Joseph Caspar Witsch

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Publishers Joseph Witsch and Jürgen Rühle , 1960

Joseph Caspar Witsch (born July 17, 1906 in Kalk , † April 28, 1967 in Düsseldorf ) was a German librarian and publisher .

Life

Joseph Caspar Witsch was born in 1906 as the eldest son of roofer Christian Witsch and his wife Elisabeth in the then independent Cologne suburb of Kalk. After Witsch's father fell in World War I in 1915 , the family's economic situation deteriorated noticeably, so that Witsch decided in 1921 to leave grammar school without a high school diploma in order to support his mother. He then initially worked as an employee of the Cologne city administration and further qualified himself through self-study. He attended the West German Volksbüchereischule in Cologne, founded in 1927, and passed his exams as a public librarian in 1931 at the German Volksbüchereischule in Leipzig . In addition to his subsequent work at the Cologne City Library , where he took over the Technical Library in 1932, Witsch studied philosophy, sociology, history and literary history at the universities in Cologne and Leipzig .

Towards the end of the Weimar Republic, he sympathized with the Socialist Workers' Party (SAP) and after 1933 helped emigrants to flee. Denounced as a communist , he was dismissed after the National Socialists came to power in 1933, but in October of the same year he joined the SA and in 1935 worked again as a librarian in Stralsund . Also in 1935 he received his doctorate in Cologne with a dissertation on the term “state” in Fichte's social and state philosophy . In 1936 he took over the management of the Ernst Abbe Library and the “State Office for Folk Libraries” in Jena . In 1937 he joined the NSDAP . During the Nazi dictatorship he succeeded in the paradox of democratizing the public library system by introducing free choice of books for borrowers and thus abolishing the direct control of book output by librarians. He only appeared to take part in the wave of "cleansing" the libraries of Jewish and socialist authors, as he kept the rejected copies in the library's basement.

Publishing house Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne am Dom (2013)

Witsch was a soldier during the Second World War , but was repeatedly exempted. At the end of the war he was a flak soldier in Italy and made his way back to Thuringia from there. Here he was initially head of the Thuringian State Office for Books and Libraries, but fled to the west to Haspe in 1948 and lived there temporarily in the house of the surgeon Fritz Breuer . In 1949 he founded the publishing house Kiepenheuer & Witsch together with Gustav Kiepenheuer , who died in Weimar that same year . As part of the publishing program, the CIA funded translations of American books through the Congress for Cultural Freedom . Witsch was the head of the Cologne section of the Congress for Cultural Freedom . The star author of the young publisher was Heinrich Böll in the early 1950s , who remained loyal to the publisher until his death. Witsch immediately forwarded Böll's travel reports from Eastern Europe to the CIA headquarters in Paris. Joseph C. Witsch was one of the initiators of the book series Die Bücher der Neunzehn ( The Books of the Nineteen) in 1954 , a joint project of 19 German publishers, and also campaigned for the foundation of the German Pocket Book Publishing House (dtv) in 1960 . In the early Federal Republic of Germany, Witsch was regarded as a “gifted and media-savvy networker” who had economic success with internationally known liberal and left-wing authors as well as with anti-communist literature and propaganda. In 1963 his son-in-law Reinhold Neven DuMont became his assistant and in 1969, two years after Witsch's death, he became the owner of the publishing house.

Shortly before his death in 1967, Witsch was to be awarded the First Class Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. But he refused this honor when he learned that the soccer coach Sepp Herberger had been awarded a higher honor.

Witsch was married to the librarian and writer Elisabeth Witsch geb. Deux (1905-1988). They had four daughters: Annette (married Neven Dumont), Christa or Krista (* 1937, actress), Bettina (married Demolin) and Gabriele (* 1944).

After several heart attacks, Witsch died in 1967 at the age of 60 in the Benrath Municipal Hospital . The couple's grave was in the Melaten cemetery in Cologne ; it was cleared in 2011.

See also

literature

  • Frank Möller: Grabbing the wheel of fortune by the spokes. Joseph Caspar Witsch - His authors, his publishing program and the literary business of the early Federal Republic. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2015, ISBN 978-3-462-04739-4 .
  • Frank Möller: The book Witsch. The dizzying life of the publisher Joseph Caspar Witsch. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2014, ISBN 978-3-462-04130-9 .
  • Birgit Boge: The beginnings of Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Joseph Caspar Witsch and the establishment of the publishing house (1948–1959). Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2009, ISBN 978-3-447-06001-1 .
  • Everhard Hofsümmer: Joseph Caspar Witsch (1906–1967). In: Georg Mölich (ed.): Rheinische Lebensbilder. Published on behalf of the Gesellschaft für Rheinische Geschichtskunde, Vol. 18. Rheinland-Verlag, Düsseldorf 2000, ISBN 3-7927-1752-2 , pp. 225–245.
  • Angelika Hohenstein: Joseph Caspar Witsch and the public library system under National Socialist rule. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1992, ISBN 3-447-03311-8 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Oliver Pfohlmann: The book Witsch. An ingeniously windy publisher icon. In: Deutschlandfunk , December 17, 2014.
  2. ↑ Arno Frank : “He didn't duck lower than the others”. The biographer Frank Möller and the publisher Helge Malchow in conversation about Joseph Caspar Witsch. In: taz of December 9, 2014, p. 15.
  3. ^ Hans-Rüdiger Minow: Used and controlled - artists in the network of the CIA. In: arte / ARD , November 29, 2006, online video.
  4. ^ Wolf-Dieter Roth : German artists and journalists as "IM" of the USA? Even Heinrich Böll worked - possibly unknowingly - for the CIA for years. In: Telepolis , November 26, 2006.
  5. ↑ Died . In: Der Spiegel . No. 20 , 1967, p. 190 ( online ).
  6. ↑ a b Frank Möller: Grabbing the wheel of fortune by the spokes. Joseph Caspar Witsch - His authors, his publishing program and the literary business of the early Federal Republic. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2015, ISBN 978-3-462-04739-4 , pp. 455/468.
  7. ↑ picture of the former grave site. In: findagrave.com. Retrieved July 24, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Witsch, Joseph Caspar
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German librarian and publisher
DATE OF BIRTH July 17, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Cologne
DATE OF DEATH April 28, 1967
Place of death Dusseldorf