Röderberg publishing house
The Röderberg-Verlag was mainly in Frankfurt -based publisher of the Association of Victims of the Nazi Regime (VVN). From the 1960s onwards it developed into a publishing house for anti-fascist literature. In the 1970s, the publisher published volumes under license from the Universal Library of Leipzig's Reclam Verlag in West Germany. In terms of sales, he benefited from a network of DKP -near collective bookshops that had been built up in 1969 . In the course of austerity measures, the publisher merged in 1987 with the Cologne-based Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag , which went bankrupt in 1989.
history
Röderberg-Verlag was founded in 1950 as the organizational publisher of the VVN with its headquarters on Röderbergweg in Frankfurt am Main . The VVN published its newspaper Die Tat through this publisher . After the VVN had threatened to be banned by 1962, the publisher initially only had a limited range of books. This included the loose-leaf collection Handbook of Compensation by VVN Chairman Marcel Frenkel and some GDR licensed editions such as the documentation on Fascism. Ghetto. Mass murder by the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and a commemorative book published by Walter Bartel on Buchenwald concentration camp . With the former bookseller Heinz Brüdigam , a lecturer was hired after the KPD ban to develop the book program.
At the Leipzig Book Fair in 1971, Röderberg publishing director Hans Bär made contacts with GDR colleagues, which enabled Röderberg to publish volumes under license from Reclam Leipzig, the leading paperback publisher in the GDR. The Leipzig Reclam publishing house could not sell its books under the name Reclam in West Germany, because the parallel Reclam publishing house founded in Stuttgart in 1947 could take action against it. The licensed editions for the Röderberg publishing house were produced in the GDR. The bindings, which had been designed by Irmgard Horlbeck-Kappler since 1957 , were almost identical. However, the publisher's name Reclam was missing and the Universal and Library beams were replaced by Röderberg and Taschenbuch . The first volume to appear was Revolution und Literatur. On the relationship between heritage, revolution and literature , which was edited by Werner Mittenzwei and Reinhard Weismach and was based on a colloquium of the Central Institute for the History of Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR in 1970. The party-official photo book Ernst Thälmann was also licensed by Dietz . Pictures, documents, texts by Günter Hortzschansky . The licenses were agreed either directly between Bär and the GDR publishing directors or through the working group of socialist and democratic publishers and booksellers .
The Röderberg books were mainly sold through the DKP-related collectiv bookshops that were established after the DKP was re-established in 1968 . From 1973 onwards, bookstores held an annual anti-fascist series of events and book weeks in memory of the book burning , at which Röderberg's publications were presented. In the meantime, the VVN's documentation has also been published as Röderberg books.
Of the nearly 500 Röderberg books published by 1989, almost a quarter were licensed editions from the Reclam publishing house. Röderberg began the series of international anti-fascist novels in 1975 with the novel Nackt unter Wölfen by Bruno Apitz . In the library of resistance series , the resistance against National Socialism was presented in individual regions or cities.
One of the greatest successes was the seven-volume series Art and Literature in Anti-Fascist Exile 1933–1945, largely responsible for Werner Mittenzwei . Further licensed editions came from the Leipziger Verlag für Buch- und Bibliothekwesen and Dietz Verlag , including the most expensive publication from Röderberg Verlag, a leaflet cassette The KPD's anti-fascist resistance struggle in the mirror of the leaflet 1933-1945 . The literary scholar Uwe Naumann published the yearbook Collection on Exile Research for Röderberg-Verlag from 1978 .
Due to sales difficulties and reduced financial support for the VVN by the GDR, the publisher had to save from 1983. The freelance workers were reduced. In the course of a second wave of savings, the Röderberg Verlag was merged with the Cologne-based Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag in 1987. At the end of 1989 this publisher had to file for bankruptcy. The archives of the Pahl-Rugenstein and Röderberg publishers went to the Cologne city archive .
See also
literature
- Klaus Körner: Against war and fascism. The Frankfurt Röderberg-Verlag and Reclam-Leipzig . In: Ingrid Sonntag (Ed.): At the limits of the possible. Reclam Leipzig 1945–1991 . Ch. Links, Berlin 2016, pp. 142–156.