Pierre G. Lévy

Pierre Gaspard Levy (born November 27, 1894 in Biel / Bienne , Switzerland; † March 6, 1945 in Paris ) was a Swiss publisher.

Life and activity

Levy settled in Paris in 1928, where he founded the Editions du Carrefour publishing house . The focus of the publishing program was initially the avant-garde magazine Bifur , published from 1929 to 1931 , in which articles by authors such as James Joyce , Hans Arp , Tristan Tzara and Gottfried Benn were represented. After the completion of the seventh edition of the magazine, Lévy transferred the editorial responsibility for financial reasons to the French Communist Party, represented by Paul Nizan and Jean-Paul Sartre , who only completed one edition (this contained, among other things, Martin Heidegger's contribution "Was ist Metaphysik? "). In addition to the magazine Bifur, Levys Verlag also published a number of novels that were also avant-garde.

In March 1933 Levy sold his publishing house, which was in financial difficulties at the time, to the KPD functionary Willy Munzenberg, who had fled Germany after the Nazis came to power . Munzenberg, who until 1933 had headed and edited a large part of the KPD's own press as the "communist newspaper king", then converted Editions du Carrefour within a short time from a publisher for aesthetic and avant-garde writings to one of the most important publishers of anti-Nazi German exile journalism, in which, in addition to novels and volumes of poetry by left-wing authors such as Johannes R. Becher , Bertolt Brecht and Anna Seghers, mainly political-enlightening writings on the conditions in Nazi-ruled Germany and other fascist regimes in Europe, such as B. the brown book about the Reichstag fire and the Hitler terror appeared. Levy, a strict opponent of the Nazi regime due to his Jewish descent and decidedly anti-fascist political attitudes, made himself available to Munzenberg and his employees as an advisor after the transfer of his publishing house, who established contacts within the Parisian publishing and press landscape.

Publications

• Bifur, 8 editions (1929–1931), reprint: Paris: Jean-Michel Place 1976 (2 vols.).

literature

• Catherine Lawton: Les Editions du Carrefour, rappel d'un passé antèrieur, in: Willi Münzenberg 1889–1940, pp. 173–175. (Also as "The Editions du Carrefour. A memory of a prehistory", in: Schlie / Roche, as below pp. 207–210)
• Héléne Roussel / Lutz Winckler: German exile press and France. 1933-1940 , 1992, pp. 182-184.
• Tania Schlie / Simone Roche: Willi Münzenberg. A German communist caught between Stalinism and anti-fascism , Frankfurt am Main 1995.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Life data according to Ruth Werfel: Gehetzt: Südfrankreich 1940: Deutsche Literaten im Exil , p. 92.