Kurt Ganske

Kurt Ganske (born January 14, 1905 in Kiel , † March 20, 1979 in Göttingen ) was a German bookseller and publisher .

Live and act

In the 1920s Kurt Ganske joined the reading group " Readers' Circle Daheim " founded by his father Richard Ganske in Kiel, and in 1929 he took over the leadership. In the 1930s, the “Readers' Group At Home in the German Reich” with over 30 branches supplied 180,000 people with reading material.

After the Second World War , the company continued to expand. Ganske founded the magazine Merian in 1947 and in 1950 took over the Hamburg book publisher Hoffmann und Campe , in which he had been involved since 1941.

In 1948 Ganske founded the Jahreszeiten Verlag in Hanover , which he moved to Hamburg a little later . Originally intended as a supplier of reading material for his reading group, the company has developed into a publishing house for upscale magazines that is still successful today.

From 1956 to 1974 Ganske was the majority shareholder of the weekly newspaper Rheinischer Merkur .

Since 1978 Hoffmann and Campe Verlag has also been a partner in Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag (dtv) .

Today all companies are grouped under the umbrella of the Ganske publishing group.

Ganske lived a secluded life, but maintained - especially at Gut Hohenhaus near Herleshausen , which his father bought in 1934 - intensive contact with the writers of his house such as Max Tau , Hoimar von Ditfurth and Siegfried Lenz , who in 1951 wrote his first There were hawks in the air at Hoffmann and Campe and authored the house until his death.

Ganske loved mountaineering and was a passionate hunter. He was married to Gerda Ganske (born Tolle; * December 15, 1913, † July 3, 2008) and had three sons and a daughter; his son Thomas had been director of the Merian publishing house and a member of the Hoffmann and Campe management since 1975, and after Kurt Ganske's death took over as CEO of the Ganske publishing group.

literature

• Emanuel Eckardt : Keep pace. Kurt Ganske and his time . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2005; ISBN 978-3-455-09509-8
• The German-language press: A biographical-bibliographical manual, KG Saur, Munich, 2005, ISBN 3-598-11710-8 , p. 317

Web links

• Literature by and about Kurt Ganske in the catalog of the German National Library
• MATTHIAS SCHMOOCK: " Kurt Ganske - a search for traces " - Hamburger Abendblatt March 17, 2006
• Emanuel Eckardt: Keep pace. Kurt Ganske and his time. as PDF file (9.49 MB)

1. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original dated June 24, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.