You shouldn’t want to see flat symbolism in everything. But if you stand in front of the house in which Martin Brinkmann’s office is located, a stately Wilhelminian style building on Haidhausen’s beautiful Steinstrasse, your gaze will be magically drawn to the shop windows opposite. “Buy now or cry later” entices a furniture manufacturer there in bright yellow letters. And that fits in well with the topic that is now driving you up five floors, into an office kitchen in the converted attic: buy now or cry later. Not to be confused with the variant that hopefully never occurs: buy now and cry later.
The thing is this: Martin Brinkmann, literary agent and editor of the magazine noise culture, acquired a literary publisher with some of its comrades-in-arms last year, den Weissbooks publishing house. “In addition to my two other honorary posts,” he wrote succinctly in a letter, “this was added during Corona: We bought a publishing house.” And then the question arises: what drives the man – and what drives him?
To begin with, I would like to introduce the man, who is no stranger to the book industry: Martin Brinkmann, born in Bremerhaven in 1976 and has lived in Munich for a good decade, has a pounding heart for every imaginable variety of literature, from high culture to trash. Even as a busy student, he founded the culture of noise that was off the mainstream – “my greatest passion”, as he still says. Brinkmann then did his doctorate on “Music and Melancholy in the Works of Heimito von Doderer” and taught at the University of Bremen; he “tried to be an author”, as he writes on his website, and worked for the gift book publisher Sanssouci for a while. There he learned to “think in terms of target groups”, which is now useful to him as a literary agent. Brinkmann goes into the next room, gets a guide to Upper Bavaria’s darkest places and a stack of football books: “111 reasons to love Bayern Munich” – the topic runs in many club variants. It goes without saying that he himself is a Werder Bremen fan; Brinkmann disappears next door again and gets his green and white scarf.
“I always want to discover something new”
Between these corner flags there is space for much more. At the window of the bright office kitchen sits someone who has casually maintained a great curiosity about the world, about people, about the most diverse forms of literature. “I always want to discover something new,” he says. And it only ebbs when it comes from, for example noise culture-Discoveries as told by Garielle (formerly Gary) Lutz, an idiosyncratic voice on the subject of fluid gender identity, “a total hit, I’m really proud of it”. He also finds the lyrics of the Korean Cheon Myeong-Kwan, for example, “so hard, so raw. It’s a different world, a different view of things, you learn something there.”
Brinkmann loves to find such texts, even to make them possible. He fetches another volume from the next room, early poems by Rudolf Proske. For the noise culture he tracked down the author, who worked as a truck driver and hadn’t written for a long time: “For us he started again.” Not an isolated case: the Bregenz writer Eva Schmidt, who had been silent for two decades, was encouraged by the agent a few years ago to write again – and it would really be a shame if such great novels as “A Long Year” had never been published. Brinkmann not only has access to a large network, but also maintains his contacts over the long term. He’s sticking with it, he’s a “digger,” he says himself. He wants to “motivate authors and get them on the road to aesthetic success,” wants to “tease, encourage.” And he can now live out this urge even more broadly, on an expanded playing field.
Because now there’s another publisher: “That’s just what I was missing,” says Brinkmann, and he means it in a positive way. And he’s in good company at Weissbooks: “We’re three people who didn’t actually look for each other, but found each other anyway.” Each of the three publishers – a fourth left the group – would probably tell a different story, Brinkmann believes. Whatever it may be in detail: The Überlingen entrepreneur Christian Augustin with the necessary purchasing power, the Berlin agent and editor Bärbel Brands and Brinkmann in Munich have together realized the dream of their own publishing house. “During this Corona period, the idea flew around,” says Brinkmann: The Weissbooks publishing house, founded in 2008 by Rainer Weiss and Anya Schutzbach and now docked with Unionsverlag, should find another home. “We took heart as a publisher and turned the music up again,” explained the new publishers in the first autumn program. “We want to continue the tradition and continue to publish books that entice us, launch us, amaze us, challenge us or comfort us.”
“The learning curves are steep.”
And so they are now trying from three locations to launch readers with books into space or books into bookstores. The administration is in Überlingen, the head office is in Berlin, Brinkmann takes care of sales and marketing in Munich, and all three take care of the program. A “gamble”, no question. Not just financially; First of all, everyone is trying to get the publishing house “up and running” free of charge, says Brinkmann, he himself earns his money with the agency. But there are even more pitfalls: Even if they are industry professionals, nobody has had to keep an eye on all departments of a publishing house at the same time. “The learning curves are steep,” the sentence is repeated several times in variations. The production alone is a complex chapter in times of paper shortages. The paper for the spring preview, for example, which Brinkmann is now handing over the table, “we didn’t choose it, the printers told us what they had there.”
The paper feels good, by the way, because the more important question is: What is the goal of the publisher, who wants to focus on “German and international contemporary literature and upscale entertainment” with six to eight titles a year? How can you stand out from the crowd with a concept that promises a little bit of everything? “By fishing out the really big features from everything,” says Brinkmann. And of course he has one or the other suggestion through his literary agency, even if he is aware that only “publishing your own delicacies could lead directly to ruin”. When it comes to program work, it is important: “It must not only be one be sound.”
Natascha Berglehner’s debut with a “Lolita” theme could cause offense
However, he has already contributed a few very different tones. Not only Garielle Lutz, whom he admires, will soon be available in book form. Two interesting Munich authors from his agency were also part of the opening program: Natascha Berglehner presented an impressive debut on the sensitive subject of pedophilia with “Im Zimmer ist Winter”; the Munich novel tells the story of a young woman from a difficult family background who, when she was 14, was seduced by her swimming teacher and, years later, after another chance encounter, obsessively pursues the man. Brinkmann offered the book to major publishers, but: “It’s too offensive, it’s hard to sell.” The fact that this author certainly has a lot to tell, in a disturbingly compelling prose, will not only be seen by the audience when reading the book, but soon at the “Wortspiele” festival as well.
The book of poems “Lichtwechsel” by Miki Sakamoto is another surprise. Born in Japan, she lives near Munich with her husband, the best-selling author Josef H. Reichholf – who is also about to publish a book with Weissbooks. Sakamoto, devoted to nature writing, writes atmospherically floating poems and haikus. Printing a bilingual German and Japanese edition proved to be technically difficult (learning curve!). But the result obviously impressed Japan fans so much that the edition of 1000 copies has almost been sold.
So things are going in very different directions at Weissbooks. Perhaps the future of literature also lies in the digital world, as Facebook poet Elisa Aseva would confirm? She has just published her first analogue book in the publishing house, and in the current one noise culture read this two-liner from her: “it may be old-fashioned – but i still sometimes dream of the future.” The dream of Martin Brinkmann and his colleagues to buy a publishing house is also beautifully old-fashioned. And definitely better than crying later.