Heinrich Cobet
Heinrich Cobet (born September 27, 1904 in Hamm ; † February 5, 1994 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German bookseller and publisher in Frankfurt am Main, an initiator of the German Library in Frankfurt am Main, the Frankfurter , which was newly founded after the Second World War Book fair and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade and the Association of German Publishers and Booksellers Association (today: Association of German Booksellers ), based in Frankfurt am Main.
Life
Heinrich Cobet grew up as the son of a Westphalian pharmacist of Huguenot descent. His ancestors, who wrote their name "Caubet", came from Clairac in the Lot-et-Garonne department . After attending school in Hamm, he completed his exams at the bookseller college in Leipzig . In 1926 he came to Frankfurt am Main and did an apprenticeship there in Walter Schatzki's youth library, which was founded in 1920 . He also studied in Heidelberg with Karl Mannheim , who later became professor of sociology in Frankfurt. As a budding bookseller, his theories on raising awareness struck him as particularly interesting. After the seizure of power of the Nazis in 1933, he followed Walter Schatzki in the forced exile in London . However, due to the external circumstances of the emigration, he was unable to achieve his actual goal of obtaining a doctorate . Cobet therefore returned to Frankfurt very soon and took over the Schatzki's youth library on Börsenstrasse together with his friend and partner Richard Schumann.
After his war effort, Cobet found not only the entire city center of Frankfurt, but also the building of his bookstore in ruins, in the basement there were still remains of charred books from the former warehouse. Right in the vaulted cellar, he began gradually rebuilding the Frankfurt bookstore Schumann & Cobet , to which he affiliated his own publishing house.
Initiatives
After Leipzig was in the Soviet zone of Germany, the "Börsenblatt des Deutschen Buchhandels" appeared in Frankfurt am Main from August 1945.
Heinrich Cobet, Hanns Wilhelm Eppelsheimer , Vittorio Klostermann and Georg Kurt Schauer initiated the re-establishment of the German Library in Frankfurt am Main in 1946. The city of Frankfurt promised to provide personnel and financial support, and the American military government approved the establishment. The German library began its work in the tobacco room of the former Rothschild library at Untermainkai 15, which served as accommodation for the bombed-out city and university library.
In the context of the (ultimately unsuccessful in favor of Bonn ) efforts of Frankfurt to become the capital of a West German state, the efforts to bring central organizations, institutions and events of the book industry to Frankfurt are to be seen.
In May 1948, the professional working groups of the British and American zones merged to form the Working Group of German Publishers and Booksellers Associations as a "preliminary stage to an association of booksellers all over Germany" based in Frankfurt.
However, the year 1948 brought with it the problem of currency reform . For the book trade, it was initially a significant slump, because people spent the little money primarily on food and clothing, not on books. A new impulse was needed, a book fair.
As early as 1946, Heinrich Cobet published the text version of the address given by the mayor of Frankfurt, Walter Kolb, to award the Goethe Prize to Hermann Hesse . In 1948, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Frankfurt National Assembly , the bibliophile work "500 Years of Books and Printing in Frankfurt" by Fried Lübbecke, edited by Cobet, was published in the Paulskirche, which had just been rebuilt . In the same year he also devoted himself to another work related to Frankfurt, the Struwwelpeter by Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann , which he reissued.
Booksellers and publishers once again took part in the cross-sector Frankfurter Spring Fair in 1949, about which the Frankfurter Rundschau wrote in a retrospective: “The foreign trade fair visitor will have taken a very impressive picture of various German industries, but hardly any of Germany's intellectual production we like to imagine so much. ”It was criticized how few booksellers and publishers presented other products than“ travel cards, patterns, postcards ”.
This gave rise to the idea of an own book fair under the sole management of the Hessian Publishers and Booksellers Association. Its chairman, Alfred Grade, wrote that “Frankfurt is also the cheapest place in West Germany for a central book exhibition and fair”. This judgment was based on Frankfurt's central traffic situation, although Frankfurt, in contrast to Hamburg , Stuttgart or Munich , had hardly any major publishers at the time.
Cobet was appointed to the trade fair committee for the first Frankfurt Book Fair in September 1949. This also included: Alfred Grade, Walter Gericke (publisher, Wiesbaden), Gottfried Löbmann (Dietrich'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Wiesbaden), Dr. Hans Bergmann (Blazek & Bergmann bookstore, Frankfurt), Dr. Georg Kurt Schauer (Umschau Verlag, Frankfurt).
Cobet gave his war comrade Dr. Wilhelm Müller took over the management of the trade fair office, which was set up in a basement corner of the bookstore with a desk that consisted of two boxes and a chipboard, a dismantled typewriter and two completely worn out chairs. It was there that the planning and coordination of the entire book fair, which took place in the Paulskirche, took place. There, in the vicinity of the historic Buchgasse , the center of the former booksellers' quarter in Frankfurt's old town , Cobet believed that the book fair belonged. Accordingly, he was skeptical about the move to the exhibition grounds in 1951, but remained on the exhibition committee.
"The book fair shows that Frankfurt is not only an economic, but also a spiritual center."
For a book fair, however, several German cities were in competition with one another, alongside Frankfurt above all Hamburg and Stuttgart . The luck of the hour also contributed to the success of Frankfurt:
“It was particularly fortunate that a French man, Monsieur Martin, organized an exhibition of French books in the Roman Halls - and that helped make the book fair international. Because after the French took part indirectly in this fair, the Americans, the Swiss, the Austrians, the Italians were also interested in seeing what opportunities this book fair offered. For Germany it was crucial that the first intellectual international connections were promoted through this book fair. "
In Hamburg, 57 publishers finally exhibited, in Frankfurt 207. Curiosity: The Rowohlt-Verlag only exhibited in Hamburg, but its publisher Ernst Rowohlt gave the opening speech in Frankfurt. At the first Frankfurt Book Fair, small and large exhibitors found the same conditions: large inclined wooden panels with five strips. 10,000 paying trade fair visitors came, the newspapers' feature pages reported positively, orders worth 2.6 million DM were signed.
Cobet campaigned for a peace prize from the German book trade as a sign of Germany's reconciliation with the world after the National Socialist terror. It was awarded at the second Frankfurt Book Fair, in 1950 to the writer Max Tau (laudator: Federal President Theodor Heuss ), and in 1951 to Albert Schweitzer (laudator: Adolf Grimme ).
As early as 1953, the number of foreign publishers exceeded that of Germany. The initially small initiative by Frankfurt and Wiesbaden booksellers and publishers became the largest book fair in the world.
When Cobet realized that the looming division of Germany would last for a longer period of time, he took numerous initiatives to re-establish important institutions of the German book industry, which had previously been based in Leipzig, in the Federal Republic of Germany, founded in 1949, and to settle in Frankfurt. As a result of his decisive efforts, the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, today's German Book Trade Association, with its headquarters in Frankfurt am Main, was established. Alfred Grade was a comrade in this regard.
“The booksellers who were not members of the NSDAP chuckled together almost every day, we were constantly talking. The bookseller's degree was very important to us because - and that was crucial for the Americans - he had dealt in anti-Hitler literature and suffered for a long time in the Buchenwald concentration camp . Nothing was more important then than people from the active resistance. Grade was obsessed with the idea of maintaining the unity of the German book trade across the former eastern zone border. "
In addition, Cobet made a contribution to training the book trade by actively participating in the founding of the schools of the German book trade in the Frankfurt district of Seckbach . In addition, the Klingspor Museum for Book and Writing Art of the 20th Century in Offenbach am Main is based on his suggestion.
Decline
Cobet foresaw long ago that the long-established book trade in downtown Frankfurt would not hold up. The rents reached exorbitant proportions that an owner-managed bookstore could not achieve in the long term. A change of ownership of the house finally brought the end of the Frankfurt bookstore. In 1988 Schumann & Cobet had to sell their business, one of the last individual bookstores ever. The new owner was Suhrkamp Verlag Siegfried Unseld , who wanted to continue the bookstore in the old style even after the main building had been converted in 1993. Just under a year after Cobet's death, on the 75th anniversary, the Schumann & Cobet bookstore in Frankfurt was completely closed.
Honors
In 1981 Heinrich Cobet received the plaque of honor from the city of Frankfurt am Main . In 1990 he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, 1st class.
literature
- Ruth Langen-Wettengl: The Frankfurter Bücherstube 1920 to 1995. In: From the antique shop. NF 7, 2, 2009, ISSN 0343-186X , pp. 92-105, Ill.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Portrait of German libraries at: goethe.de
- ^ History of the German National Library, 1946 on: dnb.de.
- ^ History of the Frankfurt Book Fair ( Memento from February 22, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) on: dasan.de
- ↑ 60 years and still exemplary - the Frankfurt Book Fair ( Memento of October 17, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) on: buchmarkt.de
- ↑ Weekly Service, No. 34, August 31, 2004 at: sabinehock.de
- ↑ a b First Frankfurt Book Fair at: kalenderblatt.de
- ↑ Honorary plaque of the city of Frankfurt am Main on: frankfurt.de
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Cobet, Heinrich |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German publisher and bookseller |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 27, 1904 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Hamm |
| DATE OF DEATH | 5th February 1994 |
| Place of death | Frankfurt am Main |