Historians of today eagerly devote themselves to searching through materials that for many years had, quite wrongly, been ignored as legitimate sources of history: fashion and food, etiquette and agricultural equipment. But there are certain objects of study that seem more difficult to examine, perhaps since they are so obvious, vast, and unwieldy that they aren’t even noticed.
One example: none of the many literary and cultural histories of the twentieth century have considered, except in passing, that flamboyant, many-headed, ruthless and refined form that the publisher and the publishing house have assumed over the past century. And yet a history of publishing over these last eighty years would be far more useful and revealing than those dull manuals that proceed by Movements and Manifestos, ecumenically jumbling the irrelevant with the essential, and tirelessly explaining that Expressionism was a cry, Surrealism was a dream, and Dadaism was the absurd.
Who is the publisher, in that peculiar physiognomy that began to take shape in the early years of the twentieth century? An intellectual and an adventurer, an industrialist and a despot, a bluffer and an invisible man, a visionary and a bookkeeper, a craftsman and a politician. The publisher is someone like Alfred Vallette, who claimed never to have read the books he published in the tiny rooms of Mercure de France, who said he only knew how to keep kitchen accounts, but his kitchen contained Alfred Jarry and Paul Léautaud, Marcel Schwob and Remy de Gourmont, Léon Bloy and Paul Valéry.
He is someone like Kurt Wolff—the “noble youth,” as Karl Kraus called him—who in just a few years published new, or almost new, writers such as Franz Kafka, Gottfried Benn, Robert Walser, and Georg Trakl. He is someone like Gaston Gallimard, who started from the group that ran a literary journal that proudly snubbed its readership, and had a white front cover with a slim frame made of two red lines and a black line, and who ended up creating a sort of East India Company of the printed page.
Among this team, who were often far more adventurous than the characters in many of the novels they published, was Peter Suhrkamp: the last of a particular lineage and also the only one of them to have established a publishing house after the Second World War.
He came from an old family of farmers and craftsmen in the German north, and a strong element of craftsmanship always remained in his work, which for him was above all the art of “translating” a bundle of typewritten sheets into a book. Suhrkamp was a man whom no one, not even his closest friends and colleagues, ever claimed to know. Everyone had the impression, at a certain point, of coming up against something impenetrable, rock-hard, and melancholy. He came late to publishing—introduced to it by Bertolt Brecht. During Nazism, he managed incredibly to protect the most prestigious German publishing house, founded by Samuel Fischer in 1886, from every intrusion. But the growing resentment the Nazi leaders felt toward him finally exploded: he was imprisoned in a concentration camp and came out of it with his health ruined.
In 1950, at the age of fifty-nine, after many vicissitudes, he founded the publishing house that bears his name: Hermann Hesse and Brecht were, at that time, his two great authors: mutually incompatible, Suhrkamp was just as much a friend and admirer of each of them—and this already gives us an idea of the untranslatable peculiarity of his approach to life. Between 1950 and 1959, through hard work, often interrupted by long spells in clinics, he built up the clear outline of the new publishing house. Paradoxically, with a program that he described as elite, and without feeling any sense of guilt about it, Suhrkamp established the basis for the enormous worldwide success that several of his authors were to have in later times: not only Brecht and Hesse, but also Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Bloch.
When the famous edition of Benjamin’s writings appeared in 1955, edited by Adorno, Suhrkamp calmly wondered whether those two volumes would find a dozen true readers in Germany. In fact, in its first year, the bookshops sold 240 copies. Suhrkamp’s farsightedness was also apparent in the choice of his successor, Siegfried Unseld: someone entirely different but who remained stubbornly loyal to the founder’s original approach.
Thus, in twenty-five years, what George Steiner described as the “Suhrkamp culture” was formed, in which we find essentially the best of postwar German critical culture. Today is a difficult moment for that culture: the Frankfurt School, after the death of Adorno, survives only as a parody of itself, and the rare recent surprises in narrative have come from Austrian writers such as Thomas Bernhard, heirs of a tradition that is in many respects incompatible with Germany. But for those who might one day wish to find out about what happened in German culture over the second half of the twentieth century, through its times of misery and of greatness, the best guide is the catalog of the publishing house created by Peter Suhrkamp.