Book Fairs, Publishers and Institutions in Germany

For the past 16 years Ida and Klaus Schöffling have been embracing the publisher lifestyle in Frankfurt am Main – maybe not always with a cheer, but certainly with good fortune.

“All due respect, gentlemen, that you are ahead of the rest here in Berlin, embracing your life with a cheer!”, calls a privy councillor’s widow to Max Brecher, the title hero of Martin Kessel’s novel Mr. Brecher’s Fiasco and his friend Dr. Geist, as they leave the UVAG office building, the Universale Vermittlungs-Aktien-Gesellschaft (universal agency corporation). For the past 16 years Ida and Klaus Schöffling have been embracing the publisher lifestyle in Frankfurt am Main – maybe not always with a cheer, but certainly with good fortune. For decades Mr. Brecher’s Fiasco, which was written in 1932 and is one of the most important office novels in German literature, eked out an existence in shadow, until Schöffling & Co. republished it in 2001 for the author’s 100th birthday – and achieved a huge surprise success.

The same thing happened with Blanche or the Garden Atelier by Paul Kornfeld or recently Ulrich Becher’s exile crime novel The Woodchuck Hunt and Kaiserhofstraße 12 by Valentin Senger (1918–1997). Re-edited with an afterword by Peter Härtling, this poignant novel about the survival of Jews in Frankfurt during the Nazi period started off the Frankfurt liest ein Buch campaign (One City, One Book).<

A new home for classics

“Sometimes a classic, or almost-classic, has to change publisher to get noticed again”, says Klaus Schöffling in the conference room at his publishing company, of which he is the sole proprietor. The Frankfurt-born publisher considers himself lucky in these circumstances: “It helps to keep me calm. The company runs at a profit, it has no debts. We can afford what we’re doing here out of the money we have made. Independence is the most important thing of all.” That hasn’t always been the case: before Ida and Klaus Schöffling started up their current firm, they re-established the Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt (FVA) in 1987, which had already existed from 1920 to 1938 as an art book publisher and then again at the beginning of the 1950s. After disagreements with one of the company owners and the complete withdrawal of the authors, Joachim Unseld took over the FVA in 1994, and Schöffling & Co. was founded at the same time. For the first ten years, Eva Demski was on board as a co-proprietor. Like Burkhard Spinnen, Reinhard Kaiser, Klaus Hensel and others, she was one of the Schöffling authors of the early days. Klaus Schöffling is also proud to call himself the “longest-serving” Ror Wolf publisher “at nearly twenty years”. The complete works consists of ten volumes, each with new, previously unprinted texts and collages by the inventor of Raoul Tranchirer: “The Ror Wolf people are getting their fix.” Schöffling has also re-compiled the works of an outstanding poet like Helga M. Novak and made them available. Silke Scheuermann will be re-publishing Novak’s Love Poems in September 2010 to celebrate her 75th birthday. Scheuermann, a lyricist and prose writer, came from Suhrkamp. “We look after the authors intensively and do a lot for the books”, say the two publishers in unison, the motto being “focus on the authors”.

Where Che bought his diary

Eight employees and a volunteer work alongside Ida and Klaus Schöffling in the Wilhelmian business premises at the end of the Kaiserstraße, a traffic-free widened zone known as the Kaisersack. From the offices they can see their colleagues at Weissbooks through the windows, and the Eichborn Verlag is nearby as well. This was where the middle-class bought their clothes before the Second World War. As is so often the case in Frankfurt am Main, history unfurls within a very small space: the neighbouring building, Schöffling tells us, used to house the Carl Klippel stationery shop, where Che Guevara bought his diary. And the most notorious prostitute in Adenauer’s Federal Republic, Rosemarie Nitribitt, received her customers not far from here, adds Ida Schöffling. She’s in charge of the Press Department. What does she particularly enjoy about it? “The variety and the opportunity to exert great influence – just this coming autumn there are three debuts and books such as Jana Scheerer’s My inner Elvis, in which the Hessischer Rundfunk Pop&Weck editorial office is also interested.”

Luck with debut women writers

“I think it’s important to build up young authors from their first book onwards, but it’s just as important to keep looking back at the good things we’ve had already”, says Klaus Schöffling. Out of the debut authors so far, of whom there are at least 25, about half have been able to make a name for themselves. The majority of these are women’s voices such as Juli Zeh, Franziska Gerstenberg or Mareike Krügel. Schöffling even thinks Croatian author Miljenko Jergović, whose manuscript Walnut Castles was thrust into his hands in Klagenfurt, is a potential Nobel Prize winner. He has now published Jergović’s fourth book in German: “That’s precisely what I find appealing and amusing with debuts, that you have to create the market first. The only thing that you might be able to bring to bear a few years later is the name of the publisher.”

However one top seller that you can rely on every year from Kaiserstraße 79 is the Literary Cat Calendar, edited by Julia Bachstein. The FAZ referred to the publisher’s “somewhat bizarre fondness”, but countless readers swear by the publication, after all it’s the freedom-loving cat that inspires poets the most. At least Ida Schöffling cannot imagine a dog or otter calendar. Often copied in vain, the bestseller has now been joined by a cat diary (starting in 2011) as well as the literary garden and travel calendar. It’s a matter of honour that the Schöfflings have a cat of their own.