Rütten & Loening
| Rütten & Loening
|
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| legal form | Imprint of the Aufbau-Verlag |
| founding | July 1, 1844 |
| Seat | Berlin , Germany |
| Branch | Book publisher |
Rütten & Loening was an important German book publisher , in 1844 in Frankfurt was founded. Today Rütten & Loening is part of the Aufbau-Verlag GmbH & Co KG. The Rütten & Loening word mark will be continued as the imprint of the Aufbau Group. Within the publishing group, the imprint is predominantly assigned to works of upscale entertainment literature.
history
19th century
In 1844 the Frankfurt merchant Joseph Rütten founded the literary institution (J. Rütten) with the help of the publisher Zacharias Loewenthal (later converted: Carl Friedrich Loening ). Heinrich Hoffmanns Struwwelpeter (1845) was the first major success of the new publishing house, with an initial edition of 1,500 copies. In the same year he also published the first book by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels , The Holy Family . His publishing program also included complete editions by Georg Büchner , Ludwig Börnes and Karl Gutzkows . Important translations also found their way into the publisher's program, such as Aristophanes , which appeared in 1845–1848 and was reprinted and edited again and again in the following years . Pieces in 3 volumes, trans. and with explanations ed. by Ludwig Seeger .
Rütten and Löwenthal became members of the first German National Assembly in 1848 . The Literary Institute later published the books of many left-wing representatives of the National Assembly.
In 1857 Löwenthal, now called Loening, became an authorized signatory and in 1859 a partner; the publishing house now operated as the Rütten & Loening literary establishment . From 1879 it was continued by Gottfried Loening and Heinrich Oswalt , a nephew of Rüttens. The focus of publishing activities was now history, art and literary history and jurisprudence . The Goethe yearbooks founded by Ludwig Geiger in 1880 were published by Rütten & Loening for many years . The Struwwelpeter however, remained an important titles of the publishing program 1876 appeared the hundredth and 1895 the two hundredth edition.
1900 to 1936
In 1901 Wilhelm Oswalt, a son of Heinrich Oswalt, inherited the publishing house together with his sisters and took over the management. In 1905 Martin Buber was editor-in-chief of the publishing house for ten years. Adolf Neumann became an authorized signatory in 1913 and a 25% partner in the OHG in 1921 . In the 1920s, fiction shaped the publishing program. The authors included u. a. Romain Rolland , Sigrid Undset , Rudolf Binding and Waldemar Bonsels . Adolf Neumann became a partner.
1936 to 1946
In 1936, based on the Nuremberg Laws , the publishers Wilhelm Ernst Oswalt and Adolf Neumann received instructions from the Reich Chamber of Literature to sell the publisher to an “Aryan” publisher or to close the publisher. In July 1936, Rütten & Loening was sold to the Potsdam publisher Albert Hachfeld (Athenaion Verlag) and the company was immediately relocated to Potsdam, taking along the entire company assets, the archive and a few employees. All “Jewish” and “international” authors (e.g. Romain Rolland) were given up. During the war, the publishing house mainly produced classical literature, but also “edification literature” for the Wehrmacht.
The main owner and publisher of Rütten & Loening, Wilhelm Ernst Oswalt, who was forced to sell his publishing house, was a broken man after the sale of his publishing house. In 1942 he was denounced and arrested for not wearing the Jewish star in public and murdered two weeks later in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Oranienburg. The older son Heinrich Oswalt fled to Switzerland and survived the Nazi era there. The younger son Ernst Ludwig Oswalt was deported "to the East" and murdered.
The publishing director and 25% co-owner of Rütten & Loening, Adolf Neumann, once one of the most respected publishers in the German Reich, fled to Norway, after its occupation by the Nazis to Sweden, survived the war and then granted for some in years for political reasons 1936 title licenses not also sold to the publishing house in Potsdam. Neumann died in Sweden in the early 1950s.
In 1942, as is customary after the murder of Jews, Wilhelm Ernst Oswalt's private assets were publicly auctioned on behalf of the Gestapo and the proceeds were collected for the benefit of the Reich. The extremely valuable and very extensive private library with over 10,000 volumes, compiled in the almost one hundred year old family tradition of the publishing family, was acquired by the renowned second-hand bookshop "Frankfurter Bücherstube Schumann & Cobet" (known before 1937 as Frankfurter Jugendbücherstube Walter "Israel" Schatzki), which was active until the 1990s ) for the ridiculous price of 8,500 RM.
The original manuscript of "Struwwelpeter", until 1942 property of the publisher, was auctioned by the city of Frankfurt am Main for 41,000 DM in the early 1950s. No evidence of the origin of the manuscript or the identity of the consignor was ever researched. The last two publishers of the formerly world-famous Struwwelpeter publishing house in Frankfurt, Rütten & Loening, do not appear in the memory culture of the city of Frankfurt.
1946 to 1990
In the post-war period, the Oswalt family filed numerous restitution and compensation applications with regard to the forced sale of the publisher. All of these applications were rejected in unison on the grounds that the application for restitution was inadmissible due to the location of the returned property outside the scope of the Allied and West German restitution laws, namely on the territory of the GDR in Potsdam. Compensation was also out of the question because the asset, i.e. H. the publisher still exists, albeit outside the scope of the relevant laws.
Since the GDR did not undertake any reparation or restitution for the Jewish assets taken away or expropriated by the Nazis, the Oswalt family remained without compensation. The publisher's two sisters, who were also involved in the company, died almost penniless in the 1950s and 1960s, respectively.
The surviving son of Wilhelm Ernst Oswalt, Heinrich Oswalt, had never come to terms with the administrative and judicial decisions on the rejection of his restitution applications that had been made in 1948.
Potsdam and Berlin
In 1946, due to the National Socialist burden on Hachfeld, the publishing house was placed under compulsory fiduciary administration by Potsdamer Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, which belonged to the state of Brandenburg and the publisher Riemerschmidt. There Rütten & Loening was run as a production group. On April 17, 1948, the publishing house was expropriated by SMAD order No. 64 in favor of public property, but the business operations and the assets continued to be administered by the Potsdam publishing group. After Riemerschmidt moved to West Germany in 1949, the SED holding Zentrag acquired the Potsdam publishing company from the state of Brandenburg and liquidated the company. The Liquidator sold the "Rütten & Loening" production group in 1950 to the Volk und Welt GmbH publishing house . The publishing house was relocated to Berlin. On March 24, 1952, the Volk und Welt GmbH publishing house with two private partners founded "Rütten und Loening GmbH" (registered in HRB 5018) and brought the substance ("including the company and publishing rights") of the production group as a contribution in kind to this new GmbH a. On November 2, 1954, after being deleted from the HRB, the publisher was entered in the HRC without changing the ownership structure.
In the GDR the publishing house tried to build on the tradition of the old publishing house Rütten & Loening. Some of the most important books in the history of the publisher were published, including numerous works by Romain Rolland. Great authors of world literature, including editions of works by Stendal, Emil Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Tolstoy, Leskow, Tchechow, Charles Dickens and many others. and discerning contemporary authors, including Herrmann Kant, President of the GDR Writers' Union, have been relocated. In addition, several important scientific journals were published by Rütten and Loening, including "Contributions to Romance Philology" with the collaboration of Victor Klemperer . The magazine Sinn und Form had been published since 1949 . Book series such as the renowned library of world literature were also established.
In terms of quality, literary standards, depth and breadth of the program, the 1950s were a heyday of the Rütten & Loening publishing house.
The year 1964 was another turning point: on January 1, 1964, due to the decision of the police office of July 31, 1962, the publishing house Rütten & Loening became part of the Ministry of Culture of the GDR together with the Aufbau-Verlag while maintaining the previous ownership structure of the publishing house and book trade assumed. But he only continued the fiction program there; the scientific program was handed over to the Berliner Verlag der Wissenschaften for continuation. The publisher remained legally independent and registered in the HRC. The working group with the Aufbau-Verlag remained in existence until the end of the GDR and beyond.
Frankfurt a. M., Hamburg and Munich
In 1950, Adolf Neumann's son founded a publishing house Rütten & Loening GmbH in Frankfurt a. M., which remained insignificant and soon became insolvent. After the bankruptcy, the publishing house was sold to Hamburg and in 1960 it was resold to Bertelsmann. The West German publishing house became known through the publication of the Globke documentation in 1961 and the Bertelsmann Group's ban on printing Rolf Hochhuth's deputy .
In 1963, the Bertelsmann Group obtained a ban on the distribution of books and magazines from the East Berlin publishing house Rütten & Loening after the OLG Hamm had ruled in favor of Bertelsmann in a dispute over the naming rights for the territory of the then Federal Republic. The judges considered it relevant to the decision that the Ariseur Hachfeld had been expropriated without compensation, which would contradict the Ordre Public of the Federal Republic. The legal succession of the Berlin publisher to the old publisher was not considered relevant to the decision. In the period that followed, the two publishers came to terms and occasionally worked together.
In 1969 the publisher, which had meanwhile been based in Munich, was sold again. However, the new owner, Berner Scherz-Verlag, ceased operations at Rütten & Loening Munich in 1974 and deleted the company from the commercial register in 1992.
After 1990
In 1995, the Aufbau-Verlagsgruppe GmbH handed over the archive to the State Library in Berlin on permanent loan. The archive is the property of the publisher Bernd F. Lunkewitz.
Restitution application due to the forced sale in 1936
Heinrich Oswalt had applied for a transfer back on October 3, 1990 under the law regulating open property issues (Property Act - VermG). The Treuhandanstalt (BVS) had been informed about this, but did not tell the investors, who had invested in the publisher for more than 10 years, before they heard of the return request. After almost 13 years of inactivity and seven years after Heinrich Oswalt's death in 1996, the application to the heirs was rejected by decision of the State Office for the settlement of open property issues on August 27, 2003. The granting of compensation was also refused.
The heirs, however, brought an action before the Berlin Administrative Court. This action was upheld by a partial judgment of the Administrative Court of Berlin on January 24, 2008 (published in ZOV 2008, 115 ff.) And the defendant Federal Republic of Germany was sentenced to a new decision stating that Rütten & Loening Verlag OHG iL is entitled to return because the Forced sale from 1936 was a damaging measure within the meaning of Section 1 (6) of the Property Act.
The court found that a reimbursement of the revoked publisher had not yet been made and that it was not legally possible because the publisher was located in the GDR. Although the publishing house in Frankfurt am Main had been taken away, the transfer to Potsdam and Berlin at the time meant that the property could be used. required area-relatedness available.
The Federal Republic of Germany has also undertaken, parallel to the Unification Treaty and the Two-Plus-Four Treaty , to extend the reparation for Nazi injustice practiced in the West to the accession area: “The government of the Federal Republic of Germany declares that it will take all appropriate measures to ensure that the still valid provisions of the transition agreement in the area of the current German Democratic Republic and in Berlin are not circumvented. "
The defendant Federal Republic of Germany and the beige invited BVS appealed against the judgment revision one. The Federal Administrative Court overturned the decision of the Berlin Administrative Court and referred the matter back to a different decision (BVerwG 8 C 12.08 published inter alia in ZOV 2010, 92 ff.). Because of the binding effect of the BVG's decision, the Berlin Administrative Court dismissed the action.
The SNB stated in the operative part of its judgment: "The Property Act established in lesions that already the Allied restitution law or the law of the Federal Republic of Germany amends law under fell, no new further claims. Its purpose is neither to 'rectify' the legal consequences regulated there nor to correct the decisions made at the time. ” (Cf. press release of the Federal Administrative Court of November 25, 2009) It was not based on an economic, but on a“ normative ”approach. The decisive factor should therefore not be whether the victims of Nazi persecution had actually been restituted in the West after 1945 and / or received compensation or some other payment, but rather whether, according to the relevant legal provisions, the Allied Restitution Acts, the Federal Restitution Act (BRüG ), the Federal Compensation Act (BEG) and the respective implementing regulations issued for this would have had a corresponding claim, regardless of whether this had actually been asserted and satisfied.
In 2011, the heirs lodged a constitutional complaint against this decision with the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, which the court did not accept for decision (July 2015).
A granddaughter of Heinrich Oswalt, Ruth Oswalt, wrote a play about the fate of her family, Struwwelväter , based on family documents . This was premiered in November 2011 in the theater that she and her husband Gerd Imbsweiler founded in Basel in 1974 .
present
Rütten & Loening is an imprint today . The development group concentrates here the works of upscale entertainment literature by German and international authors. After the Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag , which is also part of the Aufbau Group, was discontinued in 2010, the Aufbau Group intends to assign the former Kiepenheuer business areas to Rütten & Loening.
Festschriften
- Alfred Frommhold: One hundred and ten years of publishing house Rütten & Loening Berlin. 1844 to 1954 . Rütten & Loening, Berlin 1954
- One hundred and twenty-five years of Rütten & Loening 1844–1969. An almanac. Overall editor Jürgen Jahn . Rütten & Loening, Berlin 1969
- Wurm, Carsten: 150 years of Rütten & Loening. ... More than a publishing history . Rütten & Loening Berlin GmbH, Berlin 1994
literature
- Rudolf Schmidt : German bookseller. German book printer. 5th volume, published by Rudolf Schmidt, Eberswalde 1908, pp. 838-839. ( online )
- Christoph Links: The fate of the GDR publishers. Privatization and its consequences . Ch. Links Verlag, 2009, p. 204 ff. Digital copy in excerpts
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e Christoph Links: The fate of the GDR publishers. Privatization and its consequences. Links, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-86153-523-2 , p. 204f ( digitized version ).
- ↑ a b c Rudolf Schmidt: German booksellers. German book printer. Volume 5. Schmidt, Eberswald 1908, pp. 838-839.
- ^ Ernest Hamburger: Jews in public life in Germany. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1968, ISBN 3-16-829292-3 , pp. 213-214.
- ↑ Adolf Neumann, see Joseph Walk (ed.): Short biographies on the history of the Jews 1918–1945. Edited by the Leo Baeck Institute, Jerusalem. Saur, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-598-10477-4 , p. 280.
- ^ Alfred Frommhold: Verlag Rütten and Loening. 1844 to 1954. Rütten & Loening, Berlin 1954, p. 85.
- ↑ Reinhard-Maria Strecker (Ed.): Dr. Hans Globke. File extracts, documents. Rütten & Loening, Hamburg 1961.
- ↑ Heiner Teroerde: Political dramaturgies in divided Berlin: Social imaginations with Erwin Piscator and Heiner Müller around 1960. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2009, ISBN 978-3-89971-696-2
- ^ A word of comfort for the friends in the face of the near end in FAZ of June 18, 2013, p. 35
- ↑ Structure straightens and expands its program. Publishing house as a promise of quality. on: Buchreport.de April 27, 2010. Accessed September 26, 2010.