New Book Reveals How 150 East German Publishers Vanished Under the GDR

A Class Reunion in the World of Books

It had the feel of a class reunion. Many had known each other for years, even decades. Most of the book lovers who gathered in Berlin's Wilhelm von Humboldt Hall at the State Library Unter den Linden on Tuesday evening were likely still active—or had once been—in the publishing trade.

"Who doesn't know him?" With this rhetorical question, history professor Achim Bronte opened the presentation of Christoph Links' latest work, Vanished Publishers. The director-general of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin—who also serves on the Historical Commission of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association—introduced the author as a profound scholar of publishing history, one who had himself been a publisher for over 30 years. And not just that: Links is also the author of several books, including Who Was Who in the GDR? and Chronicle of the Turning Point.

Born in 1959 in Caputh, Links studied philosophy and Latin American studies at Humboldt University in Berlin and Karl Marx University in Leipzig. He began his career as a journalist before working as an assistant to the management of Aufbau Verlag. Then, on December 1, 1989—the very day censorship was abolished in the GDR and as the upheaval swept the country—he applied for a publishing license. By the final year of East Germany's existence, he had founded one of the first private publishing houses in the state, specializing in 20th-century politics and contemporary history.

For years, his publishing house has been a respected and sought-after address for high-quality, reliable books and authors you can trust. In recognition of his publishing achievements—coupled with his civic engagement—Links has received numerous awards, including the Federal Cross of Merit and the Order of Merit of the State of Berlin. Now, he has stepped into what he calls "restless retirement," entrusting his "child" to younger colleagues and placing it under the wing of Aufbau Verlag, where it continues as an independent brand.

Vanished Publishers, then. An Unknown Chapter of East German Cultural History, as the subtitle puts it. "It actually began with great promise," Links remarks in conversation with his colleague Jana Fröbel. After 1945, the Soviet Military Administration (SMAD) granted printing licenses to more than 200 publishers in its occupation zone. By the end of the GDR, only 78 remained. So where—and why—did 150 publishers disappear? In search of answers, Links traveled across Germany, undertaking what can only be described as a Herculean labor. He's no stranger to such work. Nor is the subject entirely new to him: he co-edited a three-volume foundational study on the GDR's publishing landscape and earned his doctorate on the privatization of East German publishers during German reunification.

Links identifies several reasons for the shrinking publishing landscape in the Soviet zone and later the GDR: revoked licenses, publishers fleeing to the West, forced mergers, rigid nationalization, and inheritance bans (when an owner died, their family could not take over the business). Only one publisher went bankrupt, he notes—a fashion house undone by a culture of self-service.

The separate currency reform of 1948 in the Western zones, which the SMAD was forced to respond to, dealt an early blow to East German publishers, Links explains. Western authors refused payment in East German marks. Then came political interference and censorship, driving some publishers to the West by 1961, the year the Berlin Wall was built. Finally, there was the centrally administered consolidation of publishers by industry and theme—much like the formation of industrial combines. "Concentration," they called it. "Every publisher a little monopolist." Links quotes Hermann Kant, who, at the 1983 Ninth Writers' Congress, justified the mergers as a way to eliminate "cutthroat competition"—and even "idleness." The writer's remarks, Links calls "downright infamous."

The author then presented the audience with ten exemplary cases of "vanished" publishing houses, including Peter-Paul-Verlag, whose children's books were deemed ideologically deficient by East German censors—both for their failure to celebrate the achievements of socialist agriculture and for illustrations judged too "formalist." The Karl Baedeker travel guide publisher was driven out on charges of "treason" after a 1948 edition marked the location of the Soviet military administration on a map of Leipzig. Even the Buchgemeinschaft Gutenberg, a cooperative venture, was not spared; in 1950, it was absorbed into the trade union-run Tribüne Verlag. Particularly tragic was the fate of Schwerin's Petermänken Verlag, founded in 1947 at the initiative of Willi Bredel, a committed communist and veteran of the Spanish Civil War. Despite Bredel's fierce resistance—as both a writer and president of the East German Academy of Arts—the publisher was arbitrarily dissolved. Walter Ulbricht, his former comrade from their Moscow exile, abandoned him without hesitation. The betrayal broke Bredel's heart. He died at just 63 years old—on the very day the liquidation of his publishing house was decreed: October 27, 1964. "Even I had to process that for a while," Links admitted.

Of the 78 publishers that remained at the end of the GDR, only ten still exist today. While Links praised the "high-quality book production in East Germany" and its many international awards, he lamented that the privatization of East German publishers after 1990 led to "a devastating erosion of creative potential, with repercussions still felt today." East German titles now account for just five percent of the German book market. "This imbalance is deeply regrettable."

Yet Links also shared a small success story: that of Die Weltbühne. Founded in 1905 by Siegfried Jacobsohn as Schaubühne and renamed in the revolutionary year of 1918, the magazine became a forum for radical-democratic bourgeois leftists under Kurt Tucholsky and Carl von Ossietzky during the Weimar Republic. Continued in the GDR—"with the self-conception of not being recognizable as a party organ"—it outlasted the East German state by three years under its original name. Though Weltbühne itself ceased publication, its spirit lives on in two new ventures, Ossietzky and Das Blättchen, both launched after legal disputes with one of Jacobsohn's descendants.

Speaking of vanished publishers, the list also included Musikverlag Kurt Grabau. A charming touch at the book presentation was the musical accompaniment by clarinetist Jan Hermerschmidt—a graduate of the Hanns Eisler School and an orchestral and jazz musician—who performed some of Grabau's compositions. To the audience's amusement, he recited the lyrics of a schlager: "Blauer Montag" ("Blue Monday"), with its defiant line: "If you want to mourn, don't do it with me." East Germans in the audience might have been reminded of the Polish film The Week Starts on Tuesday—a nod to the proletarian privilege of "playing hooky" on Mondays, a necessary respite from weekend toil on their dachas before resuming their "historical mission" as the working class.

The first piece Hermerschmidt played was light and melodic, but the audience flinched when he revealed its title: "Unsere Autobahn" ("Our Highway"), written in 1939. The associations were unavoidable: Hitler, autobahns, tanks, Poland, six years of murderous war. Had the Soviets truly revoked Grabau's license only because he constantly complained about bureaucratic red tape?

Christoph Links: Vanished Publishers: An Unknown Chapter of East German Cultural History. Ch. Links Verlag, 488 pp., hardcover, €35. Upcoming book presentations: - Rostock, March 26, 8 PM, Der andere Buchladen - Jena, April 14, 7:30 PM, Ernst Abbe Library - Weimar, April 15, 6 PM, Anna Amalia Library - Guben, April 17, 7 PM, City Library