.

Works

• A bookstore in Berlin. Memories of a hard time . Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-596-12735-1