Cultural publisher

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A cultural publisher (also individual publisher ) is a publisher who wants to make sophisticated literature accessible to a wider audience. This type of publisher emerged in Germany at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The cultural publisher wanted to make the culture book a mass book instead of producing avant-garde works for an elite class of the population. Thus, he subordinated the profit of his company to the conviction that he was carrying out a culture-promoting mission. Furthermore, this type of publisher, in contrast to the commercially oriented publishers, had a more personal bond with its authors . He saw them as partners or friends, supported their public and even represented their works in court.

Cultural publishers were only able to establish themselves in an epoch of extraordinary intellectual achievement, at the beginning of the 20th century.

Wilhelm Friedrich

Wilhelm Friedrich can be described as the first cultural publisher . He wanted to deliberately direct readers with his publications and contributed significantly to the reception of modern foreign literature (especially Émile Zola ) and works of naturalism . Due to his socially critical literary program, he came into conflict with the judiciary and thus lost reputation with the public.

Friedrich also opted for the "wrong" direction of naturalism. This split into the Munich and Berlin camps at the end of the 19th century. Friedrich preferred the southern German style, which finally made his company less important in the market.

Samuel Fischer

Samuel Fischer chose current trends better. He succeeded Wilhelm Friedrich and was very good at finding new talents. He recognized the rapid survival of the avant-garde and therefore allowed new literary forms, which was an important factor in his long-term success. His authors included Tolstoy , Zola and the naturalists Henrik Ibsen and Gerhart Hauptmann . In 1897 he published Thomas Mann's first work . Also Hermann Hesse and Jakob Wassermann left their books at Fischer S. publish. It soon developed into the most important German publisher of classical modernism.

Further cultural publishers

Eugen Diederichs , Anton Kippenberg , Kurt Wolff , Georg Müller , Albert Langen , Ernst Rowohlt as well as Reinhard Piper and Axel Juncker can be considered as other cultural publishers . The focus of the publishing program could be very different:

  • Reinhard Piper's great interest was in the fine arts.

The cultural publishers that emerged around the turn of the century rejected the new movement of expressionism . Only Ernst Rowohlt and Kurt Wolff took on writings by Franz Kafka , Else Lasker-Schüler , Georg Trakl and Robert Walser . They marked the next generation of cultural publishers.

However, all of the above-mentioned people were united by the concern of making an important contribution to the cultural development of the German population with their published titles. Thus they were not only companions of literary modernity, but also a crucial part of it.

literature

  • Gangolf Hübinger (Ed.): The meeting place of modern spirits: the Eugen-Diederichs-Verlag - departure into the century of extremes . Munich: Eugen-Diederichs-Verlag 1996, ISBN 3-424-01260-2 , p. 9f.
  • Helga Abret: Albert Langen: a European publisher. Munich: Langen Müller 1993, ISBN 3-7844-2459-7 , pp. 140-156.
  • Reinhard Wittmann: An overview of the history of the German book trade . 2., through Edition Munich: Beck 1999, ISBN 3-406-42104-0 , pp. 304-315.
  • Ute Schneider: Profiling on the market - the cultural publisher around 1900 . In: Discourses of Time. Reflections on the 19th and 20th centuries. Edited by Roland Berbig, Martina Lauster and Rolf Parr. Heidelberg: Synchron Wissenschaftsverlag 2004, ISBN 3-935025-55-6 , pp. 349–362.