Helmut Kindler

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Helmut Kindler (born December 3, 1912 in Berlin , † September 15, 2008 in Küsnacht , Switzerland ) was a German publisher and author .

Life

Kindler, the son of a Prussian detective, left high school at the age of sixteen to volunteer in Erwin Piscator's theater on Nollendorfplatz . From 1929 to 1933 he was assistant director at various Berlin theaters and became known to writers such as Bertolt Brecht , Alfred Döblin , Hermann Kesten , actors such as Hans Schweikart , Peter Lorre , Fritz Kortner and journalists such as Sebastian Haffner and Theodor Wolff .

In 1935 Kindler met the journalist Rudolf Herrnstadt through his childhood friend Ilse Stöbe . As a result, he worked for the Comintern on the side and was the courier for the underground organization that later went down in history as the Red Orchestra.

In 1938, on the recommendation of Sebastian Haffner, he became editor and chief editor at Ullstein Verlag in Berlin , where he published a magazine for Front und Heimat, among other things . As a war correspondent and editor of a soldiers' newspaper in Warsaw , he ran a high-risk arsenal for a Polish resistance group. In autumn 1943 he was arrested by the Gestapo, charged with “high treason, favoring enemies and degrading military strength” before the People's Court, but sentenced to “frontline probation” after a year and a half imprisonment for lack of evidence. Kindler in an interview in 1997: “Working as an editor was only bearable because I was in the resistance. I was arrested in Warsaw in autumn 1943 because I belonged to the European Union resistance group . ”In a first comprehensive investigation, Simone Hannemann (after preliminary work by the Robert Havemann Archive) was able to prove from the archives in 2001 that Kindler also belonged to the group at times.

After the Second World War, Kindler was actively involved in founding two Berlin newspapers, the Tagesspiegel and the Berliner Zeitung . After moving from Berlin to Munich, Kindler did not dare to publish the novel " Mephisto " that had already been agreed upon , after Leni Riefenstahl sued him for criticizing the production of the film Tiefland and he was convicted by the Munich District Court in 1949 for defamation . He feared a similar process with no chance of success of his own in a foreseeable legal dispute with Gustaf Gründgens when he tried to publish Klaus Mann's "Mephisto" in West Germany . Klaus Mann responded bitterly to Kindler's rejection: “I don't know what strikes me more, the baseness of your convictions or the naivety with which you admit it.” From 1949 on, he worked as editor of the Illustrated Revue in Munich.

In the spring of 1951, the newly founded Kindler Verlag published the so-called Memoirs by Ferdinand Sauerbruch as the first book , which became the publisher's most successful title with 1.5 million copies sold.

With biographies, works on current affairs and large encyclopedias, the company became one of the most important traditional German houses after the Second World War . Kindler's authors included Willy Brandt , Ludwig Marcuse , Fritz Kortner , Walter Jens , Robert Jungk , Albert Schweitzer , not least Eugen Kogon (with Der SS-Staat ) and Sebastian Haffner (with comments on Hitler ).

In 1955 Kindler founded the culture magazine Das Schönste and in 1956 the youth magazine Bravo, which is still published today . During this time, the publisher donated the Albert Schweitzer Book Prize .

Kindler's life's work is crowned by large series of works, multi-volume dictionaries and encyclopedias, each of which burdened the daring publisher to the limit of his financial capabilities. Not least because of such high-risk projects, Kindler finally had to integrate his publishing house into the Georg von Holtzbrinck publishing group in 1977 .

Kindler was married twice: to Nina Raven-Kindler (from 1947 to 1996) and Maria Kindler-Reese (from 1998 to his death in 2008).

Honors

Fonts (selection)

  • A farewell party: the autobiography of a German publisher. Kindler, Munich 1991 ISBN 3-463-40131-2 (complete as TB: Droemer Knaur, Munich 1992 ISBN 3-426-75042-2 )
  • Put me like a seal on your heart A circumstantial novel about the large "Holy Family" in Nazareth . Kindler, Munich 1997 ISBN 3-463-40313-7

literature

  • Heinz Ullstein : Helmut and Nina Kindler. Two portrait sketches , from: Wolf Keienburg (Ed.): Texts for a curriculum vitae - pictures for a publisher's chronicle. Helmut Kindler on his 70th birthday , Zurich: Kindler Verlag 1982, p. 110 ff. (Online at pkgodzik.de) (PDF; 165 kB)

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.hagalil.com/archiv/98/00/kindler.htm
  2. ↑ See literature in the reference article and review: Review of Simone Hannemann: Robert Havemann and the resistance group "European Union" .
  3. ^ Letter of May 12, 1949, ten days before Mann's suicide, quoted from: KLAUS MANN in: DER SPIEGEL 1/1957
  4. ↑ The actual author is the Freikorps and SS man Hans Rudolf Berndorff . The publisher's decision to hire this figure as a ghostwriter for the seriously ill Sauerbruch seems very strange in view of Kindler's proximity to the resistance and requires further research in the context of West German publishing in the 1950s.
personal data
SURNAME Kindler, Helmut
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German publisher and author
BIRTH DATE December 3, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH September 15, 2008
PLACE OF DEATH Küsnacht , Switzerland