Dhe is a bang in the German publishing industry, and one out of nowhere – apparently. S. Fischer gets a new publishing manager: Oliver Vogel. This is an old acquaintance in the traditional Frankfurt company, because until 2019 he was program manager for German-language literature at Fischer and, together with the then publishing director of S. Fischer Jörg Bong, something of a dream team in this area.
Then Bong left, and a successor was appointed in Siv Bublitz, who had only been in the company for two years and had a completely different idea of the publishing program than Vogel. Consequently, he was transferred to Berlin as head of the small local S. Fischer publishing office and finally left the company on January 1, 2022. Now he returns as its boss.
It is the admission of the Holtzbrinck publishing group, to which S. Fischer belongs, that the engagement of Siv Bublitz, a very experienced publisher, in 2017 was a mistake. She had previously managed the Ullstein Verlag in Berlin, and it had a completely different profile than S. Fischer: in Berlin, people were fixated on entertainment and on correspondingly large circulations.
It’s not that the latter wasn’t wanted by Fischer, especially under Bong – otherwise Bublitz wouldn’t have been hired in the first place with a view to Bong’s successor – but there, large editions should ideally be combined with high standards: in contemporary literature (about the There is no need to talk about the past: Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf or Boris Pasternak are Fischer classics, to name just a few) and above all in the non-fiction book published after the Second World War by the publisher who returned from exile Gottfried Bermann Fischer was seen as an educational accompaniment to the democratization of Germany. The most famous example of this was the famous “Black Series” on Nazi history in 1977, long after Bermann Fischer’s retirement and the resulting transfer from S. Fischer to the Holtzbrinck Group in 1963.
Siv Bublitz in the photo that the publisher S. Fischer made available in 2017 when she was poached from Ullstein
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Image: dpa
An anecdote is circulating in the publishing house that after she arrived in Frankfurt, Siv Bublitz saw an old advertising poster in the hallway with a sentence by the founder of the publishing house, Samuel Fischer, which quoted his conviction that it was the task of a publishing house to bring the values closer to the public don’t want it at all. Bublitz is said to have said that that was the dumbest sentence there is; Instead, she herself made this statement: “In the past, a publisher shaped the program and was the face of the house. Today it is fundamentally different. I don’t see that as a loss, on the contrary.”
You can say what you want, but it was a break with tradition. With the tradition that the former publishing director Monika Schoeller referred to, who was in office from 1974 to 2002 and, as an eminence grise, controlled the fortunes of S. Fischer until her death in 2019. So she also put Bublitz in the saddle. Now her half-brother Stefan von Holtzbrinck has separated from Bublitz and appointed an old Schoeller confidant in Vogel.
Was it three lost years for S. Fischer? The program was slimmed down during this period, from five hundred titles a year (most of them paperbacks) to about three hundred. The declared goal was fewer books, each with larger editions. But the financial result was not convincing, especially in the context of the group, the other two literary heavyweights Rowohlt and Kiepenheuer & Witsch are reportedly better off.
In addition, in 2020 Bublitz separated the publishing house from its long-time author Monika Maron for political reasons. It damaged S. Fischer’s reputation more than Maron’s and may have triggered a rethink at the top of the group with regard to Bublitz’s leadership skills. At that time, Vogel, who had moved to Berlin, had just submitted his notice to the publisher, which then took effect at the end of 2021. He then went to the Graf und Graf literary agency – for a few months, which in turn will not cause much joy there. And now he’s going to be the boss instead of the boss he left for. He will have to come back to Frankfurt with full commitment.
Because it will not be easy for him as the new desired boss of the group management. Vogel is considered to be a very competent and pleasant publishing person with a clear preference for content. But just because with Bublitz a more organizationally thinking publisher has now failed, this challenge will not be significantly less for him. And in public it will be said: Once again a woman has been pushed aside in the German literary scene in favor of a man. And one who is just six years younger; both belong to the generation that is gradually turning towards the target grades of their professional careers.
The expected would have been the election of a younger person. There is no lack of excellent candidates – and candidates. Irrespective of the question of age: If the public debate is always about the fact that gender should not play a role in career paths, then this also applies to failure. Oliver Vogel’s succession to Siv Bublitz is not a patriarchal conspiracy. Unless you see the obligation to the founding fathers of the house (and Monika Schoeller!) as such. It’s mostly an attempt to turn back time. That is daring, but gratifying in terms of what a publishing house should have to give to a society. Completely independent of the people.
