Luftikus from passion: An anthology on the importance of the Amann publishing house

Dhe closing picture of the publisher Egon Ammann comes from his former author Navid Kermani. Sublime ambivalence: it radiates futility as well as final perseverance, loneliness as well as untouchable dignity. But let’s start from the beginning. From autumn 1981 onwards, Ammann Verlag was based in Zurich for almost three decades and was one of the top addresses for books in German just a few years after it was founded. In the end, the publishing program included more than seven hundred titles, including the works of the Swiss contemporary classic Thomas Hürlimann – the publisher also made his debut with his narrative debut “Die Tessinerin” – and the Nigerian Wole Soyinka, who was the first African author to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. In the summer of 2009, the publisher couple, Ammann himself and his wife Marie-Luise Flammersfeld, decided to close the company. Spring 2010 was the program dernière. The two of them didn’t see any possible successors in sight, they didn’t want to or couldn’t sell to a company, and Ammann, who was almost seventy at the time, was in poor health. He spent the rest of his life in Berlin. He died there in September 2017.

Somewhere on the outskirts of Berlin, Kermani says in the anthology and commemorative volume for Egon Ammann and his publishing house, the old publisher rented a factory building immediately after retiring to private life in order to house the Zurich inventory and parts of his private library: “from A like Aeschylus to Z like Tsvetaeva”. From the apartment in Friedenau, Ammann drove to the outskirts of town several times a month. No, there was nothing more to do there, he said: “He just wanted to be there.” Kermani adds: “I imagine Egon then standing between the shelves on which his books were lined up: he was silent, she mute, complete silence.” On three further pages, Kermani then symbolically interprets his final image, but with every new idea – the spines of the books, for example, turn “into nothing but tombstones” – he also weakens it. It is more appropriate to leave it at the initial Hemingway laconicism about old Ammann in the now mute book kingdom.

A climber and self-made man

The Ammann memorial book is many things rolled into one: a complete catalog of the publishing company’s work together with a list of all employees from three decades, a virtual publishing house museum with the beautiful book covers inspired by Marie-Luise Flammersfeld, a festive album of publishing conviviality and joie de vivre, but first and foremost the impressive one Chronicle of soaring intellectual aventures and poetic emphases. That’s why we have to talk casually and discreetly about failure, about broken authors’ vitas and unfinished major projects. At least in summary, the material balance is drawn: rather rare upswings in bestseller heights – at the top: Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s collection of stories “Monsieur Ibrahim und die Blumen des Koran” from 2003 – corresponds to the permanent balancing over the financial abyss. Without the two patrons, who have since also passed away, the Swiss George Reinhart and the great Frankfurt publisher Monika Schoeller, the stupendous adventure story of the Ammann Verlag would not have been possible.

Yes, financially Egon Ammann was quite a gambler, a daring and therefore completely unswiss buffoon with a passion for literature. Coming from a simple, non-book background, he became a climber and self-made man in the best sense of both words. The paths taken by this contemporary Simplicissimus – dead ends as well as boulevards – can be experienced almost like in a fairy tale in Hürlimann’s noble and cheerful appreciation at the beginning of the book. In the servant role, first as a bookseller and then as a publisher, Ammann took productive possession of world literature in order to discover it for German-speaking readers in the first place, as in the case of the Portuguese Fernando Pessoa, or, as in the case of Dostoyevsky, through the new translations by Svetlana Geier also accessible to a new generation. The son of a Bernese policeman and a German mother who fled the National Socialists, he never publicly mentioned his Jewish origins. The enlightening contribution by Halina Bendkowski explains the personal reasons for this and the professional consequences of it: A central segment in the publishing program were poetic, narrative and essayistic volumes on Jewish culture and the Holocaust, by authors such as Walter Dirks, Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt and Abraham Sutzkever.

Wolf Biermann, who never published with Ammann himself, wrote a few captivating lines about Sutzkever, the Yiddish poet, and his German translator Hubert Witt – and posthumously dedicated them to Sutzkever’s publisher. A posthumous commemorative publication: That is, of course, first and foremost the collection “Egon Ammann and his publishing house”. A good forty contributors, former in-house authors and lasting sympathizers, stage a symphony of thunder and the sound of the spheres, but also with ironic pauses and reminiscences in minor. What remains? The novelist Ulrich Peltzer sums it up: “Trust; he trusted me, I trusted him.” The poet Wulf Kirsten concludes: “He was by far my best publisher.” It is quite possible that in the near future we will look to Egon Ammann with his idiosyncratic world literature program of poetry and reflection as one of the last independent publishers who upheld bookmaking on paper. It is therefore comforting that the Ammann Festschrift was published by Wallstein Verlag, but Thedel von Wallmoden, its founder and boss, seems like a courageous successor in some ways.

Ingrid Sonntag, Marie-Luise Flammersfeld (ed.): “Follow a star, only this . . .” Egon Ammann and his publishing house. Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2022. 344 pages, hardcover, €24.