Status: December 20, 2021 11:28 a.m.
He published authors such as Günter Grass, Hans Werner Richter or Ingeborg Bachmann and was considered a controversial head. Klaus Wagenbach has now died at the age of 91.
The publisher Klaus Wagenbach is dead. He died on Friday in Berlin at the age of 91, as his publisher announced. He died “accompanied by his family and surrounded by his books,” it said. “In accordance with his motto in life, we will continue to run his publishing house:” Something can never be gained through gloom “.
Born in Berlin, Wagenbach began an apprenticeship in 1949 at the then still unified publishing house Suhrkamp / Fischer. The writer Franz Kafka became a great passion, Wagenbach did his doctorate on the author. The purchase of Fischer by Holtzbrinck had far-reaching consequences: the new bosses fired Wagenbach after he complained to the public prosecutor about the arrest of a GDR publisher during the book fair.
Well-known authors
In 1964 he therefore founded his own publishing house in West Berlin. He published the authors Günter Grass, Hans Werner Richter and Ingeborg Bachmann.
Wagenbach stood for a culture of interference and democratic dispute. He was considered the prototype of the political publisher of the 1968 movement. Well-known heads of the movement came and went in the publishing house. There were always house searches, trials and convictions. Wagenbach saw himself as the most accused surviving German publisher. The lawyer at his side was Otto Schily, who later became the RAF lawyer and was later to become the German Federal Minister of the Interior.
Contact to Meinhof
He also kept in touch with actors in the RAF. “Above all, Ulrike Meinhof was close to me, but I never understood how she got on this path,” he once told the “Spiegel”. Wagenbach published texts by the future terrorist, and gave the speech at her grave. At the same time, a book by Peter Brückner about Meinhof brought him a threat from Gudrun Ensslin.
Wagenbach also stood for lavishly made books, they should “last a hundred years,” he said. In 2002 Susanne Schüssler took over the publishing house, Wagenbach’s third wife. One of the greatest successes in 2008 was Alan Bennett’s “The Sovereign Reader” – a book about the Queen of all places.