Publisher JHW Dietz Nachf. Bonn

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The publishing house JHW Dietz Nachf. Bonn is a specialist publisher in Bonn . The publishing program includes socio-historical and political science titles. Politically and legally , the publishing house follows the tradition of the JHW Dietz publishing house founded in Stuttgart in 1881 .

Founding history

On December 31, 1881, the social democratic member of the Reichstag, Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Dietz , founded the JHW Dietz publishing house in Stuttgart. Dietz, a trained printer, was expelled from Hamburg during the Socialist Act. In Stuttgart he took over the remains of the social democratic Leipzig book printing company, which could no longer be active in Saxony for political reasons. Dietz ran the publishing house and printer as a private entrepreneur. With this trustee model, the social democracy sought to protect itself from state repression.

In the years that followed, Dietz built the publishing house into a leading company in the German labor movement , which with its publishing products radiated far beyond national borders. It was above all the theory journal “ Die Neue Zeit ” and the renowned series “Internationale Bibliothek” and “Kleine Bibliothek” that established Dietz's reputation as a major publisher. Even when the SPD legally took over the publishing house as a party-owned company in 1906 , the dominant influence of the company founder on the choice of authors and the publishing program remained unbroken.

Dietz, who leaned towards the revisionist wing within the party, kept the publishing house open to all internal party currents, although orthodox Marxist voices dominated. This orientation was mainly due to Karl Kautsky , who edited “Die Neue Zeit” for years before the First World War and also served as a publisher's editor.

Publishing program after Dietz's death

After Dietz's death (August 28, 1922) the publishing house ran into economic difficulties that were exacerbated by the rapid inflation of money. The Stuttgart printing company had to be sold. The publishing house had already moved to Berlin in 1921 , where it merged with the second large social democratic party publisher, the “Verlag der Buchhandlung Vorwärts” (not to be confused with the Vorwärts printing company). The “Verlag der Buchhandlung Vorwärts” published more than 1,300 titles from 1890 to 1921 (adding up all editions and editions) and specialized in brochure literature. However, Rosa Luxemburg's central work The Accumulation of Capital was also published by this publisher in 1913 . A contribution to the economic explanation of imperialism . All publishing rights of the Vorwärts bookstore were transferred to Dietz-Verlag, which operated under the title JHW Dietz Nachhaben GmbH Berlin from 1923.

Working-class culture

After overcoming inflation, the publisher radically changed its image. New authors could be won, and contact with young book artists was intensified. The publishing program reflected new cultural social movements of the Weimar Republic . The journalistic reorientation was closely linked to the name Paul Kampffmeyer . From 1921 Kampffmeyer headed the party archive of the SPD and after Dietz's death took over the role of the central editor within the publishing house. Kampffmeyer had joined the opposition movement "The Young" in the SPD in 1890. However, he did not go along with this group's path to anarchism and rejoined the SPD. As a middle-class member of the " Friedrichshagener Dichterkreis " and an active supporter of the garden city movement , the former party opposition had gone through an atypical political socialization. Kampffmeyer himself was one of the most productive authors at Dietz-Verlag and was one of the early warners of the fascist danger ( Der Fascismus in Deutschland, 1923). The new editor also entered into a close symbiosis with young expressionist artists who gave the publisher a new face with book covers and book illustrations.

The cooperation with the graphic artist Hans Windisch can be seen as typical of the new “publishing spirit” . Windisch had designed the tricolor printed linen cover for Friedrich Wendel's standard work The 19th Century in Caricature , which set new graphic accents. In 1924, the graphic artist created the publisher's signature with the snake, which in future would be memorable for the publishing products of Dietz-Verlag.

Furthermore, hiking books, travel books, books for young people and children stood for the new publishing direction, which tied in with new mass interests in everyday life (sport, education, leisure, etc.). Hilde Krüger's cubist picture books published by Dietz-Verlag (Der Widiwondelwald and Der Wünschebold) influenced several generations of children's book designers.

During the Weimar Republic, the social democratic Dietz Verlag took over the publishing products (and the publishing rights) of various small publishers. Above all, this included the Freedom Publishing Cooperative, which published literature for the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) until 1922 . Authors such as Georg Engelbert Graf , Hans Hackmack , Karl Kautsky , Karl Korsch and Ernst Toller published in the publishing cooperative . The work of the poet Karl Henckell , which was taken over by the JM Müller publishing house in 1924, must also be counted among the significant increases .

Despite all the closeness to the cultural movement: Even in the Weimar Republic, Dietz-Verlag remained a political publisher close to German social democracy. The theory magazine Die Gesellschaft , published from 1924, stood for this orientation . International revue for socialism and politics, which was edited by the Marxist economic theorist and later SPD finance minister Rudolf Hilferding , as well as the magazine for local political practitioners Die Gemeinde. Semi-monthly publication for socialist work in town and country (1924–1933).

The publishing house JHW Dietz Nachf. In the anti-national socialist defensive struggle

Dietz-Verlag played a special role in the defense against the Nazi threat. This defensive struggle was carried out with the help of caricatures, symbols and texts. The medium used was the satirical magazine Der Wahre Jacob , the Illustrierte Republikanischer Zeitung and mass brochures with large volumes of illustrative design.

The leading man in the fight against the Nazis was Friedrich Wendel , like Paul Kampffmeyer, a formerly dissident socialist who had worked as an editor on the satirical magazine of the publishers Lachen Links and Der Wahre Jacob since 1924 . Wendel himself gave a concise analysis of Hitler's Mein Kampf in 1932 under the title Hitler against Germany's vital interests. The intended war against France, Russia and the border states .

Among the artists with whom Wendel worked in the fight against the NSDAP were Karl Holtz (1889–1978), Willibald Krain (1866–1945), Jacobus Belsen (1870–1937) and Willi Steinert (born 1886). The publisher distributed the anti-fascist brochures in large numbers. Wilhelm Hoegner's The National Socialists' Fraud of the People achieved a circulation of 90,000 copies. 70,000 copies of the text Kampf dem Swastika by the Reichstag member Carlo Mierendorff (under the pseudonym Adolf Schlucks) were distributed.

With the victory of the National Socialists, the publishing house went under. From 1882 to 1933 the publisher published around 1200 titles. About half of the titles fell into the era of the publisher's founder. In the early days, the publisher published all the important theorists of socialism: Friedrich Engels , Karl Marx , August Bebel , Eduard Bernstein , Franz Mehring, etc. During the Weimar Republic the range of publishers diversified considerably.

Prohibition and oppression during the Nazi era

In 1933 the publisher was able to produce nine titles before it was politically suppressed. On May 10, 1933, the entire property of the Social Democratic Party of Germany was confiscated, the party itself was banned on June 22, 1933 as anti-people and subversive. After the SPD was banned, the National Socialists took advantage of Concentration AG, the holding company for all of the SPD's commercial enterprises, for their own purposes. On the basis of the “Law for the Collection of Companies Hostile to the People and the State”, the concentration AG served as a reservoir for the collected social democratic working capital, which was entirely liquidated. The company JHW Dietz Nachf. Was deleted from the commercial register on August 28, 1934 due to lack of assets.

Re-establishment after 1945

The re-establishment of the publishing house after 1945 got massively in the East-West system conflict. In the Soviet occupation zone , the SED notarized the publishing house JHW Dietz Nachf. In December 1946, the Berlin District Court refused entry by the commercial court with reference to the GmbH law (no person with the name JHW Dietz among the founders). In April 1948, the Berlin District Court accepted the establishment of Dietz Verlag GmbH, Berlin, without any problems. The managing director of Greifenverlag Karl Dietz in Rudolstadt acted as namesake . A takeover of old publishing rights was not associated with the new establishment.

The SPD party executive in the western occupation zones in Hanover assumed the political opinion that a new publishing house was not an option, since the publishing house would continue to exist after the national socialist state of injustice had been eliminated. First, August Albrecht (1890–1982), who had headed the Arbeiterjugend-Verlag in the Weimar Republic, was commissioned to re-establish the publishing house. Albrecht was unable to reverse the deletion from the commercial register and to re-register the company. He failed to obtain the documents requested by the commercial register for the reconstruction of the commercial register files that were no longer available due to the war. Important deadlines were exceeded.

The party executive of the SPD, which needed a legally secure publishing house, founded the "Neue Vorwärts-Verlag" in 1950 as a social democratic central publishing house.

At the same time as the establishment of a new central publishing house , Gustav Schmidt-Küster (1902–1988) was entrusted by the party executive with the task of promoting the entry of the JHW Dietz Nachf. Publishing house in the commercial register and securing the old publishing rights. Schmidt-Küster, former head of the Volksbuchhandlung Pfannkuch Co. in Magdeburg, had been the publishing director of the SPD-affiliated Hanover Press in Hanover since 1947 . In his capacity as managing director, shareholder and member of the supervisory board, Schmidt-Küster built up a group of companies under the umbrella of concentration GmbH, which in 1966 included a total of 20 subsidiaries (printing companies and related companies), three book publishers, a book sales company and 24 bookshops in Germany.

In 1952 the "Verlagbuchhandlung JHW Dietz Nachf. Schmidt-Küster GmbH", Hanover, started printing the dissertation of the sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf Marx in perspective. The idea of ​​the just in the thought of Karl Marx . The establishment of the “publishing house bookstore” had no legal consequences for regaining old publishing rights. For a time, the last editor-in-chief of Vorwärts, Friedrich Stampfer , acted as the editor of the new company .

In 1953, the district court in Berlin allowed the entry of a publisher "after JHW Dietz Nachf". In 1957, the withdrawal of the old publishing rights was reversed; two years later, the publisher received compensation for Nazi injustice committed. The entry in the Berlin commercial register as "advertising publisher" took place in May 1961. With the help of the compensation money, the publisher JHW Dietz Nachf. Developed new activities in Hanover. Numerous standard works were published, such as the Biographical Lexicon of Socialism by Franz Osterroth and the three-volume work History of the International by Julius Braunthal . Nevertheless, Schmidt-Küster did not succeed in winning prominent Social Democrats as authors. With the countless series of social democratic classics in reprints , the publisher - mostly initiated by prominent scholars - removed important titles from the backlist in order to document old legal claims.

From 1959 to 1973, the Hanover-based Dietz-Verlag published over 80 titles. In the spectrum of the other publishers in the publishing group (Fackelträger-Verlag and Verlag für Literatur und Zeitgeschehen), the traditional publishing house covered the theory and practice of democratic socialism .

At the end of the sixties the Hannoversche Presse was forced to enter into a step-by-step cooperation with the “bourgeois” Hannoversche Allgemeine for economic reasons . Schmidt-Küster withdrew from the management of his group of companies. In March 1971, the 69-year-old Schmidt-Küster gave up the management of his three book publishers.

Relocation of the publishing house to Bonn

In November 1973 the Verlag Neue Gesellschaft GmbH Bonn, which was owned by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung , bought the Verlag JHW Dietz Nachf. The Verlag Neue Gesellschaft was founded in 1954 as a subsidiary of the "Presse Druck GmbH Bielefeld" and primarily served the aim of publishing the social democratic theory journal Die Neue Gesellschaft . The Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung took over the former Bielefelder Verlag in December 1968. Since then, the company has published, among other things, the series of publications by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung's research institute, the development policy journal Vierteljahresberichte, the historical yearbook Archive for Social History and the countless series Die GDR, realities, arguments that were used for political education work.

Both publishers - JHW Dietz Nachf. And Neue Gesellschaft - have been working together in an office community since autumn 1973. The new lecturer Georg Lührs revived the International Library series, which was discontinued in 1923, and set accents within the theoretical discussion of social democracy. Above all, he gave supporters of critical rationalism a journalistic platform.

From 1977 the reprints on social history were included in the publisher's program, with the editor Dieter Dowe generally using old publisher titles from the period before 1933. In the same year the publisher JHW Dietz Nachf. Took over the Socialistica of the international reprint publishing house Auvermann.

From 1978 to 2000 Heiner Lindner managed the publishing house (from 1984 also as managing director). Lindner emphasized the political independence of the publisher. Since the 1980s, the publishing program has reflected important political issues and the theory and practice of various social movements . Studies on the economic and social situation in developing countries as well as historical and current issues of the women's movement formed a special focus . Youth culture , energy supply without nuclear power , right-wing radicalism , problems with the integration of foreign workers and studies on the upheaval in the GDR were other central topics of the publishing house. The publishing house expanded the traditional topic of the history of the labor movement with numerous biographies.

Merger with the Neue Gesellschaft publishing house

The JHW Dietz Nachf. Publishing house and the Neue Gesellschaft publishing house were merged in 1988 for pragmatic and economic reasons. After the merger, Dietz-Verlag was able to add over 500 titles from the Neue Gesellschaft publishing house to its portfolio, plus just under 100 titles, the rights of which the Bonn-based publishing house had acquired from the Verlag für Literatur und Zeitgeschehen in the early 1970s. The publishing merger gave the publishing program a new face as it took over several new magazines. The magazine Neue Gesellschaft / Frankfurter Hefte is primarily responsible for the realignment . Since 1982 the editor-in-chief Peter Glotz has directed the theory journal Neue Gesellschaft, which is close to the SPD . Under his aegis, the paper merged in 1985 with the left-wing Catholic magazine Frankfurter Hefte, founded in 1946, to form a broad-based discussion body of social democracy .

Differentiation from "Dietz Verlag GmbH" Berlin

The two publishers "JHW Dietz Nachf. GmbH", Bonn and "Dietz Verlag GmbH", Berlin had little in the way of each other during the years of division due to different political objectives. This changed after reunification. Confusion about publishers was the order of the day. Amicable agreements failed. The Bonn publisher therefore brought an action with the aim of forcing Dietz Verlag GmbH, Berlin, to use its publisher's name only with an addition to avoid confusion. In a court settlement in January 1998, Dietz-Verlag in Berlin undertook to change the company name to Karl Dietz Verlag Berlin GmbH , i.e. to add the first name of the original namesake.

Publishing realignment

In 2000 Heiner Lindner, the long-time publishing director, left the company. Under his successor, Gerhard Fischer, the publishing program was temporarily reduced for economic reasons. The Dietz-Taschenbuch series fell victim to these savings. The publishing house gained a great deal of prestige when it won the tender from the Berlin Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt Foundation to publish the ten-volume Willy Brandt complete edition (“Berlin Edition”) from 2000 to 2009. The complete edition will in future be supplemented by special studies ("Willy Brandt Studies").

Since 2007 the publisher has been in charge of the Quellenedition Quellen on the history of the German trade union movement in the 20th century, which is funded by the German Research Foundation, among others . The publishing house broke new ground with the Handbook on European Constitutional History in the 19th Century, published by Peter Brandt (and others), with accompanying source editions. Editions, scientific journals and the political book determine the publisher's profile today. The publisher emphasizes its party-political independence.

At the end of 2006 the publishing house celebrated its 125th birthday. This makes it one of the oldest specialist publishers in Germany. The publisher's bibliography Empor zum Licht lists over 2000 titles that have been published since 1881; In addition, there are almost 1,000 titles, the rights of which Dietz-Verlag has also acquired.

The publisher is a member of the German Book Trade Association .

literature

  • Max Schwarz : * Since 1881. Bibliography published by JHW Dietz Nachfl. Verlag JHW Dietz Nachfl., Berlin / Bonn-Bad Godesberg 1973, DNB 740097776 .
  • Literature for a New Reality. Bibliography and history of the publisher JHW Dietz Nachf. 1881 to 1981 and the publishers Buchhandlung Vorwärts, Volksbuchhandlung Hottingen / Zurich, German Cooperative Print. & Publ. Co., London, Berlin workers 'library, workers' youth publishing house, “Freiheit” publishing cooperative, Der Bücherkreis. Verl. JHW Dietz Nachf. Berlin / Bonn 1981, ISBN 3-8012-0059-0 .
  • Detlev Brunner: 50 years of concentration GmbH. The story of a social democratic company 1946–1996. Metropol, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-926893-09-5 .
  • Horst Heidermann : On the post-war history of the JHW Dietz publishing house . Epilogue in: Angela Graf: JHW Dietz. 1843-1922 . Verlag JHW Dietz Successor, Bonn 1998, ISBN 3-8012-4089-4 , pp. 299-317.
  • In the beginning there were workers' coins. 140 years of the SPD media company. Verlag JHW Dietz Nachf., Bonn 2003, ISBN 3-8012-0334-4 .
  • Up to the light! 125 years of JHW Dietz Nachf. Its history and books 1881–2006. Verlag JHW Dietz Nachf., Bonn 2006, ISBN 978-3-8012-0374-0 .
  • Rüdiger Zimmermann : The New Society publishing house and its books 1954–1989. Verlag JHW Dietz Nachf., Bonn 2008 ISBN 978-3-8012-0395-5 .

Web links