Rotbuch Verlag

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The Red Book publishing is a collective book publisher with a left history, with the three program pillars Fiction , non-fiction and thriller . The focus is on the one hand on young German literature and crime novels .

From 1996 to 2001 Rotbuch published the culture magazine " Zibaldone ", from 1976 to 1992 the magazine PROKLA .

history

Publishing as a collective

Rotbuch-Verlag was founded in 1973 in West Berlin by a few employees of Wagenbach Verlag . From 1965 to 1973 attempts had been made to run Wagenbach-Verlag as a collective , but this ended with the split. The founders of the Rotbuch-Verlag Anne Duden , FC Delius , Eberhard Delius , Ingrid Karsunke , Andreas Fimmel , Helga Scheller and Manfred Naber tried to continue the collective idea in their own publishing house. The course book , edited by Hans Magnus Enzensberger , Karl Markus Michel and Tilman Spengler , initially continued to appear here. The rest of the Wagenbach publishing house went up in the Klaus Wagenbach publishing house.

The organization of the publishing house as a collective meant that employees and owners were identical and jointly decided on the organization, finances and program, selection of authors, sales and retail prices. Between 1973 and 1993 Rotbuch was the in-house publishing house for important new literary voices in German, including Anne Duden , Herta Müller , Emine Sevgi Özdamar , Libuše Moníková , Aras Ören , György Dalos , Heiner Müller , Christian Geissler and Adolf Endler . The enormous popularity of the left-wing comic books by Gerhard Seyfried ("Where should it all end?", "Invasion from everyday life") were able to cross-finance other projects.

Sale to Grönewald

In 1993, the then shareholders sold their shares to the Sabine Groenewold publishers in Hamburg . The publishing house moved from Berlin to Hamburg and the collective was dissolved. Only a few employees followed the publishing house to Hamburg. In 2001 the Sabine Groenewold publishers were dissolved; The Rotbuch-Verlag was converted into a pure fiction publishing house in 2001 and went to the European Publishing House .

Takeover by Eulenspiegel

At the beginning of 2007 the Eulenspiegel publishing group from Berlin took over the Rotbuch-Verlag. The headquarters of the publishing house was moved back to Berlin . The historical focus of the program, such as the current-critical non-fiction book , sophisticated German crime novels and distinctive fiction , were newly installed and expanded. As part of this structuring in accordance with the publisher's roots, the red calendar against gray everyday life was taken back into the program and the publisher's crime series was reissued.

Only a few authors such as György Dalos or Michael Wildenhain have returned to the publisher - sometimes at short notice.

Today the publishing house is run independently and independently. Rotbuch Verlag has entered into a strategic sales alliance with Eulenspiegel Verlagsgruppe to maintain this status. Since 2009, the Rotbuch Verlag's archive has been located in the Mainz publishing archive of the Institute for Book Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.

Red Book Crime

With the crime series, which was founded by Gabriele Dietze at Rotbuch Verlag in the mid-1980s , the spectrum of the publishing house expanded. The publisher also publishes international and German newcomers, among others, and is characterized by its particularly idiosyncratic progressive style. The publisher was able to win a total of ten German crime prizes. Authors such as Jörg Juretzka (German Krimipreis, 1999 and 2002), Thea Dorn (German Krimipreis 2000, 1st place) and Pieke Biermann (German Krimipreis 1991 and 1997, 1st place each) made their debut in the Red Book crime series .

In the spring of 2008 Rotbuch began to publish the crime series “Hard Case Crime”. This was a paperback series of Pulp crime novels. Authors such as Allan Guthrie , Lawrence Block , Ken Bruen and Jason Star appeared in the series .

The red calendar

The pocket calendar Red Calendar was also published by Rotbuch against gray everyday life . This was reissued and continued after being taken over by the Eulenspiegel publishing group in autumn 2007.

Authors

In the 1970s, many authors from Eastern Europe shaped the publisher's program, for example:

The important authors of this time also included:

Among the authors of the 1980s and 1990s include

To be among the new authors of the early 21st century

The program also includes translations by the 1997 Nobel Prize for Literature Dario Fo .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Uwe Sonnenberg: From Marx to the mole. Left book trade in West Germany in the 1970s . Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2016, ISBN 978-3-8353-1816-8 , pp. 265-269 .