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Although a Frankfurt court has deferred a much-anticipated legal decision on the Suhrkamp publishing company, the question remains: How can such a cultural institution continue to survive in a changing market?
Suhrkamp Verlag, considered one of Europe's leading literary and academic publishers, is beset by conflict. Despite having published the likes of philosopher Jürgen Habermas and novelist Isabel Allende, it has been embroiled in a legal battle that is threatening to tear it apart.
At the heart of the problem is a conflict between Ulla Unseld-Berkowicz, majority shareholder and widow of formative Suhrkamp leader Siegfried Unseld, and Hans Barlach, head of a profitable Hamburg media company and minority shareholder of Suhrkamp since 2006.
The conflict, on some level, boils down to whether book publishing as a cultural institution can survive in today's market-driven economy. And this is a question that legal measures are unlikely to answer.
Cultural institution
Suhrkamp, founded in 1950, is widely respected in Germany and Europe as an intellectual and literary publisher. German philosophers including Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch und Jürgen Habermas stand among its authors, as do many international literary giants such as Marcel Proust, T.S. Eliot und Samuel Beckett.
Austrian literary critic Sigrid Löffler told DW that especially in its heyday during the 1960s and 1970s, the publishing house was "an opinion leader in all forms of intellectual discourse." Löffler pointed out in particular the publisher's emphasis on international literature, including works by authors from Lebanon, Pakistan and African countries.
Such authors are important in contemporary literature, but hard to sell, Löffler said. "They bring honor to the publisher, but don't make much money," she added.
Jo Groebel, honorary chairman of the Communication, Media and Journalism Department at the Business School Berlin Potsdam, described Suhrkamp as "the number one publisher with a critical approach to society in post-World War II Germany."
"It's become a institution in society - which is why it's gained so much focus," Groebel told DW. Suhrkamp's durability as a cultural institution as well as its continued survival as a small publisher in an increasingly concentrated world of publishing oligopolies continue to make it significant.
Cash vs. culture?
After Suhrkamp's formative leader Siegfried Unseld died in 2002, widow Ulla Unseld-Berkowicz took the helm. Unseld-Berkowicz owns 61 percent of the company through a family foundation.
![Ulla Unseld-Berkewicz smiles next to large photo of Siegfried Unseld]()
Unseld-Berkewicz kept up the publisher's leftist, intellectual tradition after taking the reins from husband Siegfried Unseld Hans Barlach, grandson of German expressionist artist Ernst Barlach, owns 39 percent of Suhrkamp through Hamburg-based Medienholding Winterthur. He has stated a desire to increase Suhrkamp's profit margin, arguing for new investments and not just reliance on back catalog.
Last December, a Berlin court ordered Unseld-Berkowicz to pay 300,000 euros ($401,000) for charging the Suhrkamp company rent at parts of her villa without consulting Barlach first.
While Unseld-Berkowicz has sought to portray Barlach as a money-hungry businessman, Barlach accuses Unseld-Berkowicz of mismanagement. Both filed legal petitions to expel the other from the company, while Barlach is also asking the court for dissolution of the partnership.
![Hans Barlach]()
Barlach has been villianized as a money-hungry businessman A district court in Frankfurt on Wednesday deferred this decision to September, with the judge lamenting the possibility that such a notable publisher could disappear - and instead suggesting a financial solution.
Authors plead for survival
Suhrkamp is a company known for fostering close, personal relationships with its authors. American writer Louis Begley, whose books have been translated by Suhrkamp, said that he highly values working with the publisher.
"Suhrkamp has been exceptionally good," Begley told DW. He said that during his successful career in the United States, he never had "the sense that a whole publishing house was behind me the way Suhrkamp has been."
Last month, more than 150 authors and translators with Suhrkamp Verlag, including Jürgen Habermas, published an open letter describing their astonishment at the legal situation threatening the company.
Citing the importance of the publishing company for "intellectual life in Germany," the letter expressed concern at leaving resolution of such a conflict to the courts.
Media expert Groebel told DW that he, too, thinks it's important for Suhrkamp to survive - particularly in this era of changing cultural contexts, including the end of the "star author" age.
Groebel sees the Suhrkamp conflict as one essentially between two big egos, and calls for a neutral arbiter to help strike a balance between Suhrkamp's position as a cultural institution and its need for financial survival.
"Language is what drives society, therefore you need a literary publisher. It's part of the whole context of a text-based society," Groebel said. But Suhrkamp could also take up an active role in exploring new literary forms, including those emerging online, he concluded.
At the heart of the problem is a conflict between Ulla Unseld-Berkowicz, majority shareholder and widow of formative Suhrkamp leader Siegfried Unseld, and Hans Barlach, head of a profitable Hamburg media company and minority shareholder of Suhrkamp since 2006.
The conflict, on some level, boils down to whether book publishing as a cultural institution can survive in today's market-driven economy. And this is a question that legal measures are unlikely to answer.
Cultural institution
Suhrkamp, founded in 1950, is widely respected in Germany and Europe as an intellectual and literary publisher. German philosophers including Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch und Jürgen Habermas stand among its authors, as do many international literary giants such as Marcel Proust, T.S. Eliot und Samuel Beckett.
Austrian literary critic Sigrid Löffler told DW that especially in its heyday during the 1960s and 1970s, the publishing house was "an opinion leader in all forms of intellectual discourse." Löffler pointed out in particular the publisher's emphasis on international literature, including works by authors from Lebanon, Pakistan and African countries.
Such authors are important in contemporary literature, but hard to sell, Löffler said. "They bring honor to the publisher, but don't make much money," she added.
Jo Groebel, honorary chairman of the Communication, Media and Journalism Department at the Business School Berlin Potsdam, described Suhrkamp as "the number one publisher with a critical approach to society in post-World War II Germany."
"It's become a institution in society - which is why it's gained so much focus," Groebel told DW. Suhrkamp's durability as a cultural institution as well as its continued survival as a small publisher in an increasingly concentrated world of publishing oligopolies continue to make it significant.
Cash vs. culture?
After Suhrkamp's formative leader Siegfried Unseld died in 2002, widow Ulla Unseld-Berkowicz took the helm. Unseld-Berkowicz owns 61 percent of the company through a family foundation.
Unseld-Berkewicz kept up the publisher's leftist, intellectual tradition after taking the reins from husband Siegfried Unseld Last December, a Berlin court ordered Unseld-Berkowicz to pay 300,000 euros ($401,000) for charging the Suhrkamp company rent at parts of her villa without consulting Barlach first.
While Unseld-Berkowicz has sought to portray Barlach as a money-hungry businessman, Barlach accuses Unseld-Berkowicz of mismanagement. Both filed legal petitions to expel the other from the company, while Barlach is also asking the court for dissolution of the partnership.
Barlach has been villianized as a money-hungry businessman Authors plead for survival
Suhrkamp is a company known for fostering close, personal relationships with its authors. American writer Louis Begley, whose books have been translated by Suhrkamp, said that he highly values working with the publisher.
"Suhrkamp has been exceptionally good," Begley told DW. He said that during his successful career in the United States, he never had "the sense that a whole publishing house was behind me the way Suhrkamp has been."
Last month, more than 150 authors and translators with Suhrkamp Verlag, including Jürgen Habermas, published an open letter describing their astonishment at the legal situation threatening the company.
Citing the importance of the publishing company for "intellectual life in Germany," the letter expressed concern at leaving resolution of such a conflict to the courts.
Media expert Groebel told DW that he, too, thinks it's important for Suhrkamp to survive - particularly in this era of changing cultural contexts, including the end of the "star author" age.
Groebel sees the Suhrkamp conflict as one essentially between two big egos, and calls for a neutral arbiter to help strike a balance between Suhrkamp's position as a cultural institution and its need for financial survival.
"Language is what drives society, therefore you need a literary publisher. It's part of the whole context of a text-based society," Groebel said. But Suhrkamp could also take up an active role in exploring new literary forms, including those emerging online, he concluded.
幾年前跟朋友說過美國大學出版社中最大者為芝加哥大學出版社
世界最大的大學出版社呢?
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我曾在"系統與變異"一書中介紹OUP等的"使命說明書".....
Harvard University Press | Celebratin
In the past century, Harvard University Press has published over 10,000 new books across various fields and disciplines, including such iconic works as John Rawls's A Theory of Justice and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's The Woman That Never Evolved. Throughout 2013, we invite you to visit our centennial website to read regularly posted excerpts from 100 significant Harvard University Press books, representing the rich publishing heritage of the Press.www.hupcentennial.com
Matisse : radical invention, 1913-1917
通路由Yale大學出版社負責
今天看到 美國Fordham Univ Press, Oct 13, 201翻譯*出版的 Athens, Still Remain由美國牛津大學出版社代理發行
*The late JACQUES DERRIDA was the single most influential voice in European philosophy of the last quarter of the twentieth century. His The Animal That Therefore I Am, Sovereignties in Question, and Deconstruction in a Nutshell have been published by Fordham University Press.
Aug 16, 2010
Title Athens, Still Remains: The Photographs of Jean-François Bonhomme
Authors Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Bonhomme, Pascale-Anne Brault, Michael Naas
Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault, Michael Naas
Edition illustrated
Publisher Fordham Univ Press, 2010
ISBN 0823232050, 9780823232055
Length 73 pages
F
Athens, Still Remains is an extended commentary on a series of photographs of contemporary Athens by the French photographer Jean-Franois Bonhomme. But in Derrida's hands commentary always has a way of unfolding or, better, developing in several unexpected and mutually illuminating directions. First published in French and Greek in 1996, Athens, Still Remains is Derrida's most sustained analysis of the photographic medium in relationship to the history of philosophy and his most personal reflection on that medium. At once photographic analysis, philosophical essay, and autobiographical narrative, Athens, Still Remains presents an original theory of photography and throws a fascinating light on Derrida's life and work.The book begins with a sort of verbal snapshot or aphorism that haunts the entire book: we owe ourselves to death.Reading this phrase through Bonhomme's photographs of both the ruins of ancient Athens and contemporary scenes of a still-living Athens that is also on its way to ruin and death, Derrida interrogates a philosophical tradition that runs from Socrates to Heidegger in which the human-and especially the philosopher-is thought to owe himself to death, to a certain thought of death or comportment with regard to death. Combining philosophical speculations on mourning and death, event and repetition, and time and difference with incisive commentary on Bonhomme's photographs and a narrative of Derrida's 1995 trip to Greece, Athens, Still Remains is one of Derrida's most accessible, personal, and moving works without being, for all that, any less philosophical. As Derrida reminds us, the word photography-an eminently Greek word-means the writing of light,and it brings together today into a single frame contemporary questions about the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction and much older questions about the relationship between light, revelation, and truth-in other words, an entire philosophical tradition that first came to light in the shadow of the Acropolis.
從國立清華大學出版社說起
(2009年10月某天，許達然老師，時瑋和金台夫婦，阿松與我，談起東海大學出版社。它或積弱不振，或若有若無，不知應如何起死回生之。) 那天我或許說過，Herb Simon說過，他的CMU大學是美國名校，不過他們在60-70年代作過成立大學出版社的可行性分析 (對CMU大學而言，錢可能不是問題) 。結論是”來不及”成為一流的大學出版社，美國好的大學出版社很多。所以Simon的書多在MIT 出版社和普林斯頓大學出版社出，他的好友的，選在哈佛大學出版社出。
我研究一下臺大、輔大….的出版社。台大有資源當台灣的大學出版社的龍頭，當然是例外。輔大的一年也出版二、三十本。約6-7年前，我特地到清華大學的出版社一看，只二位職員……
http://my.nthu.edu.tw/~thup/pub00.htm
我昨天在一起二手書店買了清華今年度的新書: 張立綱傳：五院院士的故事。(本文不談文章，作者是理工人，大體很好，幾處有缺點)。它共277頁，全彩色，定價(才)350元。此書的「企劃‧編輯」是「科學月刊社」，換句話說，科學界幫助清華大學出版社。而清大校長有企畫等的能力。
Ken Su 送給我過一本交大出版品，我認為不夠好。
***** 試一下哈佛大學出版社的BLOG:
***** 試一下哈佛大學出版社的BLOG:
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