Thieme Group

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Thieme publishing house in Stuttgart

The Thieme Group , formerly Thieme Publishing Group , is an association of science publishers , media and service companies . The parent company of the group is Georg Thieme Verlag KG , based in Stuttgart . The Thieme Group employed in the financial year 2017 an average of 1,016 people and generated sales revenues amounting to 161.96 million euros.

Product range

The group publishes around 150 specialist journals and produces around 500 new publications and new editions annually. In addition, there are electronic on- and offline products, for example the Römpp Lexikon Chemie or the reaction database Science of Synthesis , as well as services such as disease management , training courses and congresses.

The focus is on human medicine . In addition, the related natural sciences chemistry and biology as well as veterinary medicine play an important role in the publishing program.

structure

Corporate management

The personally liable partner is Albrecht Hauff. Other members of the management are Udo Schiller and Katrin Siems.

structure

The publishing group consists of the following active companies:

  • Georg Thieme Verlag KG, including Karl Demeter Verlag and Thieme Chemistry publishing program
  • Thieme Publishers in New York, Stuttgart and Delhi
  • MVS Medizinverlage Stuttgart GmbH, with the imprint publishers Karl F. Haug, Hippokrates, Sonntag, Enke, Parey and Trias
  • Thieme.media GmbH
  • Frohberg Media in Medicine, Berlin
  • AnyCare GmbH
  • CRM Center for Travel Medicine, Düsseldorf
  • Thieme Compliance (previously DIOmed and proCompliance ), Erlangen
  • Schattauer Verlag , Stuttgart
  • Thieme Publicações LTDA, Rio de Janeiro

history

1886-1918

In 1886 Georg Thieme founded the publishing house of the same name in Leipzig. Thieme trained as a publishing bookseller in Leipzig, London, Brussels and Heidelberg before founding a publishing bookstore at the age of 25. The capital for this came from the parents' assets.

The basis was the acquisition of the medical publishing house Theodor Fischer in Kassel and Berlin with 45 book titles and publishing rights for medical content. The program included the International Monthly for Anatomy and Physiology and the Clinical Monthly Journal for Ophthalmology , which still exists today and which were sold to Ferdinand Enke Verlag a short time later . The publishing program also included the Steinbach forms , a lucrative system of forms with a cash book for resident doctors. The most important contribution to sales and earnings was made by the Reichs-Medicinal-Kalender , which has been published since 1879, with a medical statistics yearbook, an address book of all doctors and authorities relevant for doctors, a collection of the latest laws and regulations and an overview of new therapeutic agents . At the beginning of 1887, the publisher acquired the Deutsche medicinische Wochenschrift (DMW).

The decision to establish a publisher with a medical program seems to have been made well planned: In the 1880s, medicine was booming in the German Empire. From 1875 to 1885 the number of medical students grew from around 3,200 to just under 7,800. In 1888 there were already over 9,000. The company received decisive growth impulses in 1890. That year the 10th international medical congress with several thousand participants took place in Berlin. The two new publications Günther: Introduction to the Study of Bacteriology and Boas: General Diagnosis and Therapy of Stomach Diseases were ready in time for the congress . The sensation of the congress, however, was the plenary lecture by Robert Koch on August 4th with the suggestion that he was on the trail of a cure for tuberculosis . On November 13th he published his discovery of tuberculin in the DMW. In the same year Emil von Behring and Shibasaburo Kitasato published their work on diphtheria and tetanus . This made the journal a forum for bacteriology for years . The number of subscribers doubled within a year.

Twenty new book titles appeared from 1890 to 1893. Except for one, they all reached the turn of the century in an expanded edition. In the competition against the other publishers, Thieme prevailed by adding numerous illustrations to his books. The innovative graphic industry in Leipzig offered the publisher technical advantages such as microphotography , photograms and four-color printing . Some books also contained color prints on enclosed sheets. It was also possible to bind leading figures in internal medicine and bacteriology as authors to the publishing house and to win over young authors with promising topics. The publisher established close relationships with the German Society for Internal Medicine (DGIM) and other medical societies.

In the 1890s, advertising for medical products also began using advertisements . Thanks to the income from this business, the DMW price could be kept stable at 6 marks per quarter from its foundation until 1900 . In 1900, Karl Kraus criticized the Fackel for courtesy articles in specialist magazines that were dependent on the advertising business. He expressly emphasized that "the three most important German journals ( Berliner klin. Wschr. , DMW and Münchner med. Wschr. ) Are free from such practice."

On January 30, 1896, an essay by Moritz Jastrowitz about Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen's discovery of the " X-rays " appeared in DMW , with two original photographs and an enthusiastic description of the famous photograph of Röntgen's wife's hand. 22 original papers on X-ray therapy were published in the DMW in 1896. The neurologist Jastrowitz had given a lecture on January 6, 1896 in Berlin on the newly discovered X-rays.

In 1900 the publisher had 92 book titles available for delivery as well as six specialist magazines, including DMW with a weekly circulation of around 10,000 copies. Compared to Springer-Verlag or Enke Verlag, that was still a modest size. The permanent staff consisted of three assistants. In 1900 the publishing house Boas und Hesse from Berlin and in 1902 the publishing house Ed. Besold bought from Erlangen. The acquisition in 1902 brought, among other things, the International Central Gazette for the Physiology and Pathology of the Urinary and Sexual Organs into the publishing program; a direct descendant of this journal is today's Urology . Furthermore, through the purchase of the anatomist August Rauber came to Thieme Verlag with his two-volume textbook on anatomy . Under the short name Rauber / Kopsch led Frederick William Kopsch continue the work. It became the standard anatomy textbook for generations of students.

At the beginning of the 20th century, German medicine gained worldwide recognition. For the publisher, this had the pleasant effect of being able to rely on foreign translations for the books and a considerable proportion of foreign subscriptions for the magazines. The publisher has now diversified into related fields. In 1907 the publisher issued a series of dental monographs that lasted until 1934 and were last edited by Otto Walkhoff . In 1911 the two-volume work The Methods of Organic Chemistry was published , which was continued by Joseph Houben after the war, grew into the 70-volume Houben-Weyl Lexicon by the end of the twentieth century and is now continued in the Science of Synthesis database . In 1913, the publishing house started to expand. Thieme hired five more employees and moved to larger premises.

The First World War did not initially hinder this expansion. In 1915 there was even an upturn in the book business. However, there were bottlenecks in operational management because publishing house employees were called up for military service. From 1916 raw materials became scarce. The publishers received 85% of the paper they needed in 1915. Books and magazines were subject to compulsory management until March 1920 . At the end of the war, of the publisher's eleven magazine titles, only four were left.

The years of the Weimar Republic

Georg Thiemes health was compromised at the end of the war. His only son was in psychiatric treatment and could not be considered as a successor. In 1919 he offered a stake in an advertisement in the Börsenblatt des Deutschen Buchhandels . 35-year-old Bruno Hauff , who had worked as a head of department at Teubner Verlag before the war , applied and joined the publisher on September 1, 1919 with a contribution he had borrowed from his father-in-law. Thieme handed over the management to Hauff after a short time.

In the early 1920s, the economy was shattered by inflation ; up to and including 1924 domestic production could not generate adequate yields. Bruno Hauff ensured the continued existence of the company by expanding the international business and thus generating foreign exchange revenues. New editions of renowned textbooks and the monograph series by DMW editor Julius Schwalbe were published in four languages. The magazine La Medicina Germano-Hispano-Americana appeared from 1923 with an edition of 2,500 copies . In addition, stocks of books were sold abroad - to the detriment and annoyance of domestic booksellers, whose sales were reduced as a result.

After 1924, the income from domestic production increased again. Thieme Verlag used this income to buy up the Gräfe & Sillem publishing house in Hamburg, which had specialized in radiological literature. Its program included the journal progress in the field of X-rays (RöFo), which was founded in 1897 and is still published by Thieme Verlag today.

Georg Thieme died on December 26, 1925.

The radiological program was greatly expanded under Bruno Hauff in the following years. In 1926 the first edition of the textbook on X-ray diagnostics published by Hans Rudolf Schinz was published . On the recommendation of Willy Albrecht Eduard Baensch , Hauff had actively approached the Swiss radiologists Schinz and Friedl. This publishing approach of not waiting for manuscripts, but actively approaching possible authors, became the working principle. Some writers became personal friends and mentors to the publisher, his family, and his followers over the years; next to Baensch, for example, the gynecologist Heinrich Martius . Later, in 1945, the friendship with Baensch turned out to be life-saving.

Hauff initially expanded the radiology sector and, from 1930, the publishing program on tuberculosis . Gerhard Domagk is one of the more than 30 Nobel Prize winners who have published with Thieme in the course of its publishing history . Further expansion took place in the fields of psychiatry , neurology , gynecology and anesthesia . In the middle of the economic crisis at the end of the 1920s , Thieme Verlag expanded vigorously. The quality of the texts was directly dependent on the author's performance. Editing was not yet common at that time.

The time of National Socialism

Bruno Hauff had been married to Maria Hauff, née Neukamp, ​​who came from a Jewish family, since 1918. In 1934 he was threatened with exclusion from the Reichsschrifttumskammer because of this connection . That would have meant the end of the publishing house. Ms. Hauff then divorced her husband pro forma.

In 1944 the publishing house in Leipzig was hit by bombs, so that regular publishing operations were no longer possible. In February 1945 Maria Hauff received the order that she had to go to the Theresienstadt concentration camp for deportation . An intervention by Baensch, for which Baensch took a high personal risk, saved them. In August 1945 Bruno Hauff and his wife and son Günther and the publishing house moved to Wiesbaden at the instigation of the British military government. The British military government classified Hauff as unencumbered and on April 22, 1946 granted him the license to “publish books, brochures and magazines”.

Despite the publisher's personal distance from National Socialism, the National Socialist ideology found its way into the publishing program from 1933 onwards. At the end of the 1920s, the editors of the Thieme journal Progress in Neurology • Psychiatry had protested against the emerging racial theory and, for example, judged the racial theorist Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer that he “met the highest standards in methodology, but his attempt referred to the unsuitable Subject". However, Verschuer later became a Thieme author. In 1932, a year in which the race debate reached its first climax, hardly any work can be found under the keywords eugenics and inheritance and nothing under the keyword race in the DMW. Articles by Jewish authors can still be found in the DMW until 1935. At the same time, the university news reports in detail the departure of Jewish scholars from universities as a result of the law to restore the civil service . In 1933, however, at the same time as the law for the prevention of genetically ill offspring , a DMW booklet was published with a focus on racial hygiene . "In the second half of 1933 there were a total of 20 publications on the subject of" genetic biology and eugenics "." In the years 1936 to 1938, the order of magnitude is similar. “Most of the articles use a scientific style, are free from racial anthropological or even anti-Semitic attacks, which, however, occasionally occur again and again, but all in all aim at scientific and technical support for the National Socialists Inherited health policy. ”In 1939 Kurt Klare became editor of the DMW. Klare was a tuberculosis doctor and one of the founders of the National Socialist German Medical Association . From 1939 onwards, articles on race theory appeared less frequently; instead, military-medical topics are increasingly being taken up. In summary, the medical historian Hans-Peter Kröner judges that the DMW was “certainly not a combat paper for National Socialist medicine”, but “in its contradictions it offers a true reflection of the National Socialist appropriation of medicine”, “which expired without great resistance from those affected , yes, could rather count on the accommodating majority of German doctors. "

After the Second World War

After the move, the publishing house was initially based in the Hotel Pariser Hof in Wiesbaden. In autumn 1946, the company moved to Stuttgart at the invitation of Stuttgart's Lord Mayor Arnulf Klett . The company in Leipzig was placed under trust management in 1951 and nationalized as VEB Georg Thieme in 1953 .

In 1953 Günther Hauff became a personally liable partner of the publishing house. In the following three decades the company grew steadily. Among other things, Thieme developed inexpensive paperbacks for student training while maintaining the seriousness of the content. In 1964, General Botany by Wilhelm Nultsch was published , the first flexible paperback by Thieme.

In 1971 the 130-year-old Ferdinand Enke Verlag was acquired and the bookstore for medicine was founded. In 1980 the Hippokrates publishing house was acquired . In the same year the advertising agency Pharmedia , today Thieme.media , was founded. The Thieme Stratton Group was founded in New York in 1979, the predecessor of today's subsidiary Thieme Medical Publishers .

In 1981 the publishing group moved into the new building designed by von Berg's architectural office in Rüdigerstrasse in Stuttgart-Feuerbach .

In the course of German reunification in 1990, the Leipziger Verlag was transferred back to Thieme Stuttgart from the Treuhandanstalt for the symbolic price of DM 1. The former head office in Leipzig was then closed in 1992.

In the 1980s and 1990s, various other companies and publishing programs were acquired, in particular the Sonntag Verlag , Parey Verlag , Karl Demeter Verlag and Karl F. Haug Verlag . TRIAS-Verlag was founded for the patient and lay market . All of these companies and programs were combined in 2002 within the newly founded company subsidiary Medizinverlage Stuttgart .

The medical specialist bookstore Frohberg OHG in Berlin was merged with the publisher's own bookstore for medicine to form a joint company in 1992 .

AnyCare GmbH , which specializes in disease management , was founded in 2001 . In 2005 the Center for Travel Medicine (CRM) in Düsseldorf was acquired and in 2006 the patient education systems DIOmed and proCompliance were taken over . In 2006 the company founded a company in India, Thieme Publishers in Delhi .

The number of employees in the corporate group grew from around 350 to over 900 between 1990 and 2008. In 2004, an additional publishing building was therefore moved into, not far from the existing one in Stuttgart-Feuerbach. In 2016, the Brazilian subsidiary Thieme Publicações LTDA was founded in Rio de Janeiro . On January 1, 2017, the Thieme publishing group took over the Schattauer Verlag, also based in Stuttgart .

The group is a member of the German Book Trade Association .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Consolidated financial statements for the 2017 financial year of Georg Thieme Verlag KG. In: Bundesanzeiger , February 11, 2019, accessed on March 10, 2019.
  2. ↑ Management. In: Website of the Thieme Group. Retrieved January 4, 2019 .
  3. ↑ The presentation of the publishing history up to 1953 follows, unless other sources are expressly mentioned, Christian Staehr: Spurensuche. A science publisher as reflected in its magazines 1886–1986 . Thieme Verlag, Stuttgart 1986.
  4. ^ Werner E. Gerabek : Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen and his discovery of X-rays. In: Würzburg medical history reports. Volume 13, 1995, pp. 87-96; here: p. 95.
  5. ↑ Staehr: Search for traces, p. 67.
  6. ↑ a b c d e f Hans-Peter Kröner: The DMW in the time of National Socialism , DMW 2000; 125: 642-643.
  7. ↑ Company history. In: Company website. Retrieved January 4, 2019 .
  8. ↑ Thieme takes over Schattauer. In: boersenblatt.net. Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, December 7, 2016, accessed on December 27, 2017 .

Coordinates: 48 ° 48 ′ 38.8 "  N , 9 ° 10 ′ 21.3"  E