Merve Verlag

Peter Gente

It has been 36 years now since the Merve Verlag publishing house in Berlin started publishing philosophical pieces. In 2001 the company received the Kurt Wolf Prize for its publishing performance over the years – a new award that came out that year for the first time. The latest piece in the pipeline will be the company's 300th publication.

"The original idea was to reprint the longer pieces of authors who were not so well known here in Germany, using a small book-format." These are the words of Peter Gente who will be 70 this year. He is the present publisher at Merve and has been with the company since its beginnings as a collective back in 1970. We talked to him in his factory loft in Schöneberg, Berlin, surrounded by piles of manuscripts, correspondence, files and archive material that were to be found adorning the shelves round the walls. This is also the place where the complete stock of Merve's paperbacks is stored – all marked with the unmistakable, coloured, diamond-shaped logo. Its range of reprints of mostly French philosophers has now been complemented by more and more publications of original works; there is for example a five-volume, hardback Hermès project by Michel Serres, Merve also has the exclusive rights in Germany to The Thousand Plateaux by Deleuze and Guattari. The emphasis however is more on the publication of smaller works that can be adapted spontaneously to whatever is happening at that moment in time. "Merve did in fact invest for the long term, but we were nevertheless dilettantes. We made books without really knowing how to make books. Money was never really our thing."

The new French philosophy

The business philosophy of these "dilettantes" does not seem to have been such a bad thing for the running of this versatile specialist publishing house. With its annual turnover of circa 130,000 euros, with launches of 1,500 to 3,000 books per edition and a grant from the French Ministry of Culture that covers 30 per cent of the translation costs, Merve has really managed to hold its own. In the 1980's Merve books were above all popular in student circles, these days you will find them in museum shops, high-quality bookstores and art-book shops. The project came into being in 1970 when four fellow students set up the company, it was named after Gente's first wife, Merve Lowien. Back in those pioneering days they were keen on finding alternatives to dogmatic Marxism and published authors like Charles Bettelheim, Louis Althusser and Antonio Negri. The collective broke up and there was a shift to French post-structuralists, triggering a fierce debate, as Gente remembers, " Back then Foucault was written off as an irrationalist, but he is in fact more rationalist than many a German philosopher."

Rhizome becomes a classic

After 1976 the shift to the then unknown "new French philosophers" was promoted by Heidi Paris, who has died in the meantime. Nowadays Michel Foucault is a fully fledged member of the humanistic canon; the same with Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, Hélène Cixous, Pierre Klossowski and Michel Serres, who were all discovered by Merve. Gente does not like to use the term regular authors, "We always return to our authors, let's call them favourite authors, for me these are Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze." It really is amazing what their philosophical concepts have done for Merve in the publishing sense, for if you thought that Foucault's expansive discourse and dispositive analysis were hard to grasp, you should try the notorious "Rhizome" by Gilles Deleuze und Félix Guattari for the utterly audacious. Those who have been trained in dialectics, system or analytical philosophy will not be able to get very far with Rhizome's idea of rootless thinking in strata and streams. Large parts of Rhizome, which is still Merve's best-selling book, are identical to the first chapter of The Thousand Plateaux since it was kind of a pre-release of the later-published work by Deleuze and Guattari.

It was politics first, then art

"Our interest in art came after our political phase, we were always on the go, in the beginning on the Punk scene, then with the Techno scene. We were into a kind of experimental trip, we were on the go, yet firmly rooted at the same time. We got to know most of the important people quite early on, some of those we were friends with went on and really made the big time." Harald Szeeman, Blixa Bargeld and John Cage, to name but a few, were Merve authors. Then there were "artistic philosophers" and "philosophical artists" like Hannes Böhringer, Sylvère Lothringer, Bernard Marcadé, Gerhard-Johann Lischka and Peter Weibel, as well as Thomas Kapielski, whose work is reminiscent of the multi-faceted artistic activities of Kurt Schwitters. Even the French themselves like to fall back on philosophical forerunners – with the help of Leibniz, Nietzsche and Heidegger they have managed to build Franco-German philosophical bridges. Today Merve's interests extend way beyond the borders of Europe, in fact as far as Asia, at least from the French angle – Peter Gente has designated the aesthetic and sinologist, Francois Julien, one of the most important new authors, along with Francois Cheng and Byung-Chul Han, who are also opening new, global perspectives.