Kurt Enoch

Kurt Enoch (born November 22, 1895 in Hamburg , † February 15, 1982 in Puerto Rico ) was a publisher .

Live and act

Kurt Enoch was a son of the Hamburg entrepreneur and publisher Oscar Enoch (1860–1934). His liberal Jewish parents enabled their son to study literature and educate himself at an early age. Enoch studied economics at the University of Hamburg , interrupted by three years of military service during the First World War . After obtaining his doctorate in 1921, he joined the group of companies that his father had built up. This also included the publishing house Gebrüder Enoch , founded in 1913 , which he took over as head.

During the 1920s, Enoch developed the publishing house significantly. He replaced popular literature with major new releases. These included the Twelve Litographies of Christian Morgenstern's Grotesken by Hans Reyersbach in 1923 , The Negro on Scharhörn by Hans Leip from 1927 and the novel The Apprenticeship Years of the Heart by Ernst Sander . In 1924 he published Klaus Mann's first work, Before Life , of which three other works were later published by Enoch Verlag . In the field of fiction, the publisher offered anthologies and translations of internationally successful novels. There were also illustrated books such as See, Sand, Sonne by Arvid Gutschow or Hamburg by Albert Renger-Patzsch . From 1926 Enoch worked actively in the German Publishers' Association and in the Stock Exchange Association of German Booksellers .

In 1932 Enoch took over shares in The Albatross Modern Continental Library . This company, based in Hamburg and Paris , focused on the distribution of English-language paperbacks. In 1935 the company succeeded in taking over the rival company Tauchnitz Editions . However, due to his Jewish origins, Kurt Enoch had no further professional future in the company. He sold his shares to business partner Christian Wegner , who continued to run the publishing house under his own name.

In August 1936, Enoch emigrated to France ; a step he saw as a complete break with his past. He founded Continenta , Imperia and Enoch Ltd. based in Paris and England. After the outbreak of World War II and the invasion of France by German troops , Enoch had to give up the publishing and distribution companies. He spent a short time in custody and, with the help of the Emergency Rescue Committee , was able to flee via the Pyrenees and Portugal . In October 1940 he traveled to the USA with his wife and two daughters , where he again worked as a publisher.

From 1942 he worked as vice president of the American subsidiary of Penguin Books . In 1945, as its president, he took over shares in the company, which in 1947 was renamed The New American Library of World Literature (NAL). The publisher wanted to offer “Good reading for the Millions” in various categories and printed high-quality and attractively designed paperbacks that cost little and achieved high print runs. NAL developed into the most successful paperbacks publisher in the USA, to which Enoch, who always promoted his "quality paperbacks", played a decisive role.

In 1949 Enoch, who had meanwhile accepted American citizenship, traveled again to Hamburg. He himself later said that the walks through downtown Hamburg and parts of the city near the Alster were “sentimental journeys into the past”, but that he could no longer feel at home here. In 1968 Enoch retired. He later advised printing companies and publishers, mostly based in Israel.

Kurt Enoch died in February 1982 in Puerto Rico. Numerous articles and monographs show him as an outstanding publisher. In an obituary in the New York Times, the journalist Herbert Mitgang described him as a “pioneer in paperback publishing” in the USA and Europe.

literature

• Wilfried Weinke: Enoch, Kurt . In: Franklin Kopitzsch, Dirk Brietzke (Hrsg.): Hamburgische Biographie . tape 5 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2010, ISBN 978-3-8353-0640-0 , p. 109-110 .
• Michaela Ullmann: Kurt Enoch - Refugee and Paperback Pioneer . In: Immigrant Entrepreneurship: German-American Business Biographies, 1720 to the Present , Vol. 5: From the Postwar Boom to Global Capitalism, 1945 - Today , edited by R. Daniel Wadhwani. German Historical Institute Washington 2016 ( online ).
• Karl H. Pressler: Tauchnitz and Albatross. On the history of the paperback . In: From the Antiquariat , No. 1, Munich 1985.

Notes and individual references

1. ↑ Enoch, Kurt | Jewish Hamburg . Editor: Institute for the History of the German Jews. Retrieved December 17, 2016.
2. ↑ in the original: "sentimental journeys into the past"