Henschel Verlag

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The Henschelverlag was founded in 1945 in East Berlin and specialized in many art branches in the GDR . After a few changes of ownership and name in the post-reunification period , the publisher now operates under the name Seemann Henschel GmbH & Co. KG , based in Leipzig .

history

Stage sales and publishing house Bruno Henschel and Son (1945–1951)

On October 20, 1945, the open trading company Verlag Bruno Henschel and Son was founded in Berlin. Namesake Bruno Henschel was previously the head of the Volksbühnen- Verlag- und Vertriebs-GmbH, which was liquidated by the National Socialists in 1933 . After the Second World War , Bruno Henschel and his son began to set up a new stage sales company from the remnants of the Volksbühnenverlag . The publisher signed its first performance contract as early as autumn 1945. With the support of the Soviet military administration , Bruno Henschel was able to expand his stage sales to include a magazine and book publisher. From June 1946 the theater service appeared. Information sheets for stage, film and music and from July 1946 the magazine Theater der Zeit , both published under a Soviet license. Two more magazines followed in 1947: the Dramaturgische Blätter and the Volksbühne , both of which, however, had to be discontinued in the course of 1948. The publisher's first books came onto the market in 1947. Initially, these were mainly dramas , which the stage sales department also had in the program, as well as publications that were intended to document current developments in the theater and film industry. From 1948 the publisher published titles on aesthetics and art criticism . Finally, there were also the editing areas of music theater, film, artistic personal testimonies such as letters and diaries as well as fiction , which was dedicated to the relationship between artist and society. In 1951 the publishing house established the profile line “Fine Arts” and in 1955 finally “Entertainment Art”. Until 1990 there were only minor changes to the profile. Henschel was the only publisher in the GDR that devoted itself to all the arts.

Henschelverlag Art and Society (1952–1990)

In 1951 the publishing house was merged with the Deutsches Filmverlag and the Deutsches Funkverlag to form the Henschelverlag Kunst und Gesellschaft. In the course of this merger, Bruno Henschel transferred his company to the SED in 1952.

In the early 1950s, the stage sales department took over the construction stage sales, which was headed by Friedrich Eisenlohr . Since then, henschel SCHAUSPIEL , as the department was later called, had monopoly status in arranging theater plays for the speech stage in the GDR. The music-dramatic department henschel MUSIKBÜHNE was also built in the early 1950s. After the merger, the publishing house's magazine sector also grew significantly: Henschel moved the organ of the Association of Composers and Musicologists of the GDR Music and Society (1951–1990), Deutsche Architektur (1952–1960), which, however, after eight years was transferred to the VEB Fachbuchverlag , the German film art (1953–1962), the magazine Unser Rundfunk (1953–1957), the film mirror (1954–1991), the artistik (1955–1995), which was renamed in 1969 in entertainment art , Melodie und Rhythmus ( 1957–1991) and FF radio and television of the GDR (1958–1969). Later came the organ of the Association of Fine Artists of the GDR, the Fine Arts (1965–1990), the magazine Film und Fernsehen (1973–1990) published by the Association of Film and Television Creators, and the paper developed in collaboration with the Institute for Cultural Buildings Buildings of Culture (1976–1983) added. In 1967 Kuno Mittelstädt took over the management of the publishing house. He remained the publishing director until 1992. At this point in time, the Henschel Verlag Kunst und Gesellschaft already had a solid position in the publishing structure of the GDR. For example, he has published several works by Peter Weiss , Volker Braun , Heiner Müller , Rudi Strahl and Günther Weisenborn . The tribe of scientific authors of secondary literature included Werner Hecht , Fritz Erpenbeck , Horst Seeger and Werner Timm . The three publishing areas of theater sales, book publishing and magazines were so profiled that there were no major changes until the end of the GDR.

In the 1980s the company had 125 employees, published 70 to 80 books a year and published seven magazines. In 1988 there were 53 first editions and 20 subsequent editions. The turnover was about 247 million marks , the profit 3.0 million marks.

Henschel Verlag (since 1990)

As a result of the political upheavals in 1989/90 , the employees of the publishing house founded Henschel Verlag GmbH in April 1990, from which the former stage sales department for theater works under the name Henschel Schauspiel Theaterverlag GmbH split off just a month later . With the help of a loan from the PDS , the newly founded employee GmbH acquired the old Henschel Verlag Kunst und Gesellschaft from the SED-PDS and tried to establish itself on the German market as a whole. The henschel MUSIKBÜHNE was sold to the Bärenreiter-Verlag in Kassel in June 1991 . In 1992 Henschel Verlag came under fiduciary control . The Henschel Schauspiel Theaterverlag was also the focus of the Treuhand for a time, but finally gained its independence after a compensation payment. After a bad financial year in 1991, Henschel Verlag had to give up a large part of its magazines and finally file for bankruptcy in August 1992 . In the spring of 1993, Silvius Dornier acquired the company for a symbolic mark from the insolvency administrator and incorporated the publishing house into the Dornier publishing group , which included the East German publishers EA Seemann, Edition Leipzig and Urania . The former head editor Horst Wandrey was appointed managing director. While Henschel continued to maintain his office in Berlin, Edition Leipzig and the traditional publishing house EA Seemann continued to be based in Leipzig. In 1996 the publishing group was merged to form Dornier Medienholding, which was dissolved just six years later. Before the publishing houses were closed, the senior staff, Dr. Jürgen A. Bach and Bernd Kolf founded the three publishing houses Henschel, Seemann and Edition Leipzig and, together with the Koehler & Amelang publishing house, founded the Seemann Henschel GmbH & Co. KG group based in Leipzig. The Berlin office of Henschel Verlag was given up in April 2009. In 2017 the publishing house was taken over by Michael Kölmel , the owner of Zweiausendeins .

Book series

theatre

  • Maxim Vallentin (Ed.): Stage of Truth. Series of publications for the new German people's theater
  • Contemporary drama
  • Writings on theater studies
  • The colorful doll box
  • Material volumes Bertolt Brecht
  • International drama
  • GDR playwright
  • Theater practice
  • Amateur theater
  • Children's theater
  • Puppet theater

Music and musical theater

  • Yearbook of the Komische Oper
  • Horst Seeger (Ed.): Opera today. An almanac of the music stage

Entertainment art

  • Helga Bemmann (Ed.): Classic small stage
  • New small stage
  • Ernst Günther, Heinz P. Hofmann, Walter Rösler (Eds.): Cassette. Rock, Pop, Schlager, Revue, Circus, Cabaret, Magic (first edition and cassette. An almanac for the stage, podium and arena )
  • Cabaret up to date

Film, radio and television

  • Heinz Baumert, Hermann Herlinghaus: Yearbook of the film
  • Radio plays (first edition of the udT radio play yearbook )
  • Film studies library
  • Film / radio / television

Visual arts

  • Berlin in art
  • World of art

various

  • Great Soviet encyclopedia
  • Artist stories
  • Artists of our time
  • Hugo Fetting (Ed.): Theater and Film
  • dialog
  • Paperback of the Arts
  • Publications of the German Building Academy

See also

literature

  • Dieter Mornhinweg, Werner Schindhelm: Bibliography 1946–1985. Books, calendars and magazines. Henschelverlag Art and Society, Berlin 1987.
  • Franziska Galek: "Lesedramatik" in Henschelverlag Art and Society until 1990. In: Leipziger Jahrbuch zur Buchgeschichte. Volume 18. Harrassowitz Verlag , Wiesbaden 2009, pp. 245-306.
  • Christoph Links : The fate of the GDR publishers. Privatization and its consequences. Links Verlag, Berlin 2010, pp. 207–211.
  • Jochanan Trilse-Finkelstein : World theater and its chief editor. Ossietzky 22/2012 ( Online , accessed July 20, 2020) (Obituary for Horst Wandrey )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Franziska Galek: "Lesedramatik" in the Henschel Verlag Kunst und Gesellschaft until 1990 . In: University Library Leipzig in cooperation with the Leipzig working group for the history of the book industry (Hrsg.): Leipziger Jahrbuch zur Buchgeschichte . tape 18 . Harrassowitz Verlag , 2009, ISSN  0940-1954 , p. 245-306 .
  2. ↑ Dieter Mornhinweg, Werner Schindhelm: Bibliography 1946-1985. Books, calendars and magazines . Henschelverlag Art and Society, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-362-00172-6 , book series, p. 77-132 .
  3. ↑ Susanne Misterek: Polish drama in stage and book publishers in the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR (=  Mainz studies on book studies . Volume 12 ). Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden 2002, ISBN 978-3-447-04502-5 , The stage distributor henschel SCHAUSPIEL im Henschelverlag Art and Society, p. 63-76 .
  4. ↑ Dieter Mornhinweg, Werner Schindhelm: Bibliography 1946-1985. Books, calendars and magazines . Henschelverlag Art and Society, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-362-00172-6 , register, p. 139-158 .
  5. ↑ Leipzig books. Future for Seemann and Henschel . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of September 30, 2017, p. 14.