Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt

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Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt (born March 12, 1908 in Leipzig , † February 28, 1992 in New Delhi ) was a German publisher and translator .

Life

Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt was born in Leipzig as the illegitimate son of the publisher Ernst Rowohlt and the actress Maria Ledig. After training as a bookseller in Berlin, Cologne and London, Heinrich Maria (Heinz) Single joined his father's Rowohlt Verlag in 1931 and, after initial difficulties, took over the management of the press department.

In the spring of 1935 and in the summer of 1936 he looked after the American Rowohlt author Thomas Wolfe , who lived in Berlin on his German royalties. He made the guest known in his circles and opened his eyes to the darker sides of Germany. He introduced each of his hints with the sentence: “Now I want to tell you something.” After his return to the States, Wolfe incorporated his experiences into a short story with the same title - I Have a Thing to Tell You - which was published in March 1937 appeared in the weekly The New Republic . Although he alienated everyone, Ledig to Franz Heilig and Rowohlt to Karl Lewald, every attentive observer had to be able to "reconstruct reality down to the last detail," as Ledig wrote in his memoirs of Wolfe. He feared his arrest by the Gestapo, but the Gestapo was evidently not interested in him.

In 1936, Ernst Rowohlt was banned from working because of camouflaging and relocating works by Jewish writers. Single took over the management of Rowohlt Verlag, which became a subsidiary of the Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt in Stuttgart, until this publishing house was closed by the National Socialists in 1943. Single became a soldier and suffered severe wounds.

On November 9, 1945, Ledig-Rowohlt received the license from the Americans to reopen the publishing house in Stuttgart, and his father Ernst Rowohlt received the British publishing license on March 27, 1946 in Hamburg. Both publishers were merged again in Hamburg in 1950. Due to the lack of material and the enormous pent-up demand of readers for good, especially foreign literature, Ledig-Rowohlt came up with the idea of rotary printing books on newsprint (Rowohlt's rotary novels). Printing began in late autumn 1946. The first titles included Kurt Tucholsky's Schloß Gripsholm and Ernest Hemingway's In Another Land . The rororo paperbacks later emerged from the rotary novels. In 1949 Ledig-Rowohlt got to know the mass production of American paperbacks on a trip to the USA and decided to introduce it in Germany as well. In 1950, against the resistance of his father, the publishing house was expanded with the publication of paperbacks. Since then, Ledig-Rowohlt has been considered a pioneer of the German publishing industry after the Second World War and "rororo" has become a synonym for the paperback.

In 1960 his father Ernst Rowohlt died and bequeathed his share in the publishing house to his younger son Harry Rowohlt , with the exception of a few shares for Single Rowohlt, which were supposed to secure the majority for him. In this way, Ledig-Rowohlt became the majority shareholder and took over the publishing management.

The dropping of a publishing product over the territory of the GDR in 1969, which went down in publishing history as a balloon affair , brought a first crisis to the publishing and personal career of what had been a successful career up to then. Fritz Raddatz had made a significant contribution to the success of the 1960s , and a close relationship had developed between the publisher and his chief editor. It ended abruptly after 50,000 copies of the memoirs of Yevgenia Ginsburg, printed on behalf of Rowohlt, were dropped over the territory of the GDR. Raddatz was responsible for what happened.

In 1982 Ledig-Rowohlt sold the publishing house to the Georg von Holtzbrinck publishing group with a consultancy agreement and devoted himself to translating theater plays and poetry. Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt died on February 28, 1992 at a publishing conference in New Delhi , India.

Heinrich Maria Ledig Rowohlt Foundation

In the same year, his widow Jane Ledig-Rowohlt founded the Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt Foundation , which is based in Hamburg. "The exclusive and immediate purpose of the foundation is to promote German-language literary translators , in particular to advertise an annual Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt Translator Prize." The Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt Prize was first presented on October 1, 1992 during the Frankfurt Book Fair awarded. The development of the foundation's assets made it possible to launch the Jane Scatcherd Prize in 1995 and a third prize, the Paul Scheerbart Prize, in 1998 .

Fondation Ledig-Rowohlt and Ledig House

In the castle Château de Lavigny , the later place of residence of Jane and Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt, located between Geneva and Lausanne near Lake Geneva , Jane Ledig-Rowohlt has had a four-week residency grant for young, aspiring writers since 1996 , which enable six authors to exchange ideas with one another and do literary work in stylish surroundings. The scholarship is not awarded, but a selection is made from among applications.

Single House is a "sister" residence to the Chateau de Lavigny. It was founded in 1992 by the literary agent and friend of Ledig-Rowohlts, Francis J. Greenburger, in Omi, located in the Hudson Valley , New York State. Single House is part of the Omi International Arts Center .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dieter E. Zimmer: The Rowohlt Affair DIE ZEIT / Feuilleton, No. 39, September 26, 1969, p.16-17 Title: Does the Revolution eat its publishers? - Background and background to an affair in the Rowohlt house
  2. ↑ Hermann Gieselbusch, Dirk Moldenhauer, Uwe Naumann, Michael Töteberg: 100 years Rowohlt. An illustrated chronicle . Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2008. pp. 260–267
  3. ↑ propaganda rororos ( Memento From 1 November 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ↑ The head of the publishing house was his best translator himself
  5. ^ Preamble to the statutes
  6. ↑ Château de Lavigny Writers' Residence , literaturport.de, accessed on June 8, 2014
  7. ↑ New York Scholarships (Ledig Rowohlt Haus) , literaturport.de, accessed on April 1, 2018
personal data
SURNAME Single Rowohlt, Heinrich Maria
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Single, Heinrich Maria
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German publisher
DATE OF BIRTH March 12, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Leipzig
DATE OF DEATH February 28, 1992
Place of death New Delhi