Publishing house new criticism

The New Criticism publishing house was founded in Frankfurt am Main in 1965 and began publishing on the emerging student movement .

History of the publisher

The New Criticism publishing house was founded in 1965 as one of the first small political publishers in the context of the student movement and in close association with the Socialist German Student Union (SDS) in Frankfurt am Main. The founders of the publishing house were the two federal chairmen of the SDS at the time, Helmut Schauer and Hartmut Dabrowski, as well as the board member Helmut Richter. After the dissolution of the SDS, Dabrowski managed the publishing house alone from 1970 to 1972. Even Joschka Fischer was then lecturer and trustee of the publishing house Neue Kritik. In 1970 he was one of the co-founders of the Karl Marx bookstorein Frankfurt-Bockenheim, which acted as a book sales point for the publisher. The publishing program was initially aimed at making the classics of communist theory of the 1920s and 1930s such as Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin , Rosa Luxemburg , Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky accessible again. In the “Archive of Socialist Literature” series, the publisher re-issued works by Karl Korsch , Angelika Balabanoff and others. These included such ambitious works as the Illustrated History of the German Revolution or the Illustrated History of the Russian Revolution (first in 1929, 540 pages each), which had no chance of being republished in the GDR because the losses caused by the Great Terror of Stalin were too clear would have made. One of the publisher's early bestsellers was the German translation of the Danish work Das kleine Rote Schulbuch , published in 1970 .

Program expansion and focus

In 1972 Dorothea Rein joined the management team; In the mid-1970s, Hartmut Dabrowski, the last founding member, left the publishing house, so that Dorothea Rein was primarily responsible for the publishing house from then on, supported by two to three employees. Since then, the program has been expanded to include Eastern European literature, including by Milena Jesenská , Hanna Krall and Wladimir Semjonowitsch Wyssozki , literature by and about women, and titles on Jewish past and present. Other focal points are the topics of National Socialism and the Holocaust .

The central topic was and is to this day the reappraisal of the history and theories of the student movement and the New Left : publications by Ernest Mandel , Reimut Reiche , Wolfgang Kraushaar and Klaus Jünschke on the dispute with the Red Army Faction (RAF) are part of it. The graphic artist Christian Chruxin gave the publisher the much-praised modern book design for decades.

Magazine series

The close connection to the SDS was not only reflected in the fact that the publisher published the neue kritik , the theory journal of the SDS, but also in the fact that the SDS federal board archive was kept in the publishing house before it was transferred to the APO archive at the Free University of Berlin was handed over for processing.

In addition, the magazine Babylon appeared from 1986 to 2010 with a total of 23 issues . Contributions to the Jewish present in the publishing house. Founding editors were Dan Diner , Susann Heenen-Wolff , Gertrud Koch , Cilly Kugelmann and Martin Löw-Beer. The semi-annual magazine Transit has been published since 1990 . European review , published by the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. The magazine was discontinued after 50 issues in 2018.

Award

In 2003 Dorothea Rein and the publishing house were awarded the Kurt Wolff Prize of the Kurt Wolff Foundation for their publishing achievements .

Well-known authors

• Tony Cliff (1917-2000), British socialist, anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist
• John Donne (1572–1631), English writer and poet
• John Dos Passos (1896-1970), American writer
• Jörg Fauser (1944–1987), German writer and journalist
• Milena Jesenská (1896–1944), Czech journalist, writer and translator
• Hans-Jürgen Krahl (1943–1970), student activist of the 1968 movement
• Hanna Krall (* 1935), Polish writer and journalist
• Susanne Leonhard (1895–1984), German writer
• Emmanuel Levinas (July 1905/1906 greg. – 1995), Franco-Lithuanian philosopher and author
• Ernest Mandel (1923–1995), Marxist economist
• Paul Mattick (1904–1981), German economist, councilor communist and political writer
• Oskar Negt (* 1934), German social philosopher
• Reimut Reiche (* 1941), German sociologist, psychoanalyst and sex researcher
• Palmiro Togliatti (1893–1964), Italian politician

Web links

• Publisher homepage

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. 51-54 .
2. ↑ Ralf Euler: Joschka Fischer turns 70. From do-gooder to world politician. In: FAZ NET. April 11, 2018, accessed October 19, 2019 . 
3. ↑ 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. 195 .
4. ^ Jochanan Shelliem: Joschka, Dani and Dan. Important visit on the 35th anniversary of the Karl Marx bookstore. In: Deutschlandfunk Kultur. February 6, 2006, accessed October 19, 2019 . 
5. ↑ "Against the beautiful appearance" - history of the publishing house New Criticism. Retrieved October 19, 2019 . 
6. ^ Siegward Lönnendonker: History and current situation of the archive. In: Archive "APO and social movements" (APO archive). Retrieved May 21, 2017 . 
7. ^ Isolde Charim: The liberal world order dissolves. In: taz. January 20, 2018, accessed October 19, 2019 . 
8. ↑ From the laudation for the award of the Kurt Wolff Prize 2003 by Prof. Dr. Klaus Wagenbach. Retrieved October 19, 2019 . 
9. ↑ Prize winners. Kurt Wolff Foundation, accessed on October 19, 2019 .