Emil Oprecht, Otto F. Walter, Daniel Keel: Switzerland also had its great publisher figures. The youngest and last in line for the time being was Egon Ammann, founder and head of the Ammann publishing house in Zurich for almost 30 years. In 2010 he and his wife and co-publisher Marie-Luise Flammersfeld closed the company, in 2017 Egon Ammann died in Berlin. A commemorative book is published five years later, commemorating the achievements of this publisher and his personality.
40 authors, employees and companions tell what kind of person Ammann was – and what he was for them. An elemental force that seduced with its charm and carried away with its temper. “Everything about him was momentum,” writes journalist Margrit Sprecher, “the extreme situation was his normal state,” filmmaker Markus Imhoof, and the word “insane” appears more than once – referring to Ammann’s notorious driving skills and his business conduct.
Ammann knew a little about numbers, but even more about literature, and mostly the latter caused him to ignore the former. What he misplaced, what he stubbornly clung to, defied all calculative reason: depending on one’s point of view, it was daring, foolhardy or just insane. And sometimes it worked. For example at Wole Soyinka. Ammann had included it in the program, sold exactly 14 titles in several years, the rest caused storage costs, the board of directors grumbled – and then Soyinka got the Nobel Prize, and the slow sellers were sold in no time.
“Lector and sponsor, friend and adviser, propagandist and critic, admirer and teacher, financier and rip-off”
Soyinka is associated with one of those famous Egon Ammann anecdotes that everyone likes to tell and that refuse to be verified. Ammann is said to have observed a young man at London’s Heathrow Airport who threw a bundle of manuscripts into the paper bin and walked away. Curious, Ammann took out the stack, looked inside, was enthusiastic, found out the author’s name and printed it: It was Wole Soyinka.
In the article by the bookseller, publicist and Africa expert Richard Butz, Ammann’s acquaintance with Soyinka reads somewhat differently: he, Butz, referred Ammann to Wole Soyinka several times as part of an Africa project for the Suhrkamp publishing house. The fact that Ammann “in the euphoria forgot my not entirely unimportant role for the time being led to alienation and arguments.”
Butz is not the only one who, with all due respect, does not hide difficulties and injuries. In one of the most beautiful contributions, Navid Kermani describes the relationship between the author and the publisher as a love affair. In this case, she “wore all the trappings of a long love, from the infatuation at the beginning to the daily routine of marriage, but also the betrayal, the turning away and the timely reconciliation”. Noticing that the publisher’s preview slides backwards, that other authors are advertised, is “like watching the lover kissing someone else at the bar at night”. But Kermani also describes Ammann as a publisher who came as close to the ideal as one rarely does, who was “at the same time editor and supporter, friend and adviser, propagandist and critic, admirer and teacher, financier and rip-off”.
A bullet landed in “Poetry and Truth”: Was it fiction or truth?
Kermani wasn’t the only one who slipped backwards in the preview – or even dropped out of authorship altogether. “I can no longer afford to lose my money with unsuccessful Swiss authors,” he is said to have snapped at writer Dieter Bachmann at a Frankfurt book fair. Bachmann’s compatriot Matthias Zschokke traced the psychological motive behind this withdrawal of affection and found out: “He wanted to see his authors successful, happy and prosperous. If they weren’t, that offended him. He felt personally offended by it.” Their lack of success must be due to them, their lack of commitment – because his instinct, his sense of their “potential” could not have been wrong.
In addition to the colorful pre-publishing stages of his life – among other things he served a Spanish torero and distributed Goethe original complete editions in Turkey (and got caught in a hail of bullets from rebellious Turks, a bullet landed in “Poetry and Truth”: what is that now, poetry or Truth?) Ammann’s publishing work does not come off badly. He lifted major projects such as a new Dostoyevsky, translated by Svetlana Geier. A ten-volume Mandelstam edition edited by Ralph Dutli. The entire Pessoa along with its pseudonyms. Many titles by Ismail Kadaré and Laszlo Krasnahorkai. He brought Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt back to the German language.
“Follow a star, just this…” Egon Ammann and his publishing house. Edited by Ingrid Sonntag and Marie-Luise Flammersfeld. Wallstein, Göttingen 2022. 342 pages, 20 euros.
He oversaw the debuts of Navid Kermani, Julia Franck and Ulrich Peltzer. And of course Thomas Hürlimann, whose “Tessinerin” opened the first program and whose correspondence with Ammann includes 20 files. 900 titles came together in just under 30 years, including many that have written literary history and without which many true literature lovers’ shelves would have gaping gaps.
How was that possible? What did Ammann have that other publishers don’t? Instinct, daring, perseverance. The unconditional belief that “literature as art” is important, even necessary as a “contribution to the updating of the book of mankind”. In addition, of course, a small team that tore their legs off. Marie-Luise Flammersfeld, responsible for the book design, whose importance for the publishing house is mentioned by almost no contributor. And then, last but not least: money. “Like me, Egonek was not interested in money, although he had it even when he didn’t have it,” writes Richard Swartz. The money he didn’t have and didn’t earn came from two patrons: first from George (“Tschöntsch”) Reinhart from the Volkart-Reinhart entrepreneurial family, then from Monika Schoeller, the publisher of S. Fischer. Many authors and projects ended up with her publishing house when Ammann decided to close his publishing house.
Whether this was as inevitable as the publisher made it out to be: the authors make a subtle detour around this delicate question. A contribution from the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern, where the Ammann publishing house stores hard copy in 1101 archive boxes, as well as a chronicle and a list of titles round off the volume, which is well worth reading.