Willi Weismann

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Willi Weismann (born January 21, 1909 in Mülheim an der Ruhr , † June 1983 in Munich ) was a publisher in the German post-war period. He published works by Elias Canetti , Hermann Broch and Hans Henny Jahnn , among others . He is also considered to be a co-inventor of the folding book cover.

Life

Willi Weismann comes from a Protestant family whose roots go back to the Reformation. One of his ancestors was Ehrenreich Weismann , abbot of the Protestant monastery school Maulbronn and author of various theological writings. Weismann's father owned a printing press. After he was killed in the Battle of the Somme in the First World War in 1916 , Willi was sent to his father's hometown, Wilhelmsdorf , to a pietistic boys' institute ( Zieglersche Anstalten ) .

During the Second World War he was a member of a resistance group based on the model of Ernst Niekisch and maintained contacts with the resistance publishing house and its authors Friedrich Georg Jünger and Alexander Mitscherlich . Together with Herbert Burgmüller, he edited and distributed the German edition of the literary magazine Das Silberboot by Ernst Schönwiese . Until he was drafted into the war, he was an independent publisher's representative and was thus able to offer illegal literature and maintain contacts between the various resistance groups. Between 1936 and 1938 he survived several house searches and brief arrests. After being deployed in the war on the Eastern Front in early 1945, he returned to Germany and was employed as a telecommunications operator in the Hochland switching center in Munich. Here he joined the resistance group O7 and took part in the uprising in Munich on 29/30. April 1945. In the last days of the war he was sentenced to death in absentia. As a self-proclaimed police superintendent, Weismann took part in the surrender of Munich to the Americans without a fight on April 30, 1945. The actions of the O7 thwarted the demolition of the last bridge over the Isar, and one last American air raid was called off.

After the end of the war, at the beginning of 1946, he founded a literary publisher, Willi Weismann Verlag, Munich, with which he picked up on the literary avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s, brought back German exiled authors and, after twelve years of dictatorship, the German reader to catch up with developments in world literature wanted to help. His first project was the literary magazine Die Fähre (1946–1947), later renamed the Literary Review (1947–1949). He financed these ambitious literary projects with a second publisher, Magazinverlag, which mainly published crime literature , and the scandalous newspaper Das neue Magazin , which at times brought him a circulation of 200,000 and numerous lawsuits for endangering youth and immorality. His contacts to Leipzig in the GDR , his membership in the Kulturbund of the GDR and his efforts to reach an understanding on a literary level between East and West (Starnberg Conversation) raised suspicions that he was a supporter of communism . After several house searches, confiscation of book consignments after visiting the Leipzig Book Fair and lawsuits over possession of literature that was dangerous to the state, he was no longer able to hold onto his literary publishing house.

Willi Weismann founded Parabelverlag in 1954 and only published children's books in the period that followed .

literature

  • Jochen Meyer, Bernhard Zeller (eds.): Broch, Canetti, Jahnn: Willi Weismann and his publishing house, 1946–1954. In: Marbacher Magazin. 33 (1985), German Schiller Society, Marbach am Neckar.
  • Ortrun Huber (Red.): Word masks: Texts on the life and work of Elias Canetti. Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich / Vienna 1985, ISBN 978-3-446-18275-2 (contains a longer article on Canetti's relationship with Weismann).
  • Kai Schlüter: The Ferry / "Literary Review". Analysis of a literary magazine from the first post-war years (1945–1949). Archive for the history of books, Volume 24.Frankfurt am Main 1982.
  • Christina Bylow: Hermann Broch and the publisher Willi Weismann. A contribution to the genesis of the novel "The Guiltless" (1945–1951). Archive for the history of the book industry. Volume 22. Frankfurt am Main 1992.
  • Hans Altenhein, Georg Patzer: Forgotten publishers. 10-part series in the Börsenblatt for the German book trade. Issue 52 / July 2, 1999 - Issue 18 / March 3, 2000.
  • Julia Frohn: Literature Exchange in Divided Germany 1945–1972. Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-86153-807-3 . A separate chapter is devoted to Willi Weismann Verlag, pp. 303-319 (Willi Weismann Verlag - on the failure of German-German ambitions at paragraph 93) .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Klaus Garber: Criticism in Brief. In: The time. 21 (1985). (on-line)
  2. ^ Special issue of the Munich magazine 1947, Issue 4: o7. Special print for members of the o7. In the estate A: Weismann in the German Literature Archive Marbach am Neckar
  3. ↑ Kathrin Kuna: The correspondence between Hermann Broch and Willi Weismann. Diploma thesis, Vienna 2008, p. 24 ff. (Online)
personal data
SURNAME Weismann, Willi
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German publisher
DATE OF BIRTH January 21, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Mülheim an der Ruhr
DATE OF DEATH June 1983
Place of death Munich